# Sign of the times



## ekim68

Nation's oldest family farm up for sale



> The farm was founded by English settler John Tuttle, who came to the New World with a land grant from King Charles II, the Globe said.
> 
> Tuttle's landmark property has passed from father to son since 1632, the Globe said.


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## ekim68

I recently read an article that said the the electronic books have taken a 13% share of the book market and the internet is now taking almost 30% of the newspaper business. My daughter works at the local newspaper and in the last several years they've laid off 25% of employees and reduced the size of the paper and started charging more. And they expect more layoffs...I've been reading this for the last 5 years and the stories are the same.


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## ekim68

I went to my first Oregon Duck basketball game in 1979 in old Mac Court. It was built in the 1920's and I believe it's the oldest arena in the Pac10. This will be the last year the Ducks play here.

McArthur Court

After the first few Pac10 games the Ducks will be moving to their new home, Matt Court.

Matthew Knight Arena


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## ekim68

Storm topples chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank in hiding

A quote from her diary:



> "As long as this exists, ... and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies - while this lasts I cannot be unhappy."


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## pyritechips

Canada has decided to decommission all it's lighthouses. Unless private funding is raised to save any of them they will fall into disrepair.

*Fisheries and Oceans Canada has declared approximately 480 active lighthouses and approximately 490 inactive lighthouses across Canada surplus to its needs.*

It's very sad that something that is deep in the heart of Canada's maritime history is made obsolete by modern electronic technology. The problem with most lighthouses here is that they are in small, remote communities and the upkeep is beyond their financial means. From the article:


> Potential owners must submit a business plan that shows their proposed use of the property will be economically viable over the long term, and that they have the capacity to manage the property.


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## ekim68

Publisher: Web likely to phase out printed Oxford Dictionary



> LONDON (AP) - It's been in print for over a century, but in future the Oxford English Dictionary - the authoritative guide to the English language - may only be available online.
> 
> Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday that burgeoning demand for the dictionary's online version has far outpaced demand for the printed versions.
> 
> By the time the lexicographers behind the dictionary finish revising and updating the latest edition - a gargantuan task that will take many more years - publishers are doubtful there will still be a market for the printed form.


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## ekim68

Parents use 'digital' grounding as a 21st century disciplinary tool



> Not so long ago, teenagers in trouble got grounded. They lost their evenings out, maybe the keys to the family car. But lately the art of family discipline has begun to reflect our digital age.
> 
> Now parents seize cellphones, shut down Facebook pages, pull the plug on PlayStation.


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## ekim68

After 121 years, the Rose Parade changes its name, sells corporate sponsorship 



> After 121 years, the Tournament of Roses Parade is changing it name.
> 
> As part of a new sponsorship deal with Honda, the 2011 parade officially will be known as the the 122nd Rose Parade, Presented by Honda.


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## ekim68

Libraries reinvent themselves as they struggle to remain relevant in the digital age



> They're preparing for a future in which materials can be checked out and read from a home computer, smart phone or e-reader.


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## ekim68

Marcus Dairy Bar Closes Feb. 6



> The Marcus Dairy Bar, a hot dog and hamburger stand that offers ice cream, meals, milk, the daily paper and a gathering place for dozens of people every day, will close on Superbowl Sunday this year.
> 
> Michael Marcus said the dairy bar will close at the end of business on Feb. 6, and he thanked the Cesca family for its support. The dairy bar and adjoining milk processing and distribution plant will be demolished this spring to make way for a retail shopping center.
> 
> "The Marcus Family would like to thank the many customers and employees who have helped make the small dairy bar Jack and Pearl opened in 1948 grow and become a landmark in our community," Marcus said in a prepared statement. "We'd be remiss if we didn't give special thanks to the Cesca family, who worked by our side since opening day."


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## aka Brett

Chronicle ?


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## ekim68

More on paper being replaced by electronics:

Borders files for bankruptcy, to close 200 stores



> (Reuters) - Borders Group Inc filed for bankruptcy protection and said it would close about one-third of its bookstores, after years of shriveling sales that made it impossible to manage its crushing debt load.


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## ekim68

Frank Buckles, Last World War I Doughboy, Is Dead at 110



> Frank Buckles, who drove an Army ambulance in France in 1918 and came to symbolize a generation of embattled young Americans as the last of the World War I doughboys, died Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W. Va. He was 110.
> 
> His death was announced by a family spokesman, David DeJonge, The Associated Press said.
> 
> He was only a corporal and he never got closer than 30 or so miles from the Western Front trenches, but Mr. Buckles became something of a national treasure as the last living link to the two million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France in "the war to end all wars."


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## ekim68

Pharmacists Fight the Rise of Mail Order



> A fierce battle is being waged between retail pharmacists and mail-order companies over where people should be able to fill their long-term prescriptions.


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## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Pharmacists Fight the Rise of Mail Order


I have KAISER as my HMO and you could go in to get the refill or use the mail. But now they are pushing us to use the mail and they lower the price if done by mail. Just the last refill would of cost $10.00 less on a 90 or 100 day prescription.


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## ekim68

Pie in the sky! Qatar invents artificial clouds to beat the heat at 2022 World Cup



> The extreme heat in summer months in the Middle Eastern country has led to concern about conditions at the tournament, with some suggesting it should be played in the winter.
> 
> Qatar say they will air condition the stadia via solar power and now scientists at Qatar University have designed the 'cloud' which can be produced at a cost of US $500,000 (£310,000) each.


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## ekim68

38 years ago he made the first cell phone call



> On this day in 1973 -- on April 3 of that year -- a man did something no one had ever done before.
> 
> You may bless him for it or curse him for it. At this juncture, it hardly matters. The impact of what he did is so enormous that judging it now is almost beside the point.
> 
> The man's name was Martin Cooper. He was 44 at the time.
> 
> He made a cell phone call.
> 
> The world's first. At least the first public one; the cell phone had been tested in the lab, but never tried in the real world.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> 38 years ago he made the first cell phone call


Little did he know how far this would go!


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## ekim68

I wonder what that phone looked like. My first cell was hooked to a battery pack that was as big as a fanny pack:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_pack


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## Wino

ekim68 said:


> I wonder what that phone looked like. My first cell was hooked to a battery pack that was as big as a fanny pack:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_pack


I still have my old 3 watt bag phone - used it up until the start of 2005 when Celular One (now AT&T) forced me into digital rather than analog by running up the cost to use. At the time it would work in areas where no digital would work. Now there are enough towers and no need for the high powered units. If todays cell phones were still 3 watt I expect we'd have many a cooked brain, although I'm guessing the .3 watt have done enough harm.

I think I still have my old 'brick' phone, too - just have no idea where it's packed away.


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## buffoon

I had a car phone, the central unit of which took up half the boot (trunk) space. That's also where the SIM card went (about the size of 2 standard credit cards) and one would always forget to take it out when parking or, had one remembered, to re-insert before driving off.

The hand piece was wired into the dashboard and regularly fell off the cradle.


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## ekim68

'Out of gas' calls for help rise with fuel prices



> Soaring fuel prices have drivers running on empty.
> 
> The Automobile Club of Southern California said nearly 16,000 members a month are making one of those mildly embarrassing "stranded, need gasoline" emergency calls. That's up 13% from the year-earlier pace and represents the biggest jump since California motorists were paying a record average of $4.61 for a gallon of regular gasoline in July 2008.


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## hewee

Ever time I get gas it cost more. $3.56 and then $3.86 and then $4.01 and now it's $4.10 a going up. I have gas in the truck but needed a gallon for the mower so that was $4.10 I think. 
Plus the summer the price will get even higher.


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## ekim68

It ain't gonna go down Harry, those were the good old days...


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## Wino

ekim68 said:


> It ain't gonna go down Harry, those were the good old days...


What's sad is there is no reason for the price rise other than speculation and gouging. There is a world wide glut of crude, plenty of finished fuel product. Gas prices are slowing the economy, running up the price on most everything. While I see the need for gasoline prices to rise to force more efficient auto/trucks and to move to alternate fuel(s) (CNG) it still shouldn't be at the ridiculous Mad Max rates of late.


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## Knotbored

The price of nearly everything has risen to 10 X the price since I graduated from high school in 1957 (old codger here) and that includes gasoline and diesel. (prices varied from .25c to .45c depending on price wars)
But house prices rose much faster then gas- few houses cost over $10K and those would compare to $350K homes in todays market. The total price for payments, insurance, maintenance and utilities was expected to be about 25% of take-home wages- now I beleve its much higher.
I agree the gas price is outragious-but myself like others could easily reduce my mileage by half if I scheduled efficiently and shared rides with neighbors and friends- but myself-like others am just too lazy and would rather complain then act.


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## Coastal

Hewee-
ARco averaging 3.81 Chevron and Shell 4.09 and higher. I suppose if we drive less it will bring gas prices down. Folks tend to drive more in the summer and nicer weather-but maybe not at these high prices. :-(
Coastal


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## hewee

http://gasbuddy.com/
http://www.gasbuddy.com/GB_Price_List.aspx

Historical Price Charts
http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx?time=24
http://www.sactogasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx

Prices are just going crazy.


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## ekim68

Amazon now selling more e-books than printed versions



> It had to happen sometime, and Amazon.com announced today that it's now selling more electronic books through its Kindle e-readers than it is selling printed books.


(Part of me says 'good-save the trees' and another part of me says 'give me a book with pages I can turn'  )


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## ekim68

More automakers ditch spare tires



> The single-minded goal of cars that deliver better fuel economy looks like it's on the way to dooming an American institution: the spare tire. More automakers are shedding spares in their vehicles.


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## Wino

ekim68 said:


> More automakers ditch spare tires


AAA membership should increase.

This kinda goes with the new low profile tires which use 2/3rds less material to manufacture yet the cost is about same or in some cases much higher. Kinda like the old 3 lb. coffee tin is now 2.5 lb. at higher price or the 1 lb. now 12 oz. There is no inflation, just deflation in size.:down:


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## ekim68

Alaska Airlines ditches paper flight manuals for iPads



> The iPad has already gotten the go-ahead from the FAA as a replacement for paper flight charts and maps, and now Alaska Airlines has become the first major US airline to hop on board the paperless bandwagon.


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## ekim68

Phone-book delivery disappearing



> Phone books, long a staple of U.S. life, are fading quickly as lawmakers and phone companies see green benefits in limiting their delivery.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Phone-book delivery disappearing


Just deliver to those requesting them. I go for months without looking in a directory. Save some trees. I also use the net to get numbers. As to delivery, they can be picked up at the grocery store here.


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## ekim68

Japan OKs maglev high-speed rail line between Tokyo, Osaka



> The superconducting maglev train - "maglev" is short for magnetic levitation, allowing the trains to avoid touching ground - would cover the 320-mile span between the two cities in just 67 minutes, topping out at 313 miles per hour. Employing the opposing forces of superconducting magnets and coils to avoid rail friction, maglev trains are considered among the fastest in the world.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Japan OKs maglev high-speed rail line between Tokyo, Osaka


Wow! That's what we need here!


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## ekim68

Meet the Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen



> It's easy to forget how much time computer word-processing programs have saved the writing public. Before computers, any typewritten document that needed revision had to be retyped again and again. And that's hardly the end of it. Total up all the hours that people spent whiting out errors before the Delete key … how many zeroes would the final figure have? Combine the surface area of every lumpy smudge of liquid paper: Would it cover the country? The world?
> 
> Despite these inefficiencies, there are a few places where typewriters still clack away. New York City police stations, the desks of a few stubborn hangers-on, and, increasingly, the apartments of hip young people who have a fetish for the retro. Mechanical devices with a lot of moving parts, typewriters require maintenance by technicians with specialized knowledge and years of experience. A surprising number of people still make their living meeting that demand.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Meet the Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen


:up:


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## ekim68

Companies Are Erecting In-House Social Networks



> It's one more instance of how consumer technology trends, like the use of tablet computers, are crossing into office life. Because of Facebook, most people are already comfortable with the idea of "following" their colleagues. But in the business world, the connections are between colleagues, not personal friends or family, and the communications are meant to be about work matters - like team projects, production flaws and other routine business issues.
> 
> At Nikon, for example, which employs 500 people in offices throughout the United States, Canada and Brazil, a code of conduct for using the service leaves little room for the idle chit-chat that is pervasive on Facebook.
> 
> Still, it can be tricky to transport the mores and practices of social networking into the office.
> 
> For instance, some workers prefer to be "lurkers" who read posts rather than write them. Others are just not interested. At Symantec, the computer security company, a few employees initially disliked the idea of an internal social network, but nevertheless used it to air their complaints.


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## ekim68

Temple reveals fabulous treasure



> NEW DELHI, July 5 (UPI) -- The ages-old vaults of a Hindu temple in India have revealed a fabulous treasure trove, the value of which may exceed tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
> 
> A court-ordered seven-member inspection committee has been opening the vaults of the massive Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, capital of the southern state of Kerala, for an inventory. What has been discovered so far in five of the six vaults have stunned even the experts.
> 
> The treasures found in the vaults have included precious gems including rubies, sapphires, emeralds and pearls, replicas of coconut shells made of gold, hundreds of thousands of gold and silver coins, some centuries old, gold chains as long as 18 feet, solid-gold human figurines and idols, crowns and pendants, and gold and silver bars, CNN said, citing local reports.
> 
> A cursory valuation of the treasure, not taking into account antique, heritage, historical and other factors, has already exceeded $21 billion.


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## ekim68

Drive-ins roared into L.A. County, but only one remains



> The outdoor theaters "reached the zenith of their popularity during the suburban boom of the 1950s," Auto Club archivist Morgan Yates wrote in Westways magazine. "Piling the kids in the car made for a cheap family night out, and drive-ins were a favorite hangout for teens who'd recently gotten driver's licenses."
> 
> The activities of the teenagers prompted another nickname for the theaters - "passion pits."


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## ekim68

RIP: Borders Books



> Wow, we've kind of known this was coming, but it's still sad to see one of the great bookstore chains shut its doors forever. It's even sadder for the 11,000 employees about to lose their jobs.
> 
> I don't know about you, but I have lots of great memories of the times I spent in Borders, especially in the coffee shop, meeting people, dating people, participating in local store events, even giving talks to other writers.
> 
> Borders, like the big Barnes & Noble stores, was notable in the 1990s for, essentially, putting many of the smaller boutique, mom and pop bookstores out of business.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> RIP: Borders Books


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## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Phone-book delivery disappearing





poochee said:


> Just deliver to those requesting them. I go for months without looking in a directory. Save some trees. I also use the net to get numbers. As to delivery, they can be picked up at the grocery store here.


I use google or yellowbook.com for that...


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## ekim68

Couriant said:


> I use google or yellowbook.com for that...


Perfect example of Sign of the Times....................


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## Couriant

Same with GPS... don't use the road maps anymore... but i still love to look into it once in a while


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## ekim68

You Technocrat... :up:


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## Couriant

I'm a man, I like shiny things that plugs in and makes a noise... haha

But really I do feel technology will take us down... maybe not terminator style but still.


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## ekim68

That's an interesting concept.....Technology has made us what we are....And, IMO, it makes life more efficient at least in the communications arena...:up:


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## ekim68

Hilarious and Surprising Predictions of the Future…From the 1960s!



> Nothing should make a futurist more wary than looking at the history of the profession and seeing how hilarious its mistakes have been. Jetpacks, flying cars, death rays…the future isn't quite what the past hoped it would be. Of course, when predictions do come true it can be really shocking. I thought I'd treat you to some of the more entertaining and eye-opening videos that show classic predictions from the 1960s. Check them out below. The Jet Age couldn't imagine the Age of Social Media clearly, but they got a few things right. And many more hilariously wrong.
> 
> This first clip, identified as created in 1966 speculated as to what the typical American household would be like in the far off year of 1999. Remarkably it predicts the importance of the household computer quite accurately. It also does fairly well anticipating Amazon, e-commerce, e-banking, webcams, emails and faxes, and spreadsheets (Quicken, maybe?).


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## ekim68

Space shuttle comes to 'final stop' after 30 years



> The five shuttles launched, saved and revitalized the Hubble Space Telescope; built the space station, the world's largest orbiting structure; and opened the final frontier to women, minorities, schoolteachers, even a prince. The first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, became the oldest person ever in space, thanks to the shuttle. He was 77 at the time; he turned 90 this week.


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## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> That's an interesting concept.....Technology has made us what we are....And, IMO, it makes life more efficient at least in the communications arena...:up:


Certainly in communications technology has been beneficial, for example we have came a long way from the first telegram and phone call... now we have the technology to be able to make emergency calls without having to find a phone booth... but then here we have a downside... I don't think cell phones should have the ability to be able to watch TV from it.... that is too excessive... 

But with the Borders thing, the e-commerce is a good thing, but too much will start to get us in trouble... my wife does shopping online (exc. groceries) more than going to a store... mostly because she doesn't like big crowds but it does make it easier. She just got a Nook and started to use that instead... and it's more cheaper to buy a e-book than a normal book, but if you think about it, there would be less physical activity (walking around, etc) going on-line to purchase stuff than it would if you went to a store, which doesn't help with the growing concern of being the fattest nation.

Again, I love my technology, but I certainly not going to replace everything with it. I will still go out for walks, to stores etc...

anyways that is my 2c while not caffinated... i'm sure i don't make some sense here


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## ekim68

But you have to admit that the Nook and the Kindle will save more trees, eh?


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## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> But you have to admit that the Nook and the Kindle will save more trees, eh?


but waste more coal for power when connected/charging


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## ekim68

Walter Reed to close after more than a century



> Hundreds of thousands of the nation's war wounded from World War I to today have received treatment at Walter Reed, including 18,000 troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> 
> President Dwight Eisenhower died there. So did Gens. John J. Pershing and Douglas MacArthur.
> 
> It's where countless celebrities, from Bob Hope to quarterback Tom Brady, have stopped to show their respect to the wounded. Through the use of medical diplomacy, the center also has tended to foreign leaders.


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## ekim68

Ford Motor Company begins to kill off CD players



> The Ford Motor Company has become the first major automobile manufacturer to begin scrapping CD players within their vehicles. The company intends to replace the CD players in their vehicles with USB-based ports allowing a driver to plug in their MP3 player instead. The first car in the Ford range to support this change will be the new Focus, opting for a USB socket over the traditional disc reader.
> 
> Even the USB may be a temporary addition to the car, because Ford wants to take it one step further: they want you to be able to listen to your music over the internet.


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## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Ford Motor Company begins to kill off CD players


isn't what XM radio is for? to kill of CD players? 

Besides, our Honda Fit has an audio jack for plugging our ipods in... USB is really redundant for listening to music... maybe to keep it charged, thats about it.


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## ekim68

USPS lists 3,700 post offices for closure



> WASHINGTON, July 27 (UPI) -- The U.S. Postal Service listed 3,700 post offices across the country that could be shuttered, the largest downsizing the agency has experienced.
> 
> The money-losing stations, branches and main offices that could be shuttered starting in January represent about 11 percent of the Postal Service's retail operations and affect about 4,500 employees, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.


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## ekim68

Aircraft set to reach 20 times the speed of sound in test flight



> An experimental, arrowhead-shaped aircraft that could reach blistering speeds of 13,000 mph above the Pacific Ocean is set to blast off Wednesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara.


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## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Aircraft set to reach 20 times the speed of sound in test flight


Do we _really_ need that... seriously?


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## ekim68

Actually I prefer the transporter ......Star Trek style.....


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## ekim68

I was going through some boxes in the basement and I came across a couple of film containers....Jeez, how long has it been since I've used them....And, how long have the companies that made those things been out of the business...

Does anyone use film any more?


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## ekim68

Postal Service Is Nearing Default as Losses Mount



> In recent weeks, Mr. Donahoe has been pushing a series of painful cost-cutting measures to erase the agency's deficit, which will reach $9.2 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers - nearly one-fifth of the agency's work force - despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions' contracts.
> 
> The post office's problems stem from one hard reality: it is being squeezed on both revenue and costs.
> 
> As any computer user knows, the Internet revolution has led to people and businesses sending far less conventional mail.


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## Wino

ekim68 said:


> Postal Service Is Nearing Default as Losses Mount


It's never too late. The USPS should do now what they should have done years ago - start up their own ISP service. $10 a month WiFi for every community and citizen.:up: They should partition the Government to nationalize communications networks - it works in China.


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## golddust

ekim68 said:


> Libraries reinvent themselves as they struggle to remain relevant in the digital age


Sad! While I do resort to audio books while riding in a car because I can't read in a moving vehicle (motion sickness); I much prefer holding a book when reading elsewhere.


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## golddust

Wino said:


> It's never too late. The USPS should do now what they should have done years ago - start up their own ISP service. $10 a month WiFi for every community and citizen.:up: They should partition the Government to nationalize communications networks - it works in China.


Believe it or not, the USPS had the idea for electronic mail (email) years before it became popular. Back then folks couldn't figure out how it would work.


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## ekim68

Polaroid SX-70 cameras from the 1970s make a comeback



> Photojojo is known for offering unusual cameras for enthusiasts such as the Holga Twin Image Maker and NeinGrenze 5000T dedicated tilt-shift camera. The online store has released yet another treat for fans - the legendary Polaroid SX-70 camera that was originally manufactured in the years 1972-1977. The cameras being offered have all been restored to working condition and integral instant film is also available.
> 
> When it was released in 1972, the Polaroid SX-70 with its foldable SLR design was the world's first instant SLR. It was also the first camera to use Polaroid's then new integral instant film that contained all the chemical layers required to expose, develop, and fix the photo. This allowed the photo to be developed automatically in daylight without the need of a trip to the Fotomat.


(Anyone remember taking film to a Fotomat?  )


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## ekim68

Spain's Catalonia bids farewell to bullfighting with final bullfight in Barcelona



> BARCELONA, Spain - Spain's powerful northeastern region of Catalonia bids farewell Sunday to the country's emblematic tradition of bullfighting with a final bash at the Barcelona bullring.
> 
> The sold-out evening event at the 20,000-seat Monumental ring is the last fight scheduled this season. A regional ban on the bloody pastime takes effect Jan. 1, 2012.
> 
> Bullfighting's popularity in Catalonia has plunged in recent decades and the Monumental is its last functioning ring.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Spains Catalonia bids farewell to bullfighting with final bullfight in Barcelona


:up:


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## Wino

ekim68 said:


> Spains Catalonia bids farewell to bullfighting with final bullfight in Barcelona


I imagine the price of 'prime' Barcelona beef will now be on the rise.


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## poochee

Wino said:


> I imagine the price of 'prime' Barcelona beef will now be on the rise.


s


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## ekim68

2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls go online



> JERUSALEM (AP) - Two thousand years after they were written and decades after they were found in desert caves, some of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls went online for the first time on Monday in a project launched by Israel's national museum and web giant Google.


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## ekim68

175 MPH Student-Designed Electric Car Shatters Land Speed Record!



> The engineering students of Brigham Young University recently set a new speed record with their self-built electric car. Racing on the Salt Flats of Utah, the student-built car reached a high speed of 175 miles per hour during its two qualifying runs.


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## ekim68

Univac 1956


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## ekim68

Rumor: Could Apple shut down the Mac Pro?



> Apple's Mac line of computers continues to sell well overall, but a new rumor claims that Apple is reconsidering the future of its Mac Pro workstation line. Apple Insider reports via unnamed sources that the company is debating whether or not to continue selling the Mac Pro products beyond the end of 2011.


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## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Rumor: Could Apple shut down the Mac Pro?


Considering the MacPro Desktops are about $2,500 before upgrading the standard configuration, i can't blame them as no-one would buy them unless they really need the power and upgradability it provides. Most artists (graphic and otherwise) uses the iMacs which lasts about 5 years before having any issues... at least ours hasn't done anything crazy since we got it 5 years ago.

Just checked their site, here is the comparsions (note: monitor NOT included):

$2,500 MacPro:
One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Nehalem (One 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Nehalem add 400.00; One 3.33GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon Westmere add 1,200.00)
3x 1GB RAM (Max upgrade 4x8GB add 1,775)
1 1TB drive (upgrade to 2TB add 150 or 512GB SSD add 1,400)
Extra hard drives (3 slots) - 1TB add 150, 2TB add 300, 512GB SSD add 1,400
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB add 250.00; ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB add 200.00)
Monitor - Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel) add 999.00 (same design as the iMac)

$5,000 MacPro :
Two 2.66Ghz 6 core Intel Xeon Westmere processors (2.93Ghz add 1,200)
6x 1GB RAM (Max upgrade 4x8GB add 3,550)
1 1TB drive (upgrade to 2TB add 150 or 512GB SSD add 1,400)
Extra hard drives (3 slots) - 1TB add 150, 2TB add 300, 512GB SSD add 1,400
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB add 250.00; ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB add 200.00)
Monitor - Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel) add 999.00 (same design as the iMac)

Stark contrast between the two... a real nice iMac with monitor is about $3,000 or so. But what you pay out is what you get, a real solid machine. If only they drop the price it would be more tempting.


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## Wino

The first Mac is pretty close to my build from Sept. 2010 except I have more memory (8) and a six core AMD. Have the same 5770 vid card, but only a 24" WS monitor, 2- DVD-RW drives, multi-card reader with WIN 7 Pro 64 Bit. Set me back about $1500.

Difficult for me to comprehend why anyone would pay that much for a Apple Mac anything.


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## Couriant

From my experience... Macs have been solid all round hardware wise... I have had to replace hardware in 2 computers in the last 5 years that we had the Mac, which has not broken down... yet....


----------



## ekim68

Artificial Christmas trees outnumber real



> WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- More U.S. residents are putting up fake Christmas trees in their homes than are buying real ones, industry officials say.
> 
> This year, about 50 million fake trees will grace living rooms across the country, The Washington Post reported Friday. About 30 million pine and fir trees will be erected.


----------



## ekim68

I read an article today that basically said that Libraries are struggling with the number of alternatives....I'm thinking that a lot of Librarians will be retiring soon.

Are libraries a thing of the past? Even an old goat like me reads a lot electronically now...


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Artificial Christmas trees outnumber real


:up:

I think there is nothing sadder than what was once a live tree laying in the gutter the day after Christmas.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> I read an article today that basically said that Libraries are struggling with the number of alternatives....I'm thinking that a lot of Librarians will be retiring soon.
> 
> Are libraries a thing of the past? Even an old goat like me reads a lot electronically now...


I do think they are on the way out.


----------



## ekim68

I grew up with Kodak and had several Kodak cameras a long time ago....Their name was synonymous with photographs..

Eastman Kodak Files for Bankruptcy



> Eastman Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneer that has been struggling for years to adapt to an increasingly digital world, filed for bankruptcy protection early on Thursday.
> 
> The American legend had tried a number of turnaround strategies and cost-cutting efforts in recent years, but the company  which since 2004 has reported only one full year of profit  ran short of cash.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> *I grew up with Kodak* and had several Kodak cameras a long time ago....Their name was synonymous with photographs..
> 
> Eastman Kodak Files for Bankruptcy


Same here.


----------



## Wino

ekim68 said:


> I grew up with Kodak and had several Kodak cameras a long time ago....Their name was synonymous with photographs..
> 
> Eastman Kodak Files for Bankruptcy


Can't make it living in the past. I suspect it's run by republicans.


----------



## ekim68

Wino said:


> Can't make it living in the past.


Agree and say goodbye to BIOS because it's going away.....

UEFI


----------



## ekim68

Report: Saudi women to be allowed in sport stadium



> A government-run Saudi Arabian newspaper reports that for the first time in the conservative Muslim country, women will be allowed to attend soccer matches in one of the country's stadiums.
> 
> Al-Sharq newspaper on Saturday quoted unnamed officials as saying that women will be able to watch the matches in a new facility that will be completed in 2014 in the western port city of Jeddah.


:up:


----------



## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Report: Saudi women to be allowed in sport stadium
> 
> :up:


As in actually sitting in the seats, not on the penalty spot on the field?


----------



## ekim68

FIERY DEMISE FOR A TITAN OF NATURE



> Mother Nature claimed one of her oldest living specimens yesterday in a freak fire that destroyed a *3,500-year-old bald cypress tree* towering over central Florida.
> 
> Known as "The Senator," or simply "The Big Tree," the hollowed-out majestic timber, standing at 118 feet tall, ignited before dawn. Firefighters watched helplessly as the oldest tree east of the Mississippi - and the fifth oldest in the world - blazed and then collapsed in a heap of flaming embers.
> 
> Seminole County investigators first pronounced the Big Tree Park fire suspicious. But as the day wore on, state arson inspectors determined the inferno was not deliberately set but rather was caused by a curious confluence of natural events described as being either a weeks- old lightning strike that smoldered until combustion occured, or friction caused by buffeting winds that ignited a spark and erupted in flames.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> FIERY DEMISE FOR A TITAN OF NATURE


----------



## ekim68

Spacewar, the first computer game, turns 50 this week



> If you have played any PC game, you owe its existence to Spacewar! The program, first created 50 years ago this week by a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is generally considered to be the first computer game ever made. This week, MIT celebrated the launch of Spacewar! with a special event that included the recreation of the game by MIT students.


----------



## ekim68

Encyclopaedia Britannica to end print editions



> Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. says it will stop publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia.
> 
> The Chicago-based company announced Tuesday that the encyclopedia won't be available in book form for the first time in 244 years. The company will continue to publish digital versions.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Encyclopaedia Britannica to end print editions


Soon, we will just have a chip containing knowledge inserted into our body.


----------



## ekim68

Last princess of Egypt dies



> ISTANBUL, Turkey, April 4 (UPI) -- Nesliash Sultan, an Ottoman princess who married an Egyptian prince, has died in Istanbul at the age of 91, her family said.
> 
> Sultan was the last member of the Ottoman dynasty to be born before the empire was disbanded in 1922 and modern Turkey created in its place, Bikyamasr.com reported.
> 
> Her family was forced into exile in 1924 and only female members were allowed to return to Turkey until 1974 when the exile of males was ended.


----------



## ekim68

'African Queen' is seaworthy again



> KEY LARGO, Fla., April 6 (UPI) -- A Florida couple has restored a 100-year-old steamboat used in the classic Humphrey Bogart-Katharine Hepburn film, "The African Queen," and is offering tours.
> 
> Lance and Suzanne Holmquist told The Miami Herald they are leasing the 30-foot riverboat from the owner in exchange for money they earn from giving tours on it in Key Largo.
> 
> "There is still an extreme amount of interest in the African Queen," Suzanne Holmquist told the Herald. "Every week, while we were sitting here just two boats away, we would see hundreds of people come to photograph it, look at it and remember it. To watch all the people come and see the boat so deteriorated was such a shame."
> 
> The couple said they have spent more than three months and $60,000 restoring the craft, which had languished outside a Holiday Inn for a decade after the death of its previous owner, Jim Hendricks Sr.


----------



## golddust

poochee said:


> :up:
> 
> I think there is nothing sadder than what was once a live tree laying in the gutter the day after Christmas.


Have to agree with you there. Back when I was a kid the artificial trees were awful, but today you can hardly tell them apart appearance-wise. You can even buy pine scented spray if you miss the scent. Funny, because I remember my dad cutting up our real tree to force it down the incinerator shoot in the projects were we lived in New York City when I was a kid. Eventually we opted for a fake tree - but back then they weren't much to look at (1950s).


----------



## golddust

ekim68 said:


> I grew up with Kodak and had several Kodak cameras a long time ago....Their name was synonymous with photographs..
> 
> Eastman Kodak Files for Bankruptcy


I had a Kodak Instamatic for years. I still remember the old Kodak Brownie camera mom and dad had. It took great b&w pics.


----------



## poochee

golddust said:


> Have to agree with you there. Back when I was a kid the artificial trees were awful, but today you can hardly tell them apart appearance-wise. You can even buy pine scented spray if you miss the scent. Funny, because I remember my dad cutting up our real tree to force it down the incinerator shoot in the projects were we lived in New York City when I was a kid. Eventually we opted for a fake tree - but back then they weren't much to look at (1950s).


Hi there, long time no see.


----------



## ekim68

Technology for the Masses



> More and more, churches embracing use of iPads, smartphones during services.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Technology for the Masses


Moving along with the times.


----------



## ekim68

National Planetary Exploration Car Wash & Bake Sale



> Take Social Action and Participate
> 
> Help Protect the NASA Planetary Budget from Cuts!


----------



## ekim68

Typewriter fan Steve Soboroff loves the click-clack of carriages



> Steve Soboroff, an L.A. civic leader, has acquired typewriters once owned by the famous and infamous. In an era of iPads and text-spouting phones, the ancient, clunky machines have become unlikely objects of desire.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Typewriter fan Steve Soboroff loves the click-clack of carriages


----------



## ekim68

Apple II Forever: a 35th-Anniversary Tribute to Apple's First Iconic Product



> Thirty-five years ago, on April 16 and 17, 1977, more than twelve thousand proto-geeks flooded into San Francisco's Civic Auditorium. They were there to attend a new event called the West Coast Computer Faire, and the room brimmed with excitement over a new, futuristic gizmo known as the "personal computer." The throngs packed the aisles, marveling at microcomputers and related gizmos from tiny startups such as Cromemco, IMSAI, Northstar, Ohio Scientific and Parasitic Engineering.
> 
> One of the tiny startups benefited from having an especially slick booth located in prime real estate near the entrance. The company was called Apple Computer, and a handful of its employees, including founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were demoing an unreleased machine they called the Apple II.


----------



## ekim68

Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age



> By David Bainbridge, Published: March 26
> 
> As a 42-year-old man born in England, I can expect to live for about another 38 years. In other words, I can no longer claim to be young. I am, without doubt, middle-aged.
> 
> To some people that is a depressing realization. We are used to dismissing our fifth and sixth decades as a negative chapter in our lives, perhaps even a cause for crisis. But recent scientific findings have shown just how important middle age is for every one of us, and how crucial it has been to the success of our species. Middle age is not just about wrinkles and worry. It is not about getting old. It is an ancient, pivotal episode in the human life span, preprogrammed into us by natural selection, an exceptional characteristic of an exceptional species.
> 
> Compared with other animals, humans have a very unusual pattern to our lives. We take a very long time to grow up, we are long-lived, and most of us stop reproducing halfway through our life span. A few other species have some elements of this pattern, but only humans have distorted the course of their lives in such a dramatic way. Most of that distortion is caused by the evolution of middle age, which adds two decades that most other animals simply do not get.


----------



## ekim68

Space Needle turns 50 with blasts from the past



> The Space Needle offered more than a spectacular view Saturday. It marked the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World's Fair by taking people back in time -- sort of.
> 
> (After all, the Space Needle does resemble a UFO.)
> 
> Visitors who wanted to experience a 360-degree view of the Emerald City from the structure's observation deck could buy a ticket for $1, the price in 1962 -- although the 2012 skyline offers a different view.
> 
> The 605-foot-tall Space Needle was once the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, though it has since been dwarfed by Seattle's skyscrapers.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Space Needle turns 50 with blasts from the past


----------



## ekim68

Computing fossils: Old tech holding on for dear life



> Some ancient technology is still useful -- and some just won't die
> 
> Consider the abacus. Developed perhaps as long as 4,500 years ago, this handy gadget served the mathematical needs of merchants and accountants until the development of mechanical calculating machines in the 19th century. But the abacus hasn't been forgotten. Instead it still lives on in niches -- for instance teaching preschoolers the basics of counting.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Computing fossils: Old tech holding on for dear life


----------



## ekim68

Encyclopedia of Life reaches historic "one million species pages" milestone



> Washington, DC - May 9, 2012 - The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL; eol.org) has surged past one million pages of content with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new images and specimen data from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Launched in 2007 with the support of leading scientific organizations around the world, the Encyclopedia of Life provides global access to knowledge about life on Earth by building a web page for each of the 1.9 million recognized species.


----------



## ekim68

The World's Largest Chocolate Sculpture



> IRVINE, Calif.- To celebrate our 30th anniversary, Qzina Specialty Foods, has broken a Guinness World Record for building the largest chocolate sculpture. The sculpture models an ancient Mayan temple and weighs 18,239 pounds, far surpassing the previous record set in Italy in 2010 by more than 7,500 pounds.
> 
> Qzina chose the Mayan theme because of the crucial role the culture played in the origins of chocolate. The Mayans were one of the first civilizations to cultivate Cacao trees and discover the true potential of the cocoa bean. Realizing the delicious possibilities of this powerful discovery, the Mayans worshipped the Cacao tree and praised its beans as the food of the Gods.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The World's Largest Chocolate Sculpture


Yummy!


----------



## ekim68

After 50 years, fire still burns underneath Pa. town



> Fifty years ago on Sunday, a fire at the town dump ignited an exposed coal seam, setting off a chain of events that eventually led to the demolition of nearly every building in Centralia - a whole community of 1,400 simply gone.
> 
> All these decades later, the Centralia fire still burns. It also maintains its grip on the popular imagination, drawing visitors from around the world who come to gawk at twisted, buckled Route 61, at the sulfurous steam rising intermittently from ground that's warm to the touch, at the empty, lonely streets where nature has reclaimed what coal-industry money once built.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> After 50 years, fire still burns underneath Pa. town


----------



## hewee

Fire Department started the fire.


----------



## ekim68

hewee said:


> Fire Department started the fire.


Really?


----------



## ekim68

June 5, 1833: Ms. Software, Meet Mr. Hardware



> 1833: Ada Byron meets Charles Babbage. He designed an early computer, and she would write the first computer program.





> When published in 1843, those notes ran three times as long as the original article. Ada predicted that a computing machine could compose music, draw graphics and find application, so to speak, in business and science.
> 
> She also wrote a plan for the analytical engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It's now considered the first computer program. The countess originated the idea of a loop in a program, which she likened to a "snake biting its tail."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> June 5, 1833: Ms. Software, Meet Mr. Hardware


----------



## ekim68

Catholics rename Crystal Cathedral



> GARDEN GROVE, Calif., June 9 (UPI) -- The Catholic Diocese of Orange announced Saturday the Crystal Cathedral it bought last year will be known as Christ Cathedral going forward.


----------



## ekim68

Some cool pictures...

Paramount Pictures' 100th anniversary


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Some cool pictures...
> 
> Paramount Pictures 100th anniversary


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Public darkroom users hone craft in digital era



> Although photo darkrooms may be going the way of the typewriter and the videotape, there are still a few holdouts, like the Harvey Milk Photo Center near San Francisco's Duboce Park - the oldest, and largest, public darkroom west of the Mississippi.
> 
> Director Dave Christensen knows of a few other public darkrooms, one in New York and one in Boston. But they are dying, and fast.
> 
> "Every week I find photo orphans left outside our front door when I show up in the morning," he said. "Enlargers, old trays, film spools."


----------



## ekim68

It's the end of books as you knew them: E-books out-sell hardbound for the 1st time



> Summary: Get ready to bid adieu to your local bookstore - if you're lucky enough to still have one! - as e-books sales surpass hardcover book sales for the first time.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Its the end of books as you knew them: E-books out-sell hardbound for the 1st time


l
Does this mean my library will become valuable some day?


----------



## ekim68

Yep, they will be Collector Items and we have a Bunch, too....And, it's gonna save some trees, not a bad trade-off, eh?


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Yep, they will be Collector Items and we have a Bunch, too....And, it's gonna save some trees, not a bad trade-off, eh?


Right!


----------



## ekim68

Kind of a reverse 'Sign of the Times'....

Time for a typewriter renaissance?



> It was 4 p.m. on a Thursday, two hours until the end of Jesse Banuelos' workday. He was standing behind the front counter of Berkeley Typewriter, his trademark green apron tied around his waist. A dozen broken typewriters - some electric, but most of them manual - were stacked in a corner on the brown linoleum floor.
> 
> Forty years ago, the shop was at the top of its game. But during the '90s, as computers became more affordable, fewer customers bought typewriters or needed them repaired. Many typewriter stores went out of business. Berkeley Typewriter laid off some staff and managed to remain open by offering services like printer, photocopier and fax repair. Banuelos is the store's only remaining technician who knows how to fix typewriters. He never learned how to type on a computer and for a time he worried that the typewriter industry would soon disappear.
> 
> He was wrong. In the last few years, both typewriter sales and repairs have increased at the store.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Kind of a reverse 'Sign of the Times'....
> 
> Time for a typewriter renaissance?


----------



## ekim68

Atari turns forty years old.......



> But Nolan Bushnell, more than anyone else, was the guy who turned videogames from a very impressive demo of very pricey technology into an enduring pop-culture phenomenon. Thanks to Atari, you didn't need a *mainframe* to play the coolest games on earth. All you needed was a quarter.


----------



## ekim68

Minitel: The rise and fall of the France-wide web



> France is switching off its groundbreaking Minitel service which brought online banking, travel reservations, and porn to millions of users in the 1980s. But then came the worldwide web. Minitel has been slowly dying and the plug will be pulled on Saturday.


----------



## ekim68

EA preparing to become "100 percent digital company"



> The practice of distributing video games as physical objects had a good run. Really, it was a nice idea while it lasted. But the best option we had for getting games into our houses for a good long while is just not going to last.





> "The ultimate relationship is the connection that we have with the gamer," Gibeau said. "If the gamer wants to get the game through a digital download and that's the best way for them to get it, that's what we're going to do."


----------



## ekim68

Graphene Can Improve Desalination Efficiency by Several Orders of Magnitude, Can Do Pretty Much Anything



> Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. It's already got an impressive track record, but does it have any more tricks up its sleeve? Apparently, yes. According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude. Seriously, what can't this stuff do?


----------



## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> EA preparing to become "100 percent digital company"


Makes sense, plus I guess it will give them some more security/copy protection... though there are some people that don't have internet so it doesnt help.


----------



## ekim68

And here's another example of gaming progression.....

Valve hands over its own movie-making tools to gamers



> Valve has gained a reputation over the years not just for consistently putting out great games, but also for the slick trailers and promo videos that go along with them. But now the developer is turning the tables and handing over its own video-making tools to fans free of charge. With the Source Filmmaker, gamers will be able to direct, animate, and record their own videos as if they were shooting on location inside a video game.
> 
> The new tool will allow gamers to make their own movies using the acclaimed Source game engine directly. This means that users will have almost any element from a recent Valve game at their disposal, including characters, locations, props, particles, textures, and sounds.


----------



## ekim68

Wow, Ringo Starr is 72.....


----------



## Wino

I didn't realize he was that young.


----------



## ekim68

Army plans to build body armor for women



> WASHINGTON, July 10 (UPI) -- The U.S. military announced plans to develop body armor in the style of "Xena: Warrior Princess" to be more comfortable and effective for female troops.
> 
> The U.S. Army said it plans to engineer body armor designed to fit women's bodies more naturally, The Christian Science Monitor reported. Adjustments would include more curves in the chest and hips, shorter torsos and narrower shoulders.


----------



## ekim68

Fifty years old tomorrow.....

July 12, 1962: The Day Information Went Global



> Telstar was launched by NASA on July 10, 1962, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and was the first privately sponsored space-faring mission. Two days later, it relayed the world's first transatlantic television signal, from Andover Earth Station, Maine, to the Pleumeur-Bodou Telecom Center, Brittany, France.


What a Jalopy, eh?


----------



## ekim68

Fashion for tight jeans is increasing testicular problems among men



> The number of men suffering from painful testicular problems is on the rise - thanks to the current fashion for tight jeans, experts have claimed.


----------



## ekim68

Japan's Modi-Corp Unveils Build-It-Yourself Pius Electric Car!



> Japan's Modi-Corp has just unveiled a new electric car called the Pius that you can actually build yourself! The Pius, not to be confused with the Toyota Prius, is a single-seat electric car that will be released next spring as a class-1 motorized bicycle in Japan. Modi-Corp expects to sell the Pius primarily to colleges and mechanic schools, where students will be able to see firsthand how electric cars work.


----------



## ekim68

'The Girl from Ipanema' turns 50



> The quintessential tune was inspired by Pinheiro when she passed the songwriters in a beachside bar on her way to the sea 50 years ago.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> 'The Girl from Ipanema' turns 50


Love Bossa Nova music and that song by Jobim. Among others.


----------



## ekim68

My Granddaughter is taking her Driver's Permit test right now....Where did the time go?


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> My Granddaughter is taking her Driver's Permit test right now....Where did the time go?


Time flies!


----------



## ekim68

Country's oldest store out of business



> ADAMSVILLE, R.I., July 29 (UPI) -- The oldest general store in the United States is closing its doors Sunday after being in business in Adamsville, R.I., for 224 years, its owner says.
> 
> Gray's general store, which has been run by a family in Adamsville for six generations, has not been able to keep up with the competition in recent years and closed its doors for good Sunday, WLNE-TV, Providence, R.I., reported.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Country's oldest store out of business


----------



## ekim68

Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today's kids make of it?



> It is 30 years since the Commodore 64 went on sale to the public.
> 
> The machine was hugely successful for its time, helping to encourage personal computing, popularise video games and pioneer homemade computer-created music.
> 
> The $595 (£399) device took its name from its US maker, Commodore International, and the fact it had 64 kilobytes of RAM memory.


----------



## Blackmirror

ekim68 said:


> Commodore 64 turns 30: What do today's kids make of it?


spent hours trying to program a game in

never worked


----------



## ekim68

Refugee from Facebook questions the social media life



> MARFA, Tex. - Not long after Katherine Losse left her Silicon Valley career and moved to this West Texas town for its artsy vibe and crisp desert air, she decided to make friends the old-fashioned way, in person. So she went to her Facebook page and, with a series of keystrokes, shut it off.
> 
> The move carried extra import because Losse had been the social network's 51st employee and rose to become founder Mark Zuckerberg's personal ghostwriter. But Losse gradually soured on the revolution in human relations she witnessed from within.
> 
> The explosion of social media, she believed, left hundreds of millions of users with connections that were more plentiful but also narrower and less satisfying, with intimacy losing out to efficiency. It was time, Losse thought, for people to renegotiate their relationships with technology.


----------



## ekim68

Smartphone apps now playing doctor



> We don't use our smartphones for talking as much as we once did, but we are and will increasingly use them to detect and monitor health risks, from ear infections to E. coli bacteria in drinking water, industry experts say.
> 
> Health app developers initially focused on consumer diet and exercise, said Brian Dolan, editor of Boston-based MobiHealthNews.com, which tracks advances in mobile health and medical technology. "Now we're seeing them look into more serious health conditions where there's a real need for innovation."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Smartphone apps now playing doctor


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Kindle Book Sales Surpass Print On Amazon UK



> Amazon says it sells more books for Kindle than paperbacks and hardbacks combined


----------



## ekim68

Population loss drives Midwest school closings



> The Midwest has lost more than 2,100 public schools in recent years as school districts hammered by population loss scrambled to shift students and save money.
> 
> From 2006-07 to 2010-11, the region saw a net loss of 2,110 K-12 schools, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. Department of Education data. The rest of the nation had a net gain of 965, largely from growth in the West.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Population loss drives Midwest school closings


----------



## ekim68

Google's Self-Driving Cars: 300,000 Miles Logged, Not a Single Accident Under Computer Control



> Ever since Google began designing its self-driving cars, they've wanted to build cars that go beyond the capabilities of human-piloted vehicles, cars that are much, much safer. When Sebastian Thrun announced the project in 2010, he wrote, "According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half."
> 
> New data indicate that Google's on the right path.


----------



## ekim68

Why shopping will never be the same



> SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Nola Donato has seen the future of retail, and it is in a Magic Mirror. The Intel scientist has designed a high-tech mirror that shows how clothes look on a consumer who simply stands in front of an LCD monitor. Parametric technology simulates body type and how fabrics fit - based on weight, height and measurements.
> 
> Think of it as a digital fitting room. The concept is three to five years from fruition but could open the door for Intel in the retail market.


----------



## ekim68

L.A. restaurant pays customers to put away their phones



> Ever feel like a dinner out at the local restaurant feels more like a trip to Best Buy, with fellow patrons tapping on their smartphones or taking photos of their meal? One restaurant in Los Angeles is now paying customers to check their tech at the door.
> 
> Eva Restaurant on Beverly Boulevard is offering diners a 5% discount on their bill if they dump their digital devices before being seated, according to radio station KPCC. Owner and chef Mark Gold says it's a tactic to keep distracted dining to a minimum.
> 
> About half of patrons have taken Gold up on the offer.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> L.A. restaurant pays customers to put away their phones


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Wow, I didn't realize that Elvis died at 42.....I remember watching him doing his later Las Vegas shows and he was looking pretty old.....(Well okay I might have a different opinion of Old than I used to...) 

Page in History


----------



## hewee

I remember all the all night movies at the drive-in and you had Elvis and all the other Beach movies.


----------



## ekim68

Beloved High-Speed Film Camera Faces Extinction



> For more than five decades, the Charles A. Hulcher Co. filled an important niche in the camera world. Their cameras, which shot up to 100 frames per second, were used to make photos of everything from Space Shuttle launches to Major League Baseball games.
> 
> But as digital cameras came to dominate, Hulcher saw business decline steeply, and today the company is down to just four employees.
> 
> "Digital has pretty much killed film cameras," says Richard Hill, 75, who has been at the Hulcher company since the 1950s.


----------



## ekim68

Windows 95 released 17 years ago today


----------



## ekim68

The History of the Floppy Disk



> In the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage it used-I kid you not-a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and to back-up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The History of the Floppy Disk


----------



## ekim68

I was watching a Korean Cooking show tonight and it showed a lot of culture in Seoul....:up: What a big interesting international city....:up: But something they said struck me....May 5th is 'Children's Day' every year.....Imagine that: A Children's Day.......


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> I was watching a Korean Cooking show tonight and it showed a lot of culture in Seoul....:up: What a big interesting international city....:up: But something they said struck me....May 5th is 'Children's Day' every year.....Imagine that: A Children's Day.......


:up:


----------



## ekim68

#help! Japan mulls '911' emergency calls from Twitter, social networks



> The Japanese government has hosted the first of a series of panels on using social networks for emergency calls when phones go down


----------



## ekim68

World record as message in bottle found after 98 years near Shetland



> A Scottish skipper has set a new world record after finding a message in a bottle 98 years after it was released.
> 
> Andrew Leaper's discovery beat the previous record for the longest time a bottle has been adrift at sea by more than five years.


----------



## ekim68

Tigers Take the Night Shift to Coexist With People



> ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2012) - Tigers aren't known for being accommodating, but a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the carnivores in Nepal are taking the night shift to better coexist with humans.
> 
> The revelation that tigers and people are sharing exactly the same space -- the same roads and trails -- of Chitwan National Park flies in the face of long-held convictions in conservation circles. It also underscores how successful conservation efforts need sciences that takes into account both nature and humans.


----------



## ekim68

Three-man crew traverses Northwest Passage by sailboat



> Two weeks ago, a Chinese icebreaker became the first vessel from that country to traverse the Canadian Arctic - the fabled Northwest passage, sailed in reverse. That success was thanks to rapidly melting ice in the region, but it still required an icebreaker.
> 
> On Monday, a group of three men reported that they completed the trip last week by sailboat, the Belzebub II. From the Los Angeles Times:


----------



## ekim68

World's first colour moving pictures discovered



> The world's first colour moving pictures dating from 1902 have been found by the National Media Museum in Bradford after lying forgotten in an old tin for 110 years.
> 
> The discovery is a breakthrough in cinema history.
> 
> Michael Harvey from the National Media Museum and Bryony Dixon from the British Film Institute talk about the importance of the discovery.
> 
> The previous earliest colour film, using the Kinemacolour process, was thought to date from 1909 and was actually an inferior method.


----------



## ekim68

Google Captures Great Barrier Reef in First-ever Underwater 'Street View' 



> Google has released the first-ever underwater 'street view' of some of the world's most famous undersea locations - the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii's Hanauma Bay, and Apo Island in the Philippines.
> 
> Google in collaboration with Caitlin Seaview Survey used specialized SVII camera to capture the amazing underwater images. The camera travels at around 2.5 miles / hour and captures a 360-degree panorama with geolocation information and a compass heading every 3 seconds [see video below].


----------



## ekim68

Study: Chevy Volt Owners Spent Just $300 To Drive 10,000 Miles



> For all the negativity surrounding the Chevy Volt, people who have bought GM's plug-in hybrid are among the happiest car owners in America. How can that be? A recent case study in Scientific American looked at the Volt's energy consumption and emissions and compared it to the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius, and in every category the Volt comes out way ahead.
> 
> Writer Evelyn Lamb's parents are early adopters who purchased a Chevy Volt a year ago, rather than a Corvette (!!). Using available websites to track her parents' energy usage, Lamb was able to come to the conclusion that by every metric, the Volt saves money and reduces emissions compared to the Prius.
> 
> First the numbers; in the 11 months of available data, Lamb's parents drove 10,102 miles, about average for a typical American family. In that time, the Volt ran on just electricity for 9,186 miles, almost 91% of the time, using 2,437 kWh of electricity. This includes almost 40 miles of daily work commute, done almost entirely on battery power.The other 9% required using the gas generator, though in 11 months Lamb's parents have used just 24.4 gallons of gasoline. I know people who go through that much in a week!
> 
> At an electrical rate of $0.0885 per kWh, which is what Lamb's parents pay, the total electricity cost has been just $215.67, plus another $85.95 in gas. Total energy cost for 11 months of driving? $301.62.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Study: Chevy Volt Owners Spent Just $300 To Drive 10,000 Miles


----------



## poochee

*Fisherman dies, taking Scottish dialect with him*
October 3, 2012 11:13 AM EST | AP

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121003/eu-britain-dialect-s-death/


----------



## ekim68

New York's High Line: Why cities want parks in the sky



> Once an elevated freight railway track, New York's High Line is now an oasis for pedestrians. It has been so popular that other cities are following suit, with plans to replicate the formula in London.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> New York's High Line: Why cities want parks in the sky


----------



## ekim68

Back to the Future


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Back to the Future


----------



## ekim68

Where the internet lives


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Where the internet lives


Neat site.


----------



## ekim68

After 79 years in print, Newsweek goes digital only



> The decision to go all-digital underscores the problems faced by newsweeklies, as more consumers favor tablets and mobile devices over print in an increasingly commoditized, 24-hour news cycle.
> 
> The final print edition of the weekly current affairs magazine will hit newsstands on December 31.


----------



## ekim68

Ceefax service closes down after 38 years on BBC



> Before Olympic champion Dame Mary Peters turned off the last of the UK's analogue TV signals in Belfast, a series of graphics on Ceefax's front page disappeared down to a small dot.
> 
> The Plain English Campaign earlier gave Ceefax a lifetime achievement award for "clarity" and use of "everyday words".


----------



## Couriant

I miss Ceefax... I wonder if ITV/C4 still run theirs in Belfast?


----------



## ekim68

Pumpktris



> What do you get when you combine a pumpkin with the classic video game Tetris? Pumpktris! Fully playable, embedded in a pumpkin, and with the stem serving as a controller.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Pumpktris


----------



## ekim68

World's first 3D printing photo booth set for scan



> Ever wanted a life-like miniature of yourself or loved ones? Now's your chance, thanks to Omote 3D, which will soon be opening what's described as the world's first 3D printing photo booth in Harajuku, Japan. There, visitors will have their bodies scanned into a computer, a process which takes about 15 minutes. Then the company prints your statuette on their 3D color printer in one of three sizes.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> World's first 3D printing photo booth set for scan


----------



## ekim68

The world's oldest original working digital computer



> After a three-year restoration project at The National Museum of Computing, the Harwell Dekatron (aka WITCH) computer will rebooted on 20 November 2012 to become the world's oldest original working digital computer.
> 
> Now in its seventh decade and in its fifth home, the computer with its flashing lights and clattering printers and readers provides an awe-inspiring display for visiting school groups and the general public keen to learn about our rich computer heritage.
> 
> The 2.5 tonne, 1951 computer from Harwell with its 828 flashing Dekatron valves, 480 relays and a bank of paper tape readers will clatter back into action in the presence of two of the original designers, one of its first users and many others who have admired it at different times during its remarkable history.


----------



## ekim68

Finally! Caviar by ATM



> How many times has this happened to you? It's Tuesday night, late, and you're fresh off your shift at the diamond factory with a hankering for $1,500 caviar. You pull up to your favorite local beluga slinger and-blasted!-it's closed. With a heavy sigh, you return home to bust out those old white truffles from the freezer. Night. Ruined.
> 
> Well, no longer! Beverly Hills Caviar has launched a trio of high-end caviar vending machines spread throughout Los Angeles. Yes, even Burbank. Inside these ridiculous contraptions (y'all know we're teetering on the edge of a fiscal cliff, right?) you'll find everything from a pink mother of pearl spoon for $4 to Imperial River Beluga Caviar for $500 an ounce.


----------



## ekim68

My Grandkids have been using the term 'meme' quite a bit lately and it seems to be a trend right now...It's great to have young people around...:up: I know things almost on time....

Meme


----------



## ekim68

Black Hawk flies, lands and avoids threats - all without pilots at the helm


----------



## ekim68

Curators discover first recordings of Christmas Day



> Curators at the National Museum of London have discovered what they believe to be the first ever recordings of a family Christmas.
> 
> They were made 110 years ago by the Wall family who lived in New Southgate in North London.
> 
> There are 24 clear recordings on wax cylinders which were made using a phonograph machine between 1902 and 1917.
> 
> Music curators say the sound quality of the music recorded is outstanding.


----------



## HOBOcs




----------



## poochee

HOBOcs said:


>


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Personal satellites that fly into space



> Unwrapping devices like smartphones and tablets is sure to bring people joy on Christmas Day. Some future-oriented folks may even get a 3-D printer or a toy drone.
> 
> But what about a personal satellite?
> 
> Zac Manchester is one of the many people trying to make that device a reality. Next fall, his KickSat project plans to launch 250 cracker-size satellites into space, and someday, he believes, these gizmos will find their way under the tree.
> 
> He wants to develop gear that's "cheap enough for average people to build and fly their own satellite ... I'm trying to make the space Arduino."


----------



## ekim68

Private Space Travel to Make Giant Leaps in 2013



> Private companies building new spaceships to soar through orbital and suborbital space are looking forward to an action-packed year in 2013, with new flight tests, launches, wind tunnel tests and rocket technology trials all planned during the new year.


----------



## ekim68

I was reading this and I find it interesting how Software is pushing Hardware...


----------



## ekim68

Couldn't resist this....

Endeavour


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Couldn't resist this....
> 
> Endeavour


Wow!!


----------



## ekim68

Whoa, these folks have been around since I was young, and that's been a while...

Today's Atari bankruptcy latest in a long history of corporate deaths


----------



## ekim68

Internet connection crucial to everyday life, German federal court rules



> Internet access is as crucial to everyday life as having a phone connection and the loss of connectivity is deserving of financial compensation, the German Federal Court of Justice has ruled.
> 
> Because having an internet connection is so significant for a large part of the German population, a customer whose service provider failed to provide connectivity between December 2008 and February 2009 is entitled to compensation, the court ruled today.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook burnout: 61% of users have needed a break



> Around two-thirds of all online Americans use Facebook, but nearly two-thirds of those report having taken long breaks from the social network, while others have already given up on it, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.
> 
> In the study's findings published on Tuesday, 61 per cent of current Facebook users said that at one time or another they had voluntarily taken a break from the site that lasted several weeks or more.
> 
> Furthermore, of those internet users surveyed who said they weren't on Facebook, 20 per cent reported that they had once used it but no longer do.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Internet connection crucial to everyday life, German federal court rules


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Developer interview: DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS



> MS-DOS may be dead, but FreeDOS, an open source MS-DOS replacement, is still under active development.


----------



## ekim68

Lernstift digital pen vibrates to indicate bad spelling, grammar and penmanship



> Use digital technology long enough and you start to become dependent upon it for such mundane tasks as spell checking. That means when you pick up a garden variety ballpoint pen you're back in dictionary and "I before E except after C" territory. Like LiveScribe, the creators of the Lernstift digital pen hope to bring handwriting into the 21st century by having the pen vibrate to indicate when the writer makes spelling and grammatical errors or exhibits poor penmanship.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Lernstift digital pen vibrates to indicate bad spelling, grammar and penmanship


Wow!!


----------



## ekim68

Ethernet at 40



> Feature When Bob Metcalfe, the prime mover behind the invention of Ethernet, recently visited the site of that invention, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), The Reg had the opportunity to sit down with him to discuss the history of Ethernet, its advantages over Token Ring, and IBM's perfidy.
> 
> Metcalfe was in town to promote a two-day Ethernet Innovation Summit that will commence on May 22 at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum in celebration of Ethernet's 40th anniversary.


Wow, that passed by way too quickly...


----------



## ekim68

Dick Tracy, anyone? 

Apple is building an iWatch, claim two independent sources



> We have heard the rumors before about an Apple watch but the rumor appears to be picking up steam as both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are claiming an iWatch is being built that will be based on iOS.
> 
> First up is the New York Times who is caliming that Apple is testing such a device at its headquarters as we speak. The device will reportedly have curved glass (likely Gorilla glass as they recently announced that curved glass was possible with their product) and is based on iOS.


----------



## poochee

*Online instruction destined to increase in California colleges*
By Jim Sanders
Published: Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013 - 12:00 am | Page 1A 
Last Modified: Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013 - 10:02 am



> Targeting a tech-savvy generation, they are paving the way for more students to pass courses and obtain degrees without ever going to class.
> 
> Given budget constraints, they say boosting online programs is the only way to accommodate more students without expanding campuses and making higher education even more expensive.


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/10/5178351/online-instruction-destined-to.html#storylink=cpy


----------



## ekim68

COBOL will outlive us all



> In the early 1980s, I was told that COBOL was going away and that I should quickly move toward other programming languages. Well, thirty years later, COBOL is alive and well and living in large companies everywhere.


----------



## ekim68

A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel 



> The first bionic hand that allows an amputee to feel what they are touching will be transplanted later this year in a pioneering operation that could introduce a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel


----------



## ekim68

3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production



> Picture an assembly line not that isn't made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.


----------



## ekim68

Play to Become a Surgeon: Impact of Nintendo WII Training on Laparoscopic Skills



> _Conclusions/Significance_
> 
> The Nintendo® Wii™ might be helpful, inexpensive and entertaining part of the training of young laparoscopists, in addition to a standard surgical education based on simulators and the operating room.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Play to Become a Surgeon: Impact of Nintendo WII Training on Laparoscopic Skills


:up:


----------



## ekim68

A good friend of mine is gonna move up to Portland to be closer to family and medical resources. I made a song that showed pictures of his property and put it up on YouTube...He's gonna put it up for sale, but here are some of the pictures of his place...(And classic Music... )

Side of the Hill


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> A good friend of mine is gonna move up to Portland to be closer to family and medical resources. I made a song that showed pictures of his property and put it up on YouTube...He's gonna put it up for sale, but here are some of the pictures of his place...(And classic Music... )
> 
> Side of the Hill


 Lovely property. Enjoyed the music.


----------



## ekim68

Evolution via Roadkill



> Cliff swallows that build nests that dangle precariously from highway overpasses have a lower chance of becoming roadkill than in years past thanks to a shorter wingspan that lets them dodge oncoming traffic. That's the conclusion of a new study based on 3 decades of data collected on one population of the birds. The results suggest that shorter wingspan has been selected for over this time period because of the evolutionary pressure put on the population by cars.


----------



## ekim68

Intel Pentium has turned 20



> Friday the 22nd of March has been the 20th anniversary of the Intel Pentium processor, a chip that was first introduced on March 22, 1993. The first product in the line, the Pentium P5 (the 5 standing for 5th generation x86 microarchitecture) was available in 60 MHz and 66 MHz versions, included 3.1 million transistors, had a TDP of up to 16 W, and used an 800nm manufacturing process.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Intel Pentium has turned 20


:up:


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Evolution via Roadkill


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Worldbackupday

In keeping with the times....


----------



## ekim68

Adam Scott just won the Masters, the first Austrailian to win it..... Well done Adam..... Austrailian's are gonna be dancing in the streets today and tonight....


----------



## ekim68

Several years back I did a restoration of a 1929 Royal Manual Typewriter...  Everything works on it, and almost every time my Grandkids visit, they gravitate to it and are keeping a nice log of history.... And, it works really well against Keystroke Loggers!


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Several years back I did a restoration of a 1929 Royal Manual Typewriter...  Everything works on it, and almost every time my Grandkids visit, they gravitate to it and are keeping a nice log of history.... And, it works really well against Keystroke Loggers!


I imagine it is valuable.


----------



## hewee

That looks so nice and I see the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.


----------



## poochee

hewee said:


> That looks so nice and I see the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.


Cute


----------



## hewee

poochee said:


> Cute


It's the "Sign of the times".


----------



## ekim68

Amazing stuff made out of paper...

Calvin Nicholls


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Amazing stuff made out of paper...
> 
> Calvin Nicholls


----------



## ekim68

Teenager comes up with a way to block Twitter TV spoilers



> We would like to nominate Jennie Lamere for the Nobel TV prize if there were one.
> 
> Lamere is a 17-year-old high schooler who has developed a browser plug-in that will block tweets with TV spoilers.
> 
> Twivo, a plug-in for Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers that will be available to everyone in a few weeks, blocks tweets if it detects keywords that may reveal important details about a show users may want to watch.
> 
> After installing Twivo, users activate the plugin whenever one of their shows is going to come on. They also designate keywords, or tags, to tell Twivo which tweets to block. For example, a user could decide to block tweets that include a show's name, characters' names or even the names of the actors.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> *Teenager *comes up with a way to block Twitter TV spoilers


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3



> The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same.
> 
> On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done.


----------



## Couriant

I remember using Lotus 1-2-3 / suite to upgrade to MS Office... So long Lotus!


----------



## pyritechips

And I remember my old Coleco Adam running its spreadsheet based upon Visicalc! I loved it, mastered it and used it for everything.


----------



## ekim68

Paul and Bill in 1968


----------



## ekim68

My Grandson's last day of High School is today. Wow!  That was sure quick....


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> My Grandson's last day of High School is today. Wow!  That was sure quick....


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> My Grandson's last day of High School is today. Wow!   That was sure quick....


Well just a little history to it, eh? 

My Grandson


----------



## hewee

Wow, so time really does fly by. Soon your have a great grandson.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Well just a little history to it, eh?
> 
> My Grandson


Neat video, handsome Grandson.


----------



## ekim68

hewee said:


> Wow, so time really does fly by. Soon your have a great grandson.


I'm looking forward to it. Nothing like spoiling another bunch of Grandkids....


----------



## ekim68

Now the dead can send Facebook messages too 



> A new app lets users record video messages that are released to friends and family postmortem.


----------



## ekim68

Back in the Day...

Woz


----------



## ekim68

Crew Rides Across the U.S. in 3 Days - On an Electric Motorcycle



> What he got into was a 2,500-mile blitz from Jacksonville, Florida to Santa Monica, California, on an electric motorcycle. It was an epic test for the bike, the team, and its riders, who covered that distance in 84.5 hours, arriving at the Santa Monica Pier last Thursday, making it the fastest cross-country trip ever made on an electric bike.


----------



## ekim68

Wow, just got an ad from Skype that said I could have 'Free unlimited landline calls to Latin America for one month'...Who would have imagined this ten years ago? Did they even have phone lines then?  And, I'm trying to find out if Latin America is South America or Central America...


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Wow, just got an ad from Skype that said I could have 'Free unlimited landline calls to Latin America for one month'...Who would have imagined this ten years ago? Did they even have phone lines then?  And, I'm trying to find out if Latin America is South America or Central America...


Per Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America


----------



## ekim68

Unheard music to be broadcast for 24 hours in remote Scottish forest


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Unheard music to be broadcast for 24 hours in remote Scottish forest


----------



## ekim68

Hmm, TSG had no Birthdays today......


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Hmm, TSG had no Birthdays today......


Not list on the main page but you got 108 of them.

http://forums.techguy.org/calendar.php

http://forums.techguy.org/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2013-6-23&c=1


----------



## ekim68

Thanks Harry....:up:


----------



## hewee

You're welcome Mike.

Too many people here for not to be Birthday with 692,626 Members. 

That is a average of 1,897 a day if everyone listed it here.  Goes to show how many don't want to give there age.


----------



## ekim68

(Agreed, but still a note on the Birthday list, eh?  We could track how many Visible Birthdays show up as a ratio, during the whole year, eh?  )


----------



## hewee

I am one that does not show up here
.


----------



## ekim68

Once again the value of computers for stabilization and such...

Timberjack Walking Machine


----------



## hewee

That is cool.


----------



## ekim68

Does anyone remember Alta Vista?


----------



## ekim68

MIT researchers can see through walls using 'Wi-Vi'



> Researchers at MIT are experimenting with a system called Wi-Vi, which they say can track moving objects through walls by using the inexpensive, nearly ubiquitous wireless system. Wi-Vi could be built into a smartphone or a special handheld device and used in search-and-rescue missions and law enforcement, according to Dina Katabi, the MIT professor who developed Wi-Vi along with graduate student Fadel Adib.


----------



## ekim68

The Most Important Radio Station You've Never Heard of Marks 50 Years on the Air



> Every night, while millions of Americans are fast asleep, clocks and wristwatches across the country wake up and lock on to a radio signal beamed from the base of the Rocky Mountains. The signal contains a message that keeps the devices on time, helping to make sure their owners keep to their schedules and aren't late for work the next day.
> 
> The broadcast comes from WWVB, a station run by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. WWVB marks half a century as the nation's official time broadcaster on July 5. Together with its sister station, WWV, which is about to hit 90 years in service, NIST radio has been an invisible piece of American infrastructure that has advanced industries from entertainment to telecommunications. (WWV's broadcast includes a wider range of information, including maritime weather warnings and solar storm alerts).
> 
> Most people aren't even aware that these stations exist, but they have a rich and fascinating history. Their future is uncertain, however, as newer technologies threaten to make them obsolete.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The Most Important Radio Station Youve Never Heard of Marks 50 Years on the Air


Very interesting!


----------



## ekim68

Satellite Quilt of Wildfires, Smoke Throughout Canada



> NASA's Aqua satellite captured multiple images of fire and smoke from Canadian wildfires on July 4, 2013. The images were stitched together to form a visual quilt.
> 
> The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured the images. MODIS has the ability to detect hot spots (fires), which appear red in the image. Plumes of smoke from various wildfires can be seen blowing across many of the Canadian provinces and out over the Atlantic Ocean.


----------



## ekim68

Solar powered plane completes history-making cross-country flight, lands at JFK airport



> "Flying coast-to-coast has always been a mythical milestone full of challenges for aviation pioneers," Piccard said. "During this journey, we had to find solutions for a lot of unforeseen situations, which obliged us to develop new skills and strategies. In doing so, we also pushed the boundaries of clean technologies and renewable energies to unprecedented levels."


----------



## ekim68

60 Years ago today, Wow, seems like yesterday....

RAAF Captures Flying Saucer
On Ranch in Roswell Region


----------



## ekim68

My Grandson is a gamer so he helps to keep me in touch...

Video game starship worth $9,000 destroyed in ambush



> Imagine spending years devoting your time and your finances to acquiring an impressive video game spaceship, one of the biggest and most valuable the gaming world has ever seen.
> 
> Now imagine all of that work being destroyed in minutes.
> 
> One player of the long-running online game EVE Online experienced that horror Sunday, when an ambush destroyed his supercarrier valued at a whopping $9,000.
> 
> The massive world of EVE Online is all about buying, piloting and blowing up spaceships. It's not for the faint at heart, in part because its in-game currency, called ISK (Interstellar Kredits), carries a real-world value. The Revenant -- one of only three ships that big in existence -- carries a value of 309 billion ISK, making it among the priciest bits of code in the game.
> 
> That also made it quite the target.


----------



## ekim68

Well, sign of those times, eh? 

Maps of Vast Empires That No Longer Exist


----------



## ekim68

Swedish Machine Turns Sweat into Perfectly Good Drinking Water!



> You probably never thought you could go to the gym and then rehydrate at the end of a grueling session with your own sweat, but that possibility now exists. Inspired by NASA astronauts, who are required to recycle everything during long journeys out in Space, Swedish designers built a Sweat Machine that squeezes out the water from post-workout clothes and makes it fit to drink!


----------



## ekim68

No more mailman at the door under U.S. Postal Service plan



> (Reuters) - Under a cost-saving plan by the U.S. Postal Service, millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb and residents of new homes will use neighborhood mailbox clusters, the agency said Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Mick Jagger is seventy years old Today...


----------



## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Mick Jagger is seventy years old Today...


He's still alive?


----------



## ekim68

He makes me feel young.... And how in the heck are you Chillin in AZ?


----------



## ekim68

I'm recycling a computer for a friend and it's 13 years old. A Windows 98 machine...I'm kind amazed at a couple of things...It's a 486 machine and heat is not a problem...It has almost 200 Megs of RAM and usage looks to be 40%...And it's 16-bit....Definitely not a Photographer's Dream Team, but, some of the programs work pretty well...Seems to me like writing on paper, eh?


----------



## Couriant

Actually my AC in my car is kaput...  I was 'chillin' when I moved here, not working at all.... 4 years ago. 

As to the computer... they don't build them like they used to huh


----------



## ekim68

Couriant said:


> Actually my AC in my car is kaput...  I was 'chillin' when I moved here, not working at all.... 4 years ago.
> 
> As to the computer... they don't build them like they used to huh


Right on, although the thing is, they still work...:up: I've got one word for Good Technology......Voyager....64K of RAM...And going just beyond our Solar System.... Good Stuff...


----------



## ekim68

Geeks.com Ordering Is Being Turned Off...



> After 17 years of service, almost half a billion dollars' worth of computer products put in the hands of loyal Geeks worldwide, jobs for hundreds of people and support for their family members. That is what Geeks.com meant to us and the people who worked here. Words cannot express our gratitude for the relationships and customers we have developed.


----------



## ekim68

They don't make them like they used to....

Eighth grade exam from 1912 is kinda hard



> The Bullitt County History Museum in Kentucky unearthed an exam that was given to eighth grade students in 1912, and many of the questions stump today's adults.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> They don't make them like they used to....
> 
> Eighth grade exam from 1912 is kinda hard


Wonder if anyone would get an A on the test today that are in 12th grade.


----------



## poochee

hewee said:


> Wonder if anyone would get an A on the test today that are in 12th grade.


I doubt it!


----------



## hewee

poochee said:


> I doubt it!


I know I would fail the test.


----------



## Couriant

Well they studied more easier since they didn't have things to distract them... like facebook.. tweeting.. cellphones in class...

Plus didn't teachers have the ability to inflict pain on those who weren't paying attention?


----------



## poochee

Couriant said:


> Well they studied more easier since they didn't have things to distract them... like facebook.. tweeting.. cellphones in class...
> 
> Plus didn't teachers have the ability to inflict pain on those who weren't paying attention?


Good points!


----------



## hewee

Watch this here.

New England Primer- first grade textbook





Also others from wallbuilders777 on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/user/wallbuilders777/videos?flow=list&live_view=500&view=0&sort=dd

More here at http://shop.wallbuilders.com/american-heritage-building-on-the-american-heritage-dvd-sets

http://www.amazon.com/New-England-Primer-David-Barton/product-reviews/092527917X

Look at it here at the first grade textbook.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/nep/index.htm
http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/nep/1777/

Note that God was part of life back then so your also bless by God

My dad was in a one room school house. Older kids also help teach the younger kids so you learn also in teaching.
Dad was smart and went from 5th to 8th grade also

So now are you smarter then a 1st grader used to be? You got to say NO to this after looking it all over.

We used to be a lot smarter


----------



## ekim68

America's Last, Remaining Drive-Ins Face a New Threat



> In 1993, Chuck and Marianne James heard that the drive-in movie theater in the town of Pueblo, Colo., was scheduled for demolition. Like the nostalgic cinephiles they are, they bought the business. "We didn't have a business plan or anything," explains Chuck James, who's now 58. "We just wanted to see if we could save it."
> 
> Pueblo once boasted four drive-in theaters, but now the Mesa Drive-In, built in 1951, is the only one. The same thing has happening in towns across the country; the number of drive-ins in America has dwindled from over 4,000 in the 1960s to about 360 today.


(I thought they were all gone...  )


----------



## ekim68

Apple reportedly blows off cable companies, talks directly with HBO, ESPN for iTV service



> Apple has apparently grown tired of playing nice with the incumbent cable providers. Unnamed sources tell Quartz that the company has started employing "a new strategy of talking directly to content providers" for a long-discussed Internet television service after "years of halting negotiations with cable companies haven't gotten Apple much closer to its grand vision for television." Quartz says that Apple is now in talks with HBO, ESPN and Viacom to bring content to a future online television platform that would presumably compete with incumbent cable providers.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Addiction: A Shocking Cure



> To mitigate Facebook's addictiveness, the pair created an Arduino-based keyboard hand-rest that shocks computer users who spend too much time checking the social network.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Facebook Addiction: A Shocking Cure


Interesting.


----------



## ekim68

Wind turbines don't hurt property values



> Some people who learn that wind turbines are going to be built in their neighborhood freak out about a couple of things, but science can help put their minds at ease.


----------



## ekim68

Video games do not make vulnerable teens more violent



> Study finds no evidence that violent video games increase antisocial behavior in youths with pre-existing psychological conditions.


----------



## ekim68

EU plans to fit all cars with speed limiters 



> All cars could be fitted with devices that stop them going over 70mph, under new EU road safety measures which aim to cut deaths from road accidents by a third.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> EU plans to fit all cars with speed limiters


:up:


----------



## hewee

I see that as a bad thing. 

Just think in times of War if the other side can slow down and or stop all the cars.

I say stop because once things like this get added changes are made later to catch the bad guys and that means to stop the car so you do not want this to happen to all at once in time of war etc. 

Some things you want control over and not an outside force to be able to change anything. So this may sound good but can turn into something very bad.


----------



## ekim68

Well I'm not so sure about using Wars as a litmus test, Harry....But I like the Statement that it would save one-third of all Fatalities and maybe we should at least try it....:up:


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Well I'm not so sure about using Wars as a litmus test, Harry....But I like the Statement that it would save one-third of all Fatalities and maybe we should at least try it....:up:


That is what I mean. It's good because so many people are bad driving high speed that this would be a good thing. 
But also if anyone else can control the car speed and or stop it then it can be used as a bad thing too so I vote NO.
Too many laws start out with one thing and other things are added to it later.
Just like taxes that are a temp tax they keep voting to keep it. Once the foot is in the door your can't close it.


----------



## ekim68

Has the world reached peak chicken?



> When a few other Mother Jones staffers and I heard about the spent-hens problem, it got us wondering: Has the world reached peak chicken? Considering the fact that Americans eat 79 billion eggs a year, that's an awful lot of laying hens. And that's to say nothing of the so-called broiler operations that make chickens for supermarket shelves and fast-food sandwiches and nuggets.


----------



## ekim68

Pole wakes up from 19-year coma



> A Polish man has woken up from a 19-year coma to find the Communist party no longer in power and food no longer rationed, Polish TV reports.
> 
> Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988.
> 
> "Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin," he told Polish television.


----------



## ekim68

Poll: Americans' perfect age rises from 41 to 50



> ROCHESTER, N.Y., Sept. 13 (UPI) -- A majority of Americans said that if they could skip time and live forever in good health at a particular age, they would pick age 50, a recent poll indicates.
> 
> When The Harris Poll asked the same question 10 years ago, the answer was 41.
> 
> The answer for respondents depends on how old they are currently, as younger people said they wanted to be older, while older generations said they were happy with where they are.


----------



## ekim68

Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization



> Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America's occupations will be automated within the next 20 years.


----------



## ekim68

Shadow: A Beautiful App That Tracks Your Dreams



> Created by designers Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho, Shadow is an app that makes recording and remembering your dreams extremely simple. On its most basic level, Shadow is an alarm clock/digital dream journal, but the designers ultimately hope to create the largest dream database in the world. Users set the clock before they go to sleep at night, and in the morning, gradually escalating volume and vibration gently rouses you awake. Most of the time, alarm clocks abruptly blast through your consciousness, ripping you from the depths of sleep. In contrast, Shadow's alarm system gradually transitions users through their hypnopompic state, that not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake phase, which has be proven to help you better remember your dreams.


----------



## ekim68

Here's where you're most likely to die from air pollution



> Where on Earth are you most likely to die early from air pollution? NASA provides the answer with this mortally serious view of the planet, and it is: lots of places.


----------



## ekim68

Cost of renewable energy's variability is dwarfed by the savings



> Wear and tear on equipment costs millions, but fuel savings are worth billions.


----------



## ekim68

Everything You Needed to Know About the Internet in May, 1994



> Back in 1994, the Internet was the next big thing in technology - hot enough that TIME did a cover story on it, but so unfamiliar that we had to begin by explaining what it was. ("…the world's largest computer network and the nearest thing to a working prototype of the information superhighway.")


----------



## ekim68

Mormon women march for entry into priesthood



> Members of Ordain Women try to enter a session for priests and start a conversation about role of Mormon women.


----------



## ekim68

GM Follows Tesla's Lead, Plans To Sell Directly To Online Shoppers



> Tesla has made plenty of headlines the past couple of years -- not just because its Model S sedan is selling better than critics expected (despite the occasional fire), but also because of its unusual sales strategy. According to the Wall Street Journal, General Motors plans to follow Tesla's lead on that front.


----------



## ekim68

2% of China's public consumes one-third of world's luxury goods



> According to China's official population clock, there are an estimated 1,359,025,970 people in China as of Sept. 26, with just 2% of that number - some 27,180,519 people - consuming one third of the world's luxury items. The 2% are the backbone of the global luxury goods sales and the target of hundreds of international brand names, the Chinese-language Money Week magazine reports.


----------



## ekim68

MIT Students invent Thermoelectric Bracelet which helps people maintain a comfortable body temperature



> Heating or cooling certain parts of your body - such as applying a warm towel to your forehead if you feel chilly - can help maintain your perceived thermal comfort.
> 
> Using that concept, four MIT engineering students developed a thermoelectric bracelet that monitors air and skin temperature, and sends tailored pulses of hot or cold waveforms to the wrist to help maintain thermal comfort.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> MIT Students invent Thermoelectric Bracelet which helps people maintain a comfortable body temperature


I want one. :up:


----------



## ekim68

A Live Map of Ongoing DDoS Attacks



> While this map is here to emphasize the impact that screwing with the way the Internet works can have on everyday citizens of real-world democracies, I wonder if it's too pretty for its own good. To those carrying out the attacks (activists, money makers, or just malicious, anarchistic hackers), I'd think the live display of their attack data is read with pride. Like graffiti.


----------



## ekim68

'Pushback': Resisting the life of constant connectivity



> Researchers at the University of Washington have studied and named a trend lots of people can identify with: the desire to resist constant connectivity and step back from the online world.
> 
> "We call this 'pushback,'" said Ricardo Gomez, assistant professor in the UW Information School and co-author of a paper to be presented at the iConference in Berlin in early 2014. Lead author is Stacey Morrison, who graduated last summer with a master's degree from the school.
> 
> "Pushback is an expression of those who have access and use of communication technologies, but who decide to resist, drop off, manage or reduce their use of these technologies," Gomez said.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Pushback: Resisting the life of constant connectivity


:up:


----------



## ekim68

'Reverse microwave' can chill wine bottles and fizzy drink cans in 45 seconds



> The technology, which has been developed with the help of research funding from the EU, works on the basis of a cooling vortex which spins the drink round.


----------



## ekim68

You don't even have to pedal anymore...

One Wheel. ∞ Fun.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Motors West Coast charging network now complete



> Owners of the Tesla Motors electric Model S can now drive from San Diego to Vancouver without ever paying for juice.
> 
> Tesla has finished installing its high-speed Supercharger stations up the length of the West Coast, the Palo Alto company reported Tuesday. Model S drivers can use the stations for free, a welcome perk considering they've already shelled out $69,900 to $94,900 for the car.


----------



## ekim68

Man drives across U.S. in under 29 hours



> Before the transcontinental race in "Cannonball Run," the starter tells the gathered racers, "You all are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place."
> 
> Ed Bolian prefers the term "fraternity of lunatics."


----------



## ekim68

Study: U.S. Hospitals Admit 7,500 Kids A Year With Gunshot Wounds



> A new study says that each year approximately 7,500 children are admitted to U.S. hospitals with gunshot wounds and more than 500 children die during hospital admission from these injuries.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Study: U.S. Hospitals Admit 7,500 Kids A Year With Gunshot Wounds


----------



## ekim68

Tech Time Warp of the Week: IBM Speech Recognition, 1986



> A pair of carefully painted lips, a feathered head-of-hair, pearl earrings, a pink button-down beneath a blue sweater, synthesizer music, a personal computer with a floppy drive, and a monochrome display. Welcome to the 1980s.
> 
> At first, the display is blank, except for a flashing green cursor. Is it waiting for someone to type? No, it's not. This PC is different from the average DOS machine. When those carefully painted lips say the word "speaking," the letters arrive on the display, as if by magic.
> 
> Then we see that those lips belong to a perfectly coiffed spokesmodel. "I talk," she says, "and the words appear on the computer screen." And then these words appear on, well, you get the idea.
> 
> This little piece of computer history appears in an IBM promotional video that says as much as about the culture of the times as the technology (see above). The year is 1986. IBM is still the king not only of the PC world, but the tech world as a whole, and with the video - and a spokesmodel that could come from no other decade - Big Blue shows off its early efforts in speech recognition software.


----------



## ekim68

Debut North Korean tablet offers Angry Birds and communist propaganda



> North Korea has produced its answer to the iPad with its very own Samijyon tablet.
> 
> According to North Korea Watch, the 7-inch tablets are assembled in the Pyongyang's Computer Centre from Chinese parts and comes complete with a local version of Angry Birds and Kim Il Sung's literary works.


----------



## ekim68

LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers



> LG Smart Ad analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences. For example, LG Smart Ad can feature sharp suits to men, or alluring cosmetics and fragrances to women.
> Furthermore, LG Smart Ad offers useful and various advertising performance reports. That live broadcasting ads cannot. To accurately identify actual advertising effectiveness.


----------



## ekim68

Circuit Scribe: Draw Circuits Instantly



> Circuit Scribe is a rollerball pen that writes with conductive silver ink. It makes creating circuits as easy as doodling.


We've come a long way....


----------



## DaveBurnett

That's been around for years. Don't donate.


----------



## ekim68

Wisconsin is solving icy roads like it solves everything else: With cheese



> Wisconsin, as a cheese-producing state, has an overabundance of a particular type of liquid waste - cheese brine, or as Modern Farmer describes it, "liquid cheese-making byproduct." It's the salty water that soft cheeses like mozzarella and provolone float around in, and cheese-makers normally have to spend a lot of money to get rid of it. But now, in a genius reuse ninja move, some counties in Wisconsin are using it to keep roads from freezing during the winter.


----------



## ekim68

LoJack system will allow parents, auto makers and insurance companies to track vehicles



> Computerworld - LoJack, whose technology has for years allowed law enforcement to track down stolen vehicles, plans to release a device for parents and others to track family vehicles.
> 
> The devices will not only collect data about vehicle locations, but also about how well someone is driving. It would also be able to restrict talking or texting on a smartphone while a vehicle is in operation.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> LoJack system will allow parents, auto makers and insurance companies to track vehicles


:up:


----------



## ekim68

poochee said:


> :up:


:up:


----------



## hewee

I see a lot of bad use of that and it can be used to not pay you because you was driving over a set speed even if you was not at fault. Just another way to make it harder to get your claim.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Big brother.
I don't know why they don't just insist in a chip being implanted at birth........


----------



## ekim68

23% of IT pros spend Thanksgiving with coworkers



> Think it's hard surviving your family on Thanksgiving? Try inviting your coworkers to dinner.
> 
> A timely CareerBuilder survey finds that 23% of IT pros spend the holiday with coworkers, in the office or at another location. So you're either elbow deep in the server closet or helping debug Uncle Murray's ancient PC in the spare bedroom ("Why can't I get on AOL?").


----------



## ekim68

Analysis: No checkouts, no chocolate: Online shopping hits impulse buys



> (Reuters) - For consumers, one of the great things about shopping online is bypassing the queue to check out. For producers of the candy, magazines and drinks often sold there, it's a problem.
> 
> In Britain, the country where e-commerce is most popular, about 13 percent of people do all or most of their grocery shopping online. Yet this only accounts for 5 percent of overall spending, suggesting consumers spend more when they visit a store.
> 
> That is because online shoppers search for what they need, usually sticking close to their shopping lists. They don't spontaneously buy magazines they opened while waiting to pay, or chocolate to eat on the go.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook And Google Are About To Overtake All Of TV In Audience Size



> This weekend, Business Insider wrote a long, detailed piece covering all the ways cable is losing subscribers and television advertising dollars are poised to move to digital media.
> 
> A recent analyst note from Macquarie Capital should also be worrisome for those making money in the TV advertising ecosystem, but for a different reason. While the pay-TV industry is hurting from losing more subscribers than it ever has before, this chart shows Facebook and Google are reaching more people than ever. It measures monthly reach in millions of users:


(Good, at least on the Internet I'll watch what I want for the right price...:up: )


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Facebook And Google Are About To Overtake All Of TV In Audience Size
> 
> (Good, at least on the Internet I'll watch what I want for the right price...:up: )


Yep!


----------



## ekim68

poochee said:


> Yep!


----------



## ekim68

New product shuts car engines off with a radio pulse



> The company E2V has developed a prototype device that uses a radio-frequency pulse to shut down a car's engine at range, according to a report from the BBC. While the range of the device is fairly short, it worked on a handful of cars and motorbikes and could also potentially be used on boats.
> 
> The product, named the RF Safe-stop, works by sending an RF pulse to a car at up to 50 meters (164 feet) away. The pulse "confuses" the car's electronic systems, which the BBC said made the "dashboard warning lights and dial [behave] erratically." The engine then stalls, and the car comes to a stop. How safely and quickly the vehicle would stop depends on the vehicle, and this technique would not work on older vehicles.


----------



## Couriant

ekim68 said:


> Facebook And Google Are About To Overtake All Of TV In Audience Size
> 
> (Good, at least on the Internet I'll watch what I want for the right price...:up: )


Neither one has actually anything to do with TV shows... well perhaps Google (YouTube) but most of the stuff is copyrighted unless the respective broadcaster post something... and generally they will not do a whole show.


----------



## ekim68

Couriant said:


> Neither one has actually anything to do with TV shows... well perhaps Google (YouTube) but most of the stuff is copyrighted unless the respective broadcaster post something... and generally they will not do a whole show.


Doesn't really matter to me because I don't watch most of the drab stuff that the Networks put out...However it does expand the options, eh?


----------



## Couriant

true... but in reality it's not the cable provider that's pulling the strings on what channels you can have (ie al la carte - etc) - the broadcasters are the real money driven idiots... just look at AMC with DirecTV, Dish, and others... then there was the Turner Networks dispute that was recent with another Cable provider... they shut them down right at the beginning of the MLB Playoffs.


----------



## ekim68

Why Won't Big Automakers Build the Car of the Future?



> Auto companies like to sneer at legitimately futuristic cars, calling them "science projects" and saying consumers will never buy them. I believe this is a mistake. Because ultimately, they don't really know. They've never tried to make and sell cars like the ones that ended up excelling in the X Prize contest. And they're awfully good at blaming consumer timidity for their own engineering fears and failures.


----------



## ekim68

10 classic USA brands that are foreign-owned



> China firm's purchase of Smithfield Foods is latest in long series of brand acquisitions.


----------



## ekim68

Neural Prosthetic Is a "Bridge" Over Damaged Brain Areas



> A new idea for treating brain injury doesn't involve fixing the damaged regions. Instead, researchers want to detour neural impulses around the damage.
> 
> Scientists used to think of the brain as an collection of discrete parts, with different regions taking charge of different neural functions. Today's emerging model of brain activity indicates that even a simple act of perception or cognition involves many different brain regions. Several projects are devoted to mapping those complex webs of interconnections, collectively known as the connectome.
> 
> The current experiment on brain injury banks on the idea that a lesion in the brain may be disruptive partially because it interrupts some neural circuit. The researchers, from Case Western Reserve University and the Kansas University Medical Center, thought that a little judicious rewiring could solve the problem.


----------



## ekim68

This Sleek Spiderman Spacesuit Could Take Astronauts To Mars



> The invention looks so sleek because it's pressurized close to the skin--an advance made possible by tension lines on the suit (those are the Spiderman lines) that don't break when an astronaut bends their arms or knees. Active materials, like nickel-titanium shape-memory alloys, allow the nylon and spandex suit to be shrink-wrapped around the skin even tighter, getting Newman to her goal of designing a suit that has 30% of the atmosphere's pressure--the level necessary to keep someone alive in space.


----------



## ekim68

Midwest Wind Cost-Competitive With Gas and Coal



> More efficient technologies, combined with low costs and strong wind resources, are making wind cost-competitive with some of the cheapest forms of fossil energy in the Midwest.
> 
> "In the Midwest, we're now seeing power agreements being signed with wind farms at as low as $25 per megawatt-hour," said Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley's Head of North American Equity Research for Power & Utilities and Clean Energy, at the Columbia Energy Symposium in late November. "Compare that to the variable cost of a gas plant at $30 per megawatt-hour. The all-in cost to justify the construction of a new gas plant would be above $60 per megawatt-hour."


----------



## ekim68

Homeless man creates phone application with his Chromebook




> A homeless man who learnt to code on his Google Chromebook in just 16 weeks has released his first mobile application dubbed "Trees for Cars".
> 
> Leo Grand spent a few hours a day coding the carpooling application on his refurbished Chromebook while living on the streets. The Android and iOS application aims to save the environment by connecting drivers willing to transport riders to their destination.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Homeless man creates phone application with his Chromebook





> The application is now available on Google Play and Apple's App Store for just $0.99. All money will go to Grand, who hopes to further his career in programming and app development.


:up:


----------



## poochee

*Learning Cursive Is a Basic Right*
_"Today more and more I meet high school students who, though they can read, sometimes well and sometimes poorly, are ashamed whenever they are confronted with the need to sign a document." 
_Abigail Walthausen
Dec 13 2013, 7:32 AM ET



> The signature, the ability to sign one's own name with grace and confidence, has long been an essential marker of society. Today more and more I meet high school students who, though they can read, sometimes well and sometimes poorly, are ashamed whenever they are confronted with the need to sign a document. Students are sometimes too embarrassed to admit that they can't read a piece of an important historical document or the comments of a teacher who writes in script. Script is not seen by students as some quaint relic of the past. Even among kids for whom academic achievement is hardly "cool," students recognize the pedigree that the knowledge of the cursive alphabet and the ability to write it fluently represent. Cursive has become a status marker.


http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/learning-cursive-is-a-basic-right/282288/


----------



## ekim68

Light bulb ban set to take effect



> Light bulb manufacturers will cease making traditional 40 and 60-watt light bulbs -- the most popular in the country -- at the start of 2014.


----------



## combsdon

Some companies will do anything to brighten up our lives...................


----------



## DaveBurnett

That's been in effect over here in England for several years.


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> That's been in effect over here in England for several years.


I read an interesting article about the fact that the old lights use 90 percent of the energy they get to produce heat and that they make great little space heaters... The only trouble is using them during Winter and Summer when the desired heat has different effects....


----------



## ekim68

Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online



> Access to the Gutenberg Bible and other rare, fragile ancient manuscripts has just gotten easier.
> 
> The Vatican Library and Oxford University's Bodleian Library put the first of 1.5 million pages of their precious manuscripts online Tuesday, bringing their collections to a global audience for the first time.
> 
> The two libraries in 2012 announced a four-year project to digitize some of the most important works in their collections of Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and early printed books.


----------



## DaveBurnett

> I read an interesting article about the fact that the old lights use 90 percent of the energy they get to produce heat and that they make great little space heaters...


I think that article needs amending. The whole way that incandescent light bulbs work is that the element is HEATED up so much that it is white hot and as a result give off some visible light along with the huge amount of lower frequency radiant energy(heat). Light bulbs are use quite a lot in things like incubators, nurseries etc.


----------



## ekim68

Willie bus concept plasters public transport with LCD billboards



> Anyone that's been to Las Vegas and caught a glimpse of the "Hot Babes" billboard circling around the city knows that vehicle advertising can be effective ... at least at grabbing your attention. A new bus concept by designer Tad Orlowski puts a more modern spin on the idea, integrating large LCDs on the broad sides of the bus. The screens can display a variety of information, including paid advertising, bus information and TV coverage.


----------



## ekim68

Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab



> RICHLAND, Wash. - Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae - a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.





> In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I am currently reading a modern science opera story, and the theme for that is the colonisation of other worlds, one of which is turned into oil production my this very method. So far it is a good book, deep, engrossing and over 1000 pages of fine print.


----------



## ekim68

This from the current Pope....:up:

"Never be afraid of tenderness"


----------



## ekim68

EFF's 2013 Holiday Wishlist



> As we did last year and the year before, EFF welcomes the winter season with a new wishlist of some things we'd love to have happen for the holidays-for us and for all Internet users. These are some of the actions we'd most like to see from companies, governments, organizations, and individuals in the new year.


----------



## ekim68

How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates -- then went and played for them



> Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in. The band has focused extensively on South American tours in recent years, one of which was filmed for the documentary "Flight 666." After all, fans can't download a concert or t-shirts. The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.


----------



## ekim68

Atheists are good if they do good, Pope Francis says



> VATICAN CITY - Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis said Wednesday in his latest urging that people of all religions - or no religion - work together.


:up:


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Atheists are good if they do good, Pope Francis says
> 
> :up:


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Many consumers in the dark about Jan.1 start of light bulb phase out



> Only four in 10 consumers are aware that the most popular light bulbs in the U.S. will be phased out next year as production of the products ends on Jan. 1, 2014.


----------



## DaveBurnett

They'll see the light when it dawns on them.....


----------



## ekim68

CNN Poll: Pope's approval rating sky-high



> As Pope Francis prepares to celebrate his first Christmas at the Vatican, Americans' opinions of the pontiff appear to be as high as the dome on St. Peter's Basilica, according to a new survey.
> 
> A CNN/ORC International poll released Tuesday found that 88% of American Catholics approve of how Francis is handling his role as head of the 1.2 billion-member church.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> CNN Poll: Pope's approval rating sky-high


:up:


----------



## ekim68

The Most Amazing, Beautiful and Viral Maps of the Year


----------



## ekim68

Watch Arthur C. Clarke predict the computers of today, in 1974



> Arthur C. Clarke didn't just put the smackdown on A.I. skeptics - he also predicted the future of compuers with pinpoint accuracy, in this recently released 1974 interview. Not just the personal computer, but telecommuting and internet commerce.


----------



## HOBOcs

Great Find Mike!. :up::up:


----------



## ekim68

Thanks Jim. I'm just glad someone thought to record that....


----------



## ekim68

Japan's population falls 'by record 244,000' in 2013



> Japan's population declined by a record 244,000 people in 2013, according to health ministry estimates.
> 
> The ministry said an estimated 1,031,000 babies were born last year - down some 6,000 from the previous year.
> 
> Meanwhile, the number of people that died last year was 1,275,000 - a rise of around 19,000 from 2012.
> 
> Japan's population has been shrinking for several years now. If current trends persist it will lose a third of its population in the next 50 years.


----------



## ekim68

Tech Time Warp of the Week: The World's First Hard Drive, 1956



> IBM unleashed the world's first computer hard disk drive in 1956. It was bigger than a refrigerator. It weighed more than a ton. And it looked kinda like one of those massive cylindrical air conditioning units that used to sit outside your grade school cafeteria.


----------



## ekim68

San Antonio library offers glimpse of bookless future



> SAN ANTONIO -
> 
> Alamo City residents have seen the future of the public library, and it looks a lot like an Apple Store: Rows of glossy iMacs beckon. iPads mounted on a tangerine-colored bar invite readers. And hundreds of other tablets stand ready for checkout to anyone with a borrowing card.
> 
> Even the librarians imitate Apple's dress code, wearing matching shirts and that standard of geek-chic, the hoodie. But this $2.3 million library might be most notable for what it does not have - any actual books.
> 
> That makes Bexar County's BiblioTech the nation's only bookless public library, a distinction that has attracted scores of digital bookworms, plus emissaries from as far away as Hong Kong who want to learn about the idea and possibly take it home.


----------



## ekim68

The US declared war on poverty 50 years ago. You would never know it



> Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty for reasons both economic and moral. They are still relevant today.


----------



## ekim68

Switzerland tops 34 nations for life expectancy at 82.8



> PARIS, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Switzerland leads a study of 34 nations for life expectancy at 82.8 years, followed by Japan at 82.7, Italy at 82.7, Spain at 82.7 and Iceland at 82.4.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Switzerland tops 34 nations for life expectancy at 82.8


----------



## ekim68

poochee said:


>


Have to look down the page to find the USA....


----------



## ekim68

This cafe charges you 5 cents a minute to hang out, but everything else is free



> Ziferblat, a Russian company that just opened its first branch in London, works on an unusual premise: It charges you for the time you spend in its space, rather than what you consume there. TimeOut London describes it as a café, but it sounds more like a co-working space where you pay per minute rather than per month:


----------



## ekim68

Canadian town is using beet juice to de-ice the roads



> What's weirder - or at least less pungent - than de-icing roads with cheese brine, like they do in some Wisconsin counties? How about doing the same thing using a beet juice-based road treatment, like the British Columbia town of Williams Lake? In fact, even better: Combine the two, and maybe add some traction in the form of walnuts. Tastiest clear roads ever!


----------



## hewee

I love beet juice but I drink it.

Hey you love cooking cookies and bread Mike.

Ever make flour less cookies?
Been looking at the peanut flour less cookies but they all have so much sugar. Why? Can't you do the same without all that sugar? I don't mean Sugarless to be replaces with another type of sugar.

Banana or stevia can be used to make things sweet.

This sounds good but another protein mix because that one they use has a GMO sweeter in it. I got some great Vanilla bio-fermented raw sprouted whole grain brown rice protein
http://www.sunwarrior.com/store/protein-raw-vegan-natural.html
Cheaper here.
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Warrior-V...51457?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1389725680&sr=1-1






Vanilla Almond Cookies (Moist and Chewy!)
http://www.truenourishment.me/blog/2013/12/vanilla-almond-cookies-moist-and-chewy

This one sounds great.
4 Ingredient, organic, healthy no-bake cookies. Make 2 dozen in less than 10 minutes! 





We have food at church all the time and a lot of potlucks but to much junk food and pre-made things. And that mean sweets. I bring watermelon and everyone loves it. But the right cookies can also be good tasting and also good for you.
I know the minister is tying to get us all to eat better and also be more Alkaline and we even had a Bible Study on "We Are What We Eat". I like this because we all need to eat better.

Another is bread and how it's bad for you. You have lots of stories of why it's bad and why you need to eat it. I am now looking at it as bad after reading this this.

Does the Bible Say We Should Eat Grains?
http://wellnessmama.com/2359/does-the-bible-say-we-should-eat-grains/

Naturally Leavened Sourdough Bread
http://earthstar.newlibertyvillage.com/fermentedbreads.htm

Naturally Leavened Bread
http://ranprieur.com/readings/natleavbread.html

Our Daily Bread: No-knead Sourdough
http://nourishedkitchen.com/no-knead-sourdough-bread/

http://www.naturalleavening.com/

I never made bread before but now like to try.

Will have to check on the heath food stores to see if I can get the right grains and try to make some real bread that really is good for you.


----------



## ekim68

Did you ever play any neighborhood games? 

30 Classic Games for Simple Outdoor Play



> Listed below are some no-tech games that you may have enjoyed as a kid. I sure did. Some can be done indoors. Some can be done by yourself or with just one friend. But most of them are best when done outside with a group of people. Also, most of these games can be changed or improved by making up your own rules.


----------



## ekim68

I've made bread for years Harry and I'm always experimenting...As a matter of fact I made a loaf two days ago and it consisted of one cup of rice flour, two cups of wheat flour, one half cup of flax seed, sugar, salt, yeast, and water...(I often add different spices and herbs to learn whether I like it or not..) I only need between five and ten ingredients for my bread and I did the Math and it costs me between seventy and eighty cents to make a loaf....:up: So I decided to check on this low-cal loaf of bread we recently purchased and I looked at it's ingredients and it almost took up the page of a book.. So then I looked around a bit and found this.....

The Top 20 Ingredients Used in Bread


----------



## hewee

Wow great info from that link.

So what would be the best way to get started. Easy and cheaper or as cheap as you can and keep it Non GMO.

Sure is cheaper to make the bread because what I get is $4.29 a loaf. So I can goof up and still pay less. I like a bread something like these are.
http://www.alvaradostreetbakery.com/product_list.php?id=6

Like this one here http://www.alvaradostreetbakery.com/product_detail.php?id=27 I do not want many thing listed but it's hard to buy any that is full of bad things and this is just better then many but still not really good but better then others you can get at the store.


----------



## ekim68

First thing to get started with is a couple of loaf baking pans and an oven...:up:


----------



## hewee

Got a glass loaf pan and a oven right now.


----------



## ekim68

Hate Parking Tickets? Fixed Fights Them In Court For You



> Up to 50 percent of parking tickets are dismissed when fought in court, but it takes knowledge and time to do it. New app Fixed will do it for you. Take a photo of your ticket, Fixed contests it, and if it's dismissed, you pay Fixed 25 percent of the ticket price. If Fixed loses, you pay it nothing, so there's nothing to lose. Fixed just launched in San Francisco, but wants to fight tickets nationwide.


----------



## DaveBurnett

It is nearer 90% here in the UK.


----------



## ekim68

Well, it is a Sign of the Times....


----------



## ekim68

New giant 3D printer can build a house in 24 hours



> Scientists claim to have developed a revolutionary new giant 3D concrete printer that can build a 2,500-square-foot house in just 24 hours.
> 
> The 3D printer, developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis from the University of Southern California, could be used to build a whole house, layer by layer, in a single day.
> 
> The giant robot replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, which squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home based on a computer pattern, MSN News reported.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> New giant 3D printer can build a house in 24 hours


Wow!


----------



## ekim68

Rewinding to Betamax: The path to consumers' "right to record"



> 30 years ago today, a landmark ruling set technology free.


----------



## ekim68

Paramount stops releasing major movies on film



> For more than a century, Hollywood has relied on 35-millimeter film to capture its fleeting images and deliver them to the silver screen. Now, in a historic move, Paramount Pictures has become the first big studio to stop releasing its major movies on film in the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Global warming denial hits a six-year high



> The latest data is out on the prevalence of global warming denial among the U.S. public. And it isn't pretty.
> 
> The new study, from the Yale and George Mason University research teams on climate change communication, shows a 7-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Americans who say they do not believe that global warming is happening.


----------



## ekim68

In flight: see the planes in the sky right now - interactive


----------



## ekim68

I wonder if this will affect the Banks.....

T-Mobile's 'Mobile Money' blends prepaid Visa cards and no-fee checking features



> T-Mobile's latest service seems to fit its 'UnCarrier' agenda perfectly, since it has little connection to wireless and doesn't actually require users to have the company's phone service. Called Mobile Money, the personal finance product combines a smartphone app (iOS or Android) with a branded prepaid Visa card. Without paying a single fee, T-Mobile wireless customers can deposit checks into their Mobile Money account by taking a picture of them with their smartphone, withdraw money from 42,000 in-network ATMs and reload the cards with cash at T-Mobile stores (non-T-Mobile customers would pay additional fees). There are also no maintenance fees, minimum balances or activation fees.


----------



## ekim68

Rats! Open data tells New York City residents where the vermin are - and aren't



> The point of the portal is to provide educational information for everybody (residents, landlords, businesses, etc.) about what attracts rats, signs of rat infestations, how to report rats to city health inspectors and so on. It also provides raw data on where the rats are, based on inspections done by the health department, as well as by their rat indexing initiative, which is an an effort to more comprehensively "index" the rat population by inspecting all properties in certain areas (currently, only Manhattan and the Bronx).


----------



## ekim68

Made in China: Up to a quarter of California smog



> What goes around comes around - quite literally in the case of smog. The US has outsourced many of its production lines to China and, in return, global winds are exporting the Chinese factories' pollution right back to the US.
> 
> Decades ago, the US began outsourcing its industrial production, resulting in the ubiquitous "made in China" label. US factories shut down and Chinese ones opened up in droves. It looked like a clever scheme to shift noxious pollution to the opposite side of the planet, but it is backfiring.


----------



## ekim68

The Mac is Thirty years old today


----------



## ekim68

Stem cell knee injection shown to regenerate meniscus, reduce pain



> Results of a randomized, double-blind controlled study in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery supported the use of human mesenchymal stem cell for meniscal regeneration and the control of knee pain.
> "There was evidence of meniscus regeneration and improvement in knee pain following treatment with allogeneic human mesenchymal stem cells," C. Thomas Vangsness Jr., MD, and colleagues wrote in the study. "These results support the study of human mesenchymal stem cells for the apparent knee-tissue regeneration and protective effects."


----------



## ekim68

Is Japan's Offshore Solar Power Plant the Future of Renewable Energy?



> One think tank has calculated that a national solar power initiative could generate electricity equivalent to ten nuclear plants. But skeptics have asked where, in their crowded mountainous country, they could construct all those solar panels.
> 
> One solution was unveiled this past November, when Japan flipped the switch on its largest solar power plant to date, built offshore on reclaimed land jutting into the cerulean waters of Kagoshima Bay. The Kyocera Corporation's Kagoshima Nanatsujima Mega Solar Power Plant is as potent as it is picturesque, generating enough electricity to power roughly 22,000 homes.


----------



## ekim68

Giant Hologram of Turkish Prime Minister Delivers Speech



> Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan couldn't attend a political party meeting in the city of Izmir on Sunday, so he decided to send the next best thing: a giant hologram of himself.
> 
> In a scene straight out of Star Wars, Erdogan's shimmering avatar, whose real-life counterpart is under siege amid an ever-expanding corruption scandal and the resignations of multiple high-level officials, spoke to an astonished crowd of Justice and Development Party supporters on the need for resilience before municipal elections on March 30.


----------



## ekim68

Porsche's first car is 116 years old, and it's electric



> Many think that Porsche EVs are relatively new creations, but it turns out that they're quite old -- 116 years old, to be exact. The automaker has recovered the P1, an electric car that Ferdinand Porsche built while working for a carriage maker in 1898; it was also the first car he ever built.


----------



## ekim68

The 10 Lowest-Paid Jobs in America



> Beauty salon workers and restaurant employees are among the lowest-paid workers in America


----------



## ekim68

Selling homemade food is now legal in California



> Launch that website for your medicinal pot brownies, because Californians can now sell their homemade goodies legally. It's a victory for the cottage food industry and anyone who thinks a fledgling food entrepreneur shouldn't have to rent commercial kitchen space to make jam or cupcakes. (Hold your horsemeat, though: It's still illegal to sell homemade meat or dairy products.)


----------



## ekim68

California community colleges could offer bachelor's degrees



> As demand for bachelor's degrees grows in health professions, information technology and law enforcement, also growing is pressure on California lawmakers to let community colleges offer bachelor's degrees in high-need areas. One bill introduced in January could have students enrolling in such programs by fall 2015 if approved.


----------



## ekim68

Who's in charge? 

BP boss warns of 'uncertainties' due to Scottish vote



> Oil giant BP boss Bob Dudley has warned there are "big uncertainties" for the company over the possibility of Scotland becoming independent.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> California community colleges could offer bachelor's degrees


----------



## HOBOcs

Hi Mike - I thought this fit in this category the best


----------



## ekim68

HOBOcs said:


> Hi Mike - I thought this fit in this category the best


Needs repeating, thanks Jim...:up:


----------



## ekim68

CVS to stop selling cigarettes by Oct. 1



> Pharmacy chain CVS said Wednesday it will stop selling tobacco products at its 7,600 locations across the United States, a move that public-health advocates hope will become a watershed and pressure other large drug store franchises to follow suit.
> 
> CVS executives said the decision could cost billions of dollars in revenue because cigarettes draw so many customers to their stores. But by jettisoning tobacco products, CVS can further define its pharmacies as full-fledged health-care providers and strike more profitable deals with hospitals and health insurers. CVS stores already are home to more than 750 MinuteClinics, the country's largest chain of pharmacy-based health clinics, offering flu shots and diagnosis of common ailments like ear infections and strep throat.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> CVS to stop selling cigarettes by Oct. 1


:up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

> Who's in charge?
> 
> BP boss warns of 'uncertainties' due to Scottish vote


That brought an OLD joke to mind.

More oil has been found in Texas. The trouble is all the dipsticks are in Washington!


----------



## poochee

.


----------



## ekim68

Ah geez, the word's gotten across the Pond....


----------



## DaveBurnett

It is the same here. It is just that London is a lot closer to everyone here than Washington is to most of you lot, and we cannot get away from the stupidity quite as easily.


----------



## ekim68

New York Police Department is beta-testing Google Glass



> Google Glass may soon become a favored tool for law enforcement agencies in the United States.
> 
> The New York City Police Department's massive and controversial intelligence and analytics unit is evaluating whether Google Glass is a decent fit for investigating terrorists and helping cops lock up bad guys, VentureBeat has learned. The department recently received several pairs of the modernist-looking specs to test out.


----------



## ekim68

The end of the tank? The Army says it doesn't need it, but industry wants to keep building it.



> The manufacturing of tanks - powerful but cumbersome - is no longer essential, the military says. In modern warfare, forces must deploy quickly and "project power over great distances." Submarines and long-range bombers are needed. Weapons such as drones - nimble and tactical - are the future. Tanks are something of a relic.


----------



## ekim68

Treat Your Spouse Well - Heart Disease Risk Linked With Spouses' Social Support



> Matters of the heart can influence actual heart health, according to new research. A study from researchers at the University of Utah shows that the ways in which your spouse is supportive - and how you support your spouse - can actually have significant bearing on your overall cardiovascular health.


----------



## ekim68

Who wants competition? Big cable tries outlawing municipal broadband in Kansas



> Legislation introduced in the Kansas state legislature by a lobby for cable companies would make it almost impossible for cities and towns to offer broadband services to residents and would perhaps even outlaw public-private partnerships like the one that brought Google Fiber to Kansas City.
> 
> The Senate bill doesn't list any lawmaker as its sponsor, and there's a reason-a Senate employee told us it was submitted by John Federico on behalf of the Kansas Cable Telecommunications Association, of which he is president.


----------



## ekim68

The $4.38 billion reason it's so hard for U.S. cord-cutters to watch the Olympics online



> The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics start tonight. But if you're among the 9 percent of U.S. households who have broadband but don't subscribe to paid television, it will be nearly impossible to (legally) watch the games online this year.
> 
> That's because while NBC is streaming all of the events live online, full access to the livestream will only be available to paying cable subscribers. And thanks to a $4.38 billion exclusive deal NBC struck with the International Olympics Committee (IOC) in 2011 for the privilege of broadcasting the Olympic games in the U.S. through 2020, cord-cutters don't have a lot of options.


----------



## ekim68

States Reaping Budget Benefits Of Ending Bush Tax Cuts For Richest Americans



> The reasons for the better-than-expected revenues are a mix of factors: higher income tax revenues, growing sales tax revenues, and conservative budget forecasting-prompting the press reports that revenue forecasts are being exceeded. But where reporters generally stop explaining what's behind the revenue surge is noting that 2013's big bump in state revenues-5.7 percent nationally-mostly came from ending some Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and Wall Street investments.


----------



## ekim68

The house wins 



> THE global gambling industry gathers in London this week for the annual ICE gaming conference. It should be a happy affair, with gross winnings (total take minus payouts, excluding expenses) of around $440 billion last year.


----------



## ekim68

October 2015: The End of the Swipe-and-Sign Credit Card



> It's a payment ritual as familiar as handing over a $20 bill, and it's soon to go extinct: prepare to say farewell to the swipe-and-sign of a credit card transaction.
> 
> Beginning later next year, you will stop signing those credit card receipts. Instead, you will insert your card into a slot and enter a PIN number, just like people do in much of the rest of the world. The U.S. is the last major market to still use the old-fashioned signature system, and it's a big reason why almost half the world's credit card fraud happens in America, despite the country being home to about a quarter of all credit card transactions.


----------



## hewee

A lot of hacks they get your PIN number. But with a credit card or all I have use do not have a PIN number. So if I have to change then I will not get the PIN.


----------



## ekim68

Scotland Will Soon Be Home to the World's First Self-Sufficient Island



> Scotland's Eigg Island might just be the world's greenest island - and not only because of its pristine untouched landscape. The tiny isle off the country's northwest coast boasts a broad array of sustainable strategies and, depending on weather conditions, gets up to 90 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric schemes scattered all over the island meet the energy requirements of almost all of its residents.
> 
> The island's $2.64 million electricity grid was switched on in 2008 and runs across the entire 31 square kilometer land mass. As the gird operates independently of the UK's national grid, the island hasn't been able to bring in big energy companies, which set its electricity prices higher than the cost on the mainland. Its residents are forced to keep their energy usage under 5 kilowatts at a time, while the limit for business is 10 kilowatts. This limitation has prompted the islanders to use their electricity economically.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I've never understood why, when the card holder is present, a pin number is considered more secure than a signature.
On line I will only give a card number to a (to me) trusted site. Even then I would prefer to use something like Paypal where there is supposedly a further level of security.


----------



## ekim68

Banks Throw Hissy Fit After Elizabeth Warren Endorses Idea to Allow Post Office to Offer Financial Services



> The U.S. postal service inspector general put out a report last week suggesting an intriguing way to shore up the ailing institution's finances: Let the mailman double as a bank teller.
> 
> The plan? The post office would offer services designed to appeal to America's unbanked and under-banked - the more than 50 million adults who either have no checking or savings account, or use high-cost, predatory services like payday loans to supplement traditional banking needs.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Banks Throw Hissy Fit After Elizabeth Warren Endorses Idea to Allow Post Office to Offer Financial Services





> The post office would offer services designed to appeal to Americas unbanked and under-banked.


:up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

Post Offices already do so in the UK, and have for years.


----------



## ekim68

Are your Post Offices public or private?


----------



## ekim68

Two Koreas hold first high-level talks in 7 years



> Senior officials for North and South Korea met Wednesday for the first high-level talks between the two foes in seven years ahead of a visit to Seoul by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
> 
> No immediate results were made public after the meeting, held at the truce village of Panmunjom, beside the heavily militarized border still dividing North and South Korea.


----------



## DaveBurnett

> Are your Post Offices public or private?


Historically public, but just recently privatised in that it has been floated on the stock exchange and the shares were initially sold to the public with a maximum issue per person so that no large companies could get immediate control. Obviously there has been trading since that may have changed that picture. Shares were undervalued by 20% so a lot have been sold.


----------



## ekim68

Should We Place A Tax On All College Graduates?



> Under a graduate tax-funded system of higher education, students would pay nothing to attend college upfront. Instead, once they graduate and move out of their parents' basements, they would begin to pay an additional income tax (say, for example, three percent) on their earnings that would fund higher education. In other words, the current crop of college graduates funds the current crop of college students, and so on down the line. There is no debt taken on by students, which minimizes risk (good); repayment is tied to income, because only people who make income pay the tax (also good); and it is simpler and more easily administrable than plans to make loans easier to pay off (still good).


----------



## ekim68

How we can make our cities greener and more equal at the same time



> Sprawl has trapped many Americans in poverty: Unable to afford a car, maintenance, insurance, and gasoline, they cannot get from their suburban homes to jobs. For many middle-class Americans, their car is an albatross, forcing them to spend too much money just getting to work everyday. That's one reason that a recent Harvard study found that transit-rich coastal cities such as New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Boston ranked among the country's top 10 metro areas for economic mobility, while auto-dependent Southern cities such as Atlanta and Jacksonville ranked near the bottom.


----------



## ekim68

Just a fracking well exploding into flames - nothing to see here!



> Early on Tuesday morning, a Chevron-owned natural gas well in Greene County, Pa., burst into flames - and more than 72 hours later, it's still burning. One contractor for Chevron is missing and presumed dead, and another was injured in the explosion.
> 
> Chevron has flown in experts from Houston's Wild Well Control to put out the fire, and crews spent yesterday removing overheated pieces of metal that kept reigniting. Today, they await heavy-duty water tanks to extinguish the blaze, which could be delayed by the winter storms afflicting the region. Last year, five surface well blowouts with fires were "wild" enough to require the expertise of Wild Well Control.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperlinking is Not Copyright Infringement, EU Court Rules



> Does publishing a hyperlink to freely available content amount to an illegal communication to the public and therefore a breach of creator's copyrights under European law? After examining a case referred to it by Sweden's Court of Appeal, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today that no, it does not.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix speed index shows further decline in Verizon quality



> Verizon insists it "treats all traffic equally" but new data from Netflix indicates that the network provider's customers have seen a degradation in service quality in the past months.
> 
> The streaming video company released its monthly ISP speed index for January on Monday, and the results show another significant decline in service quality for Netflix users on both Verizon's FIOS and DSL services.
> 
> The publication of the rankings comes a week after a security expert claimed that Verizon was throttling bandwidth to AWS IP addresses and Netflix.


----------



## ekim68

Pew Research Finds Almost No Gains for Young College Grads Over Last Quarter Century



> Most NYT readers probably would have missed this fact, since the blogpost highlighted the growing gap between the pay of recent college grads and those with less than a college degree. While Pew did find an large increase in the gap, almost all of this was due to a fall in the year-round pay of less-educated workers.
> 
> In the 27 years from 1986 to 2013, Pew found that the median wage for full-time workers between the ages of 25-32 with college degrees increased from $44,770 in 1986 to $45,500 in 2013, a rise of 1.6 percent. This comes to an increase of 0.06 percent a year. By comparison, productivity rose 72.5 percent over this period, an average of 2.0 percent per year over this period.


----------



## ekim68

Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq to Cost U.S. Over $4 Trillion



> Yet the ultimate costs of America's wars in the Middle East will accumulate long after they have officially ended. Medical care and disability benefits will be due to their veterans for a generation to come, damaged equipment will need to be replaced, and Obama has promised to build a "Strategic Partnership" with Afghanistan. This will likely include American management of its police and military forces.
> 
> All told, Harvard calculates that the price tag for these conflicts will double and potentially triple. That means $4 trillion at its most conservative and $6 trillion at its highest.


----------



## ekim68

Tucson restaurant reacts to Arizona 'religious rights' bill



> TUCSON, Arizona - When the Arizona Legislature approved a bill that allows business owners to deny gays service based on their religious beliefs, a Tucson pizzeria countered by putting up a sign with a clear message to lawmakers.
> 
> "We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators," the sign says.
> 
> Rocco's Little Chicago Pizzeria posted a photo of the sign Thursday night on its Facebook page with a caption stating, "Funny how just being decent is starting to seem radical these days."


----------



## ekim68

Netflix packets being dropped every day because Verizon wants more money



> The battle over who should pay to carry Netflix traffic is heating up again, and one of the main players blames Verizon's greed for the poor performance that many consumers see when trying to watch streaming video.
> 
> Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer made his case in an interview with Ars yesterday, saying Verizon is refusing to upgrade the infrastructure that carries Internet traffic from one network to another unless outrageous demands for payment are met.


----------



## ekim68

Fracking infrastructure? Not in my backyard, says Exxon CEO



> Woe is Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil.
> 
> Public utility Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp. has had the nerve to plan a water tower in Bartonville, Texas - right next to Tillerson's own personal horse ranch! Not only is the tower a blight on Tillerson's very own piece of Texas forever, but it's also going to bring all kinds of noise, traffic, and plebeians to his driveway. Oh, and one more thing - it's also going to supply the energy companies that are quickly growing their fracking operations in the area. Included among these companies is XTO Energy, which ExxonMobil acquired in 2009.
> 
> Tillerson and his wife have brought suit against Cross Timbers to block the proposed water tower, and they're not alone. Former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R) and his wife are the lead plaintiffs in the suit. Armey's impressive track record includes a stint as chairman of Tea Party-affiliated FreedomWorks, a D.C.-based nonprofit committed to "helping activists fight for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom."


----------



## ekim68

North Korea seen from space reveals a country living in the dark



> Astronauts aboard the ISS recently captured a rather revealing night image of East Asia. Though the dark patch at center looks like water, it's actually North Korea - a country of 25 million people sandwiched between China and South Korea.
> 
> This picture pretty much says it all, the stark legacy of the Kim Dynasty.


----------



## hewee

Sad


----------



## ekim68

We're building undersea cable to thwart US spying, say Brazil and Europe



> Brazil and the EU have reaffirmed plans to lay a new undersea cable in an effort to avoid spying by US authorities.
> 
> The cable, which will stretch from Portugal to Brazil, was discussed on Monday by the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, and the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, at the seventh EU-Brazil Summit in Brussels.


----------



## ekim68

Could you pass a US citizenship test?



> In order to become a US citizen, immigrants must pass the Naturalization Test.


----------



## ekim68

Consumer Reports names Tesla Model S its top pick



> DETROIT (AP) - The Tesla Model S electric sedan is Consumer Reports' top pick in this year's automotive rankings.
> 
> The magazine cited the Model S's sporty performance and technological innovations, including its 225-mile range. But it acknowledged that the car is expensive. Consumer Reports paid $89,650 for the Model S it tested.


----------



## DaveBurnett

City drivers!!


----------



## ekim68

Senate Republicans Kill a Bill to Expand Veterans' Benefits



> WASHINGTON -- It's not until you watch it happen close up that the way things do not get done in the World's Legislative Body becomes well and truly nauseating. This afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought forth a carefully crafted bill to provide $21 billion in new veterans benefits over the next decade. These included medical benefits, education benefits, and job-training. It contained 26 provisions that came from the Republican members of the Veterans Affairs Committee, which Sanders chairs


----------



## ekim68

Education subjected to 10,000 violent attacks



> There have been almost 10,000 violent attacks on places of education in recent years, according to the biggest ever international study of how schools and universities are targeted by acts of aggression.
> 
> These included the murder of staff and students and the destruction of buildings in bomb and arson attacks, in countries including Pakistan, Colombia, Somalia and Syria.
> 
> This stark account of violence against education between 2009 and 2013 has been published by a coalition of human rights groups, aid organisations and United Nations agencies.
> 
> The Education Under Attack report, published in New York on Thursday, reveals the extent to which education has been subjected to deliberate acts of violence.


----------



## ekim68

Storms and floods unearth unexploded wartime bombs



> There has been a dramatic increase in the number of wartime bombs unearthed because of the winter storms and flooding.
> 
> Bomb disposal teams in the South West have dealt with double the number of unexploded ordnance than in the same period last year.
> 
> Since mid December, the Royal Navy's Southern Dive Unit has recovered or disposed of 244 items of ordnance.


----------



## ekim68

The Math That Predicted the Revolutions Sweeping the Globe Right Now



> It's happening in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Bosnia, Syria, and beyond. Revolutions, unrest, and riots are sweeping the globe. The near-simultaneous eruption of violent protest can seem random and chaotic; inevitable symptoms of an unstable world. But there's at least one common thread between the disparate nations, cultures, and people in conflict, one element that has demonstrably proven to make these uprisings more likely: high global food prices.
> 
> Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned us that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe. Sure enough, we're seeing them now.


----------



## ekim68

Crimean Foreshadowing



> Given the degree to which this weekend's events in Crimea seem to have caught the world off guard, I was curious to see if the Wikileaks cables contained any discussions by U.S. diplomats of a scenario like this one. Indeed, there is some now ominous foreshadowing to be found.
> 
> A 2006 cable under the name of Kiev Deputy Chief of Mission Sheila Gwaltney, who as it happens is now the highest ranking diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Moscow following the departure of Amb. Michael McFaul, warns of a possible Russian threat to Crimea - Ukraine's "soft underbelly":


----------



## ekim68

Project ROSE Is Arresting Sex Workers in Arizona to Save Their Souls



> Project ROSE is a Phoenix city program that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online. They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion program to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.
> 
> In the Bethany Bible Church, those arrested were not allowed to speak to lawyers. Despite the handcuffs, they were not officially "arrested" at all.
> 
> In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were "programs." The arrests were "contact." And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms-they were "lawfully detained."


----------



## ekim68

The happiest and saddest states. Pity poor West Virginia.



> On Sunday we noted that West Virginia was the most miserable state in the country in 2013, according to a Gallup-Healthways Well Being Index. Turns out, it's been a bad last five years for the Mountain State.
> 
> Since 2008, when the Index began, West Virginia has ranked 49th, 50th, 50th, 50th, 50th and 50th in terms of well being nationwide. Kentucky, which finished as the second most miserable state, has had a similar run of things -- ranking 48th, 49th, 49th, 49th, 49th and 49th. Ouch.


----------



## hewee

Wonder why we are so poor?

Wall Street adviser: Actual unemployment is 37.2%, 'misery index' worst in 40 years
http://washingtonexaminer.com/wall-...isery-index-worst-in-40-years/article/2542604



> Don't believe the happy talk coming out of the White House, Federal Reserve and Treasury Department when it comes to the real unemployment rate and the true "Misery Index." Because, according to an influential Wall Street advisor, the figures are a fraud.
> 
> In a memo to clients provided to Secrets, David John Marotta calculates the actual unemployment rate of those not working at a sky-high 37.2 percent, not the 6.7 percent advertised by the Fed, and the Misery Index at over 14, not the 8 claimed by the government.


Should We Wallow in the Rising Stock Market?
http://www.emarotta.com/should-we-wallow-in-the-rising-stock-market/

United States Misery Index
http://www.miseryindex.us/


----------



## ekim68

WHO: 5 percent of calories should be from sugar



> LONDON (AP) - Just try sugar-coating this: The World Health Organization says your daily sugar intake should be just 5 percent of your total calories - half of what the agency previously recommended, according to new draft guidelines published Wednesday.
> 
> After a review of about 9,000 studies, WHO's expert panel says dropping sugar intake to that level will combat obesity and cavities. That includes sugars added to foods and those present in honey, syrups and fruit juices, but not those occurring naturally in fruits.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Somebody should teach the WHO bureaucrats that all energy producing food gets broken down to sugars via digestion anyway. The rest is roughage.
See http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090509233119AAxqJ2w


----------



## hewee

Who can you trust? Not The World Health Organization.


----------



## ekim68

Now There's A Speaker That Listens Back--And Learns



> Even the best speakers are pretty dumb. They're good at projecting sound, but that's about it. Cone is about to change that. The newly announced smart speaker from Skype cofounder Janus Friis's new startup Aether learns from you as you use it. And it just might change the way people listen.
> 
> "Cone learns from everything you do, says Duncan Lamb, cofounder and chief product officer. "If you turn up the volume or ask for a certain song, that means you probably like that song. Skipping a song means you probably don't care to listen to it at the time."


----------



## ekim68

Big Company CEOs Just Aren't Worth What We Pay Them



> It isn't every day that academic research comes along to tell you something you really wanted to hear and that you suspected was the truth all along. In this case it's about the long running debate around top executive pay.
> 
> A recent paper by J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School and Philippe Jacquart of France's EMLYON, seem to have finally established that paying top dollar simply doesn't get a better job done. And, in fact, it might actually get a worse one done.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Big Company CEOs Just Aren't Worth What We Pay Them


:up:


----------



## ekim68

50 Things That Turn 50 in 2014


----------



## ekim68

As Though Iraq Never Happened



> I don't really understand how any editorial by Condoleezza Rice on conflict in Ukraine can fail to directly address the failures of the Iraq War. But here is Rice arguing for American godhead:





> Condoleezza Rice was an important member of an administration that launched a war on false pretense and willingly embraced torture. This was done in the name of the American people. It takes a particular historical blindness to claim that such actions should have no effect on all our crowing over "democracy and human rights."


----------



## ekim68

Happy birthday Internet....

On the 25th anniversary of the web, let's keep it free and open


----------



## ekim68

New Jersey Bans Tesla to Ensure Buying a Car Will Always Suck



> New Jersey is banning Tesla.
> 
> No, you won't get pulled over for driving your Model S on the Turnpike. But if rules passed yesterday by New Jersey regulators and backed by GOP Governor Chris Christie take effect, you won't be able to visit a Tesla store in the state. In an effort to protect traditional car dealerships, New Jersey is trying to shut the electric car maker down before it ever gains traction.
> 
> This isn't the only place where Tesla is battling such bans. Across the country, powerful car-dealer lobbies with their hands in politicians' pockets are fighting the Silicon Valley company, trying to hold on to monopolies protected by outdated laws. But there is some solace to be taken in the New Jersey decision: *It calls attention to the hypocrisy of supposed free-market politicians propping up an unloved industry at the expense of real competition. *


----------



## ekim68

Make Journalism Easy: Just Blame Obama


----------



## ekim68

Drones to deliver drugstore items in the Mission?



> For one brief shining moment, commercial drones are now legal in U.S. skies, thanks to a court decision this month that slapped down the Federal Aviation Administration's attempt to ground them.
> 
> A San Francisco company has leaped on the opportunity, gearing up to offer drone delivery of drugstore items in the Mission.
> 
> QuiQui, pronounced Quicky, said on its website that it's been working on its idea for two years, and was taken by surprise when the FAA lost its lawsuit. Its drones will fly below 500 feet, for a $1/delivery fee and will operate 24 hours a day - with orders arriving in less than 15 minutes, it said.


----------



## ekim68

The Living Wage Calculator Finds What You Need to Support Your Family



> Ever wonder just how much money is enough to survive on? This calculator from MIT tells you how much you need to earn to be able to support yourself and your family without government assistance, based on typical expenses in your area.
> 
> Unlike the outdated federal poverty level based on USDA food budgets, The Living Wage Calculator, created by Dr. Amy Glasmeier and her colleagues, is updated regularly and takes into account major budget items for working adults by area, such as: housing, food, child care, health care, transportation, and taxes.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The Living Wage Calculator Finds What You Need to Support Your Family


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court Ruled In Favor Of The Nation's Top Corporate Interest Group In 7 Of 8 Cases This Term



> So far this term, the Supreme Court handed down eight cases where the United States Chamber of Commerce filed a brief - and a majority of the justices sided with the Chamber in all but one of these decisions. The one outlier decision was a case involving anti-retaliation protections for whistleblowers where the justices votes broke down along unusual lines, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing the majority opinion and Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissent.


----------



## ekim68

Crime's Down, So Why is Police Aggression Increasing?



> You might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S.-including violent crime-has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it, 1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.
> 
> So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?


----------



## ekim68

Dozens of Planes Have Vanished in Post-WWII Era



> Some 83 aircraft have been declared "missing" since 1948, according to data compiled by the Aviation Safety Network. The list includes planes capable of carrying more than 14 passengers and where no trace - bodies or debris - has ever been found.


----------



## ekim68

Plastic shopping bags make a fine diesel fuel



> Plastic shopping bags, an abundant source of litter on land and at sea, can be converted into diesel, natural gas and other useful petroleum products, researchers report. The conversion produces significantly more energy than it requires and results in transportation fuels -- diesel, for example -- that can be blended with existing ultra-low-sulfur diesels and biodiesels.


(Imagine that, true recycling...:up: )


----------



## ekim68

The Brothers Koch quietly become largest tar-sands lease holders in Alberta



> Charles and David Koch sure are a busy coupla pranksters! In the 2012 election, the Mark and Donnie Wahlberg of modern-day American capitalism spent more than $412 million trying (and largely failing) to get their favorite candidates elected. And they're gearing up to drop some cash on this year's elections too.
> 
> But fossil-fuel-loving politicians aren't the only item in the Koch shopping cart. Turns out the wacky sibling duo has spent the past dozen years throwing substantial bills at tar-sands property in Alberta - enough to buy leases on 1.1 million acres worth, to be exact.


----------



## ekim68

If you want to fake it, don't do it around this computer



> In the ever-expanding contest between artificial intelligence and the ordinary human mind, you can chalk up another one for the computer.
> 
> Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed much better than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just faking it.


----------



## ekim68

Scores of ships trapped by Texas oil spill



> Three cruise ships were among scores of boats trapped by an "extremely serious" oil spill that closed the shipping channel connecting Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico for a second day Sunday, the Coast Guard said.
> 
> On Saturday, a barge carrying almost 1 million gallons of heavy oil collided with a ship in the Houston Ship Channel at Texas City. A barge tank containing 168,000 gallons of oil was breached, but the Coast Guard said it was not clear how much oil leaked.


----------



## ekim68

Deadly chemical weapons, buried and lost, lurk under U.S. soil



> Cleaning up an Alabama site, one of hundreds where toxic munitions were dumped after World War II, is expected to take decades. It's not even known what exactly is there.


----------



## ekim68

IPCC to deliver 'darkest' draft yet 



> UN scientists are set to deliver their darkest report yet on the impacts of climate change, pointing to a future stalked by floods, drought, conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions go untamed.
> 
> A draft of their report, seen by the news organisation AFP, is part of a massive overview by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, likely to shape policies and climate talks for years to come.


----------



## golddust

ekim68 said:


> I recently read an article that said the the electronic books have taken a 13% share of the book market and the internet is now taking almost 30% of the newspaper business. My daughter works at the local newspaper and in the last several years they've laid off 25% of employees and reduced the size of the paper and started charging more. And they expect more layoffs...I've been reading this for the last 5 years and the stories are the same.


This is why some newspapers have restricted access to their websites to subscribers only. I used to be able to catch up on news back in New York (Long Island), but Newsday stopped allowing free access a few years ago. They did drop that when the two major storms hit in the last couple of years (Irene and Sandy).


----------



## ekim68

A true sign of the times....Not to demean the newspaper businesses, but it would save a lot of trees in the long run..


----------



## ekim68

Fight over Rooftop Solar Forecasts a Bright Future for Cleaner Energy



> As the cost of solar power drops, more consumers find that they hold the upper hand as utilities fight to maintain paying customers and the relevance of the grid .


:up:


----------



## ekim68

The $431 million payoff [Editorial]



> Our view: With unemployment high and the state budget precarious, it's a mystery why the General Assembly decided that now is the time to give the wealthiest 3 percent a major tax break.


----------



## ekim68

WHO: Pollution kills 7 million people a year 



> Air pollution kills about 7 million people worldwide every year, with more than half of the fatalities due to fumes from indoor stoves, according to a new report from the World Health Organisation.
> 
> The agency said air pollution is the cause of about one in eight deaths and has now become the single biggest environmental health risk.
> 
> "We all have to breathe, which makes pollution very hard to avoid," Frank Kelly, director of the environmental research group at King's College London, who was not part of the WHO report, told the Associated Press news agency.


----------



## ekim68

Why we can't seem to stop oil-filled rail cars from going boom

By Heather Smith



> People - including me - have written a good amount already about how trains have been exploding lately. In 2008, 9,500 carloads of crude oil were shipped by train in the U.S.; in 2012, that number was 234,000 carloads. The oil is packed into freight cars that date back to the 1960s and that normally carry payloads like corn syrup, then shipped along aging freight infrastructure. When the trains fail, they fail hard, and because freight lines were built to run through cities, rather than around them, they fail around people. Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, the Alabama wetlands, and eastern North Dakota are just a few instances of this species of disaster.


----------



## ekim68

Brain Changes Suggest Autism Starts In The Womb



> The symptoms of autism may not be obvious until a child is a toddler, but the disorder itself appears to begin well before birth.
> 
> Brain tissue taken from children who died and also happened to have autism revealed patches of disorganization in the cortex, a thin sheet of cells that's critical for learning and memory, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Tissue samples from children without autism didn't have those characteristic patches.


----------



## ekim68

NASA-funded report says society is trending toward big collapse



> Societal collapse, like the kind that took down the Roman Empire, could be just around the corner, according to a report partly funded by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
> 
> Prophecies of impending doom go back a long way, but this one has the extra cachet of backing by NASA.
> 
> The report, posted online in November 2012 by the University of Maryland's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, states that collapsed societies seem to share two features: over-exploitation of natural resources and economic stratification into elites and masses or "commoners."


----------



## ekim68

Spyware's role in domestic violence



> It is marketed as the perfect solution for worried mothers and vigilant bosses: secret mobile phone spyware that monitors a person's texts, calls, photos, emails and web browsing.
> 
> ''I can now keep an eye on my babies - even when I'm at work!'' reads a testimonial for one spyware product.
> 
> ''Now that we know the truth, our profits are up by more than 10%!'' another happy customer reports.
> 
> Yet new technologies such as GPS trackers and mobile phone spyware are increasingly being used to stalk, harass and threaten women in a new form of domestic abuse that legal experts say is highly disturbing.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Spyware's role in domestic violence


:up:


----------



## ekim68

New G.O.P. Bid to Limit Voting in Swing States



> CINCINNATI - Pivotal swing states under Republican control are embracing significant new electoral restrictions on registering and voting that go beyond the voter identification requirements that have caused fierce partisan brawls.
> 
> The bills, laws and administrative rules - some of them tried before - shake up fundamental components of state election systems, including the days and times polls are open and the locations where people vote.


----------



## ekim68

The Best Airports in the World 2014



> U.S. Airports Are Off the Chart: Ritholtz Chart


----------



## ekim68

Happy Birthday Gmail



> If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.


----------



## ekim68

Zero U.S. Troops Died In Combat In March, The First Time In More Than A Decade



> March 2014 marked the first time in more than a decade that there were zero U.S. fatalities among American troops engaging in combat, according to numbers from the Department of Defense.
> 
> After a decade at war in the post-9/11 environment, with major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and smaller conflicts in the various other countries where the U.S. uses more covert methods to fight against terrorism, the lack of combat deaths in March 2014 marks a milestone.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Zero U.S. Troops Died In Combat In March, The First Time In More Than A Decade


May this trend continue!


----------



## ekim68

U.S. gets new, hyper-accurate atomic clock



> Timekeeping in the United States, which was already a pretty precise science involving lasers and atomic particles, just got even more exact.
> 
> A new atomic clock, so accurate it will lose or gain only one second every 300 million years, was unveiled Thursday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce.


----------



## ekim68

Half A Million People With College Degrees Are Working For Minimum Wage



> Almost half a million college graduates are working minimum-wage jobs, according to new government statistics.
> 
> There were 260,000 Americans with bachelor's degrees earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less in 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' newest annual snapshot of minimum wage workers. Another 200,000 associate's degree holders also worked for that wage.


----------



## ekim68

CBS' '60 Minutes' admits to faking Tesla car noise



> What is it about Tesla and its ability to make major media outlets look like fools?
> 
> The latest example came a week ago today when CBS' 60 Minutes aired a report on Tesla and its amazing electric car. It was basically the kind of coverage that any automaker would kill to have (and must have left flummoxed General Motors executives wondering why they never got it for the plug-in Chevrolet Volt).
> 
> Just one problem: As the Associated Press reported, a CBS editor made what is being called an "audio error" in dubbing the sound of a loud traditional car engine over footage of the much quieter Tesla electric car. The Model is whisper quiet, no matter how hard you push it.
> 
> Auto website Jalopnik broke the story of the fake sound and CBS was in retreat all week


----------



## ekim68

Half-century milestone for IBM mainframes



> The IBM mainframe is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
> 
> The first System 360 mainframe was unveiled on 7 April 1964 and its arrival marked a break with all general purpose computers that came before.
> 
> The machines made it possible to upgrade the processors but still keep using the same code and peripherals from earlier models.
> 
> Later this year the British rival to IBM's machine, the ICL 1900, also celebrates its 50th anniversary.


----------



## DaveBurnett

It was only four years later that I started working with them!


----------



## ekim68

Only 28 percent of Fox News climate segments are accurate



> According to a Pew study released last year, 38 percent of U.S. adults watch cable news. So if you want to know why so many Americans deny or doubt the established science of climate change, the content they're receiving on cable news may well point the way.
> 
> According to a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, misinformation about climate science on cable news channels is pretty common. The study found that last year, 30 percent of CNN's climate-related segments were misleading, compared with 72 percent for Fox News and just 8 percent for MSNBC. The study methodology was quite strict: Segments that contained "any inaccurate or misleading representations of climate science" were classified as misleading.


----------



## ekim68

Overseas Earnings of Russell 1000 Tops $2 Trillion in 2013



> In the Majority Staff Report for the hearing taking place today, the Subcommittee cites an Audit Analytics analysis of the undistributed foreign earnings of the Russell 1000. According to our analysis, such companies are holding more profits overseas than ever before. As of their most recent annual filings, the Russell 1000 companies now have over $2 trillion of indefinitely reinvested earnings - earnings that are not subject to US corporate income tax.


----------



## ekim68

Gotta love Capitalism, eh? 

Pot sales: $8B tokes over the (retail) line by 2018?


----------



## ekim68

What Will Bioengineered Plants Be Like In The Future?



> As we head deeper into the GMO era, it's fair to wonder just how far we can manipulate the biology of plants. Here are a few possibilities - from spore-spewing super-plants to delicious hamburgatoes.


----------



## ekim68

Internet Revolt Begins as Condi Rice Joins Dropbox Board 



> Amid the shiny, happy announcements of new features and new apps this week, file-sharing startup Dropbox quietly revealed another piece of news. Condoleezza Rice - Stanford professor, Iraq War architect, alleged warrantless wiretap supporter - is joining the board at the rising tech startup.
> 
> Dropbox CEO Drew Houston didn't mention the appointment during his keynote at a press event on Wednesday, but a day later, Rice's arrival had eclipsed the rest of the company's carefully crafted public event. Unsurprisingly, some people aren't too happy about the move. Over on Hacker News, a leading barometer for what's on the minds of tech geeks, the day's most popular link connects to DropDropbox, a new site calling on users to boycott the company unless it removes Rice.
> 
> The campaign's apparently anonymous creators are calling for her removal in part because of her support for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, including claims that Rice herself authorized eavesdropping on UN Security Council members. "Why on earth would we want someone like her involved with Dropbox, an organization we are trusting with our most important business and personal data?" the site asks.


----------



## ekim68

Dropping Dropbox - what's a replacement?



> I loved Dropbox and Mailbox. I was paying for a 200GB account. But after learning that Iraq war starter, torture promotor, and warrantless wiretapper Condoleezza Rice will be joining Dropbox's Board of Directors I deleted my account (Dropbox doesn't issue refunds, so I lost about $100. They can keep it.). I also deleted the Mailbox app from my phone.


----------



## ekim68

A long but interesting read....

Judge says prosecutors should follow the law. Prosecutors revolt.

I like this line.....



> Why else would a judge who sides with a defendant and his Fourth Amendment rights be unfit to sit in criminal court? Why else would it be grounds to disqualify a judge for reminding prosecutors of their ethical obligation?


----------



## poochee

*Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say*
By Michael S. Rosenwald, Published: April 6



> To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombes experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
> 
> I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing, said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html?hpid=z7


----------



## ekim68

This Cartoon Is the Simplest Explanation of Heartbleed Yet


----------



## ekim68

Top 20 Replies by Programmers When Their Programs Don't Work


----------



## DaveBurnett

Ah! a successful test at last! was my favourite.

Remember that it cannot EVER be proven that a program works.
It can only be shown NOT to work.


----------



## ekim68

'Gods' Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs From Robots



> Inside Toyota Motor Corp.'s oldest plant, there's a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai's vision of the future.
> 
> "We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them," said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota's plants. "When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything."


----------



## ekim68

8 Images of Hyper-Modern South Korea Compared With Its Past


----------



## ekim68

Eleven colleges and universities have committed to pursue fossil fuel divestment



> A growing number of institutions are committing to divest from fossil fuels. This page lists the commitments from colleges and universities, cities, counties, religious institutions, and other institutions. You can click on each name for more information about the type of commitment they're making.


----------



## ekim68

(xico was right..)

A New Study Proves That We Are a Plutocracy



> It's no surprise to most Americans that the economy is struggling. Unless you are part of the corporate elite, things are not going well. Time and again we have been told by our leaders that they are working to help the middle class. But in reality our nation's leaders are serving the one percent.
> 
> A recent study from Princeton University found that though the general thought has been that we have a democracy, in all reality the rich and powerful are the ones who are really in control now.


----------



## ekim68

The date is 1981......

Byte Magazine


----------



## ekim68

Rich people rule!



> Average citizens have "little or no independent influence" on the policy-making process? This must be an overstatement of Gilens's and Page's findings, no?
> 
> Alas, no. In their primary statistical analysis, the collective preferences of ordinary citizens had only a negligible estimated effect on policy outcomes, while the collective preferences of "economic elites" (roughly proxied by citizens at the 90th percentile of the income distribution) were 15 times as important. "Mass-based interest groups" mattered, too, but only about half as much as business interest groups - *and the preferences of those public interest groups were only weakly correlated (.12) with the preferences of the public as measured in opinion surveys.*


----------



## hewee

See* Republic vs. Democracy - What Is The Real Form of the U.S. Government *


----------



## ekim68

SPLC report: Users of leading white supremacist web forum responsible for many deadly hate crimes, mass killings



> Nearly 100 people in the last five years have been murdered by active users of the leading racist website, Stormfront, according to a report released today by the SPLC's Intelligence Project.
> 
> Registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the web forum became the first hate site on the Internet in 1995, a month before the Oklahoma City bombing. The report found that hate killings by Stormfront members began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, when Barack Obama took office as the nation's first black president.


----------



## ekim68

Last gasps of a dying movement: Obamacare obstructionists' self-created trap



> What happens when your whole focus was on killing a program millions of Americans now need? We're about to find out.


----------



## ekim68

Is gulf cleanup over or not? BP and Coast Guard differ.



> On Tuesday night, BP said that the "active cleanup" of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill had been brought "to a close." Later Tuesday night, the Coast Guard said the response to the spill isn't over yet, "not by a long shot."
> 
> The dueling news releases came out just before the fourth anniversary of the April 20, 2010, blowout on BP's Macondo well. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught fire and sank, 11 workers were killed and more than 4 million barrels of crude spilled into the gulf.


----------



## ekim68

The Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act. What Happened Next in These 8 States Will Not Shock You.



> When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act last June, Justice Ruth Ginsburg warned that getting rid of the measure was like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." The 1965 law required that lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters get federal permission before changing voting rules. Now that the Supreme Court has invalidated this requirement, GOP lawmakers across the United States are running buck wild with new voting restrictions.


----------



## ekim68

Average credit card interest up to shocking 21%



> Credit card companies know there's no free lunch, but they're letting more customers get a taste as an enticement by gouging their existing card members.
> 
> The average credit card interest rate for people with fair credit has hit a shocking 21 percent, up more than 2 percent from only a year ago, according to industry group CardHub.


----------



## ekim68

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World's Richest



> The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.
> 
> While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.
> 
> After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada - substantially behind in 2000 - now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.


----------



## ekim68

Apple offering free recycling of all used products



> SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Apple is offering free recycling of all its used products and vowing to power all of its stores, offices and data centers with renewable energy to reduce the pollution caused by its devices and online services.
> 
> The iPhone and iPad maker is detailing its efforts to cultivate a greener Apple Inc. in an environmental section on the company's website that debuted Monday. The site highlights the ways that the Cupertino, Calif., company is increasing its reliance on alternative power sources and sending less electronic junk to landfills.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Apple offering free recycling of all used products


----------



## ekim68

Gasoline Tax, Unchanged Since 1993, is Due for an Increase



> Roads are crumbling, bridges are collapsing, and what was once considered one of the greatest achievements of any government anywhere has fallen into embarrassing disrepair. I am of course discussing our nation's infrastructure. Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. infrastructure a D+.
> 
> When it comes to the most basic functions of government we barely get a passing grade.
> 
> How did this happen? Credit a combination of benign neglect and anti-tax ideology run amok.


----------



## ekim68

A List of Cliven Bundy's Supporters, Now That We Know He's a Pro-Slavery Racist



> The Republicans who withheld their support for Cliven Bundy were rewarded on Thursday morning when The New York Times' Adam Nagourney reported the Nevada rancher is a grade-A, pro-slavery racist. The ones who took the Bundy bait are changing their stories.


----------



## ekim68

Spring 2014: To Whom Does the U.S. Government Owe Money?



> On Tax Day 2014, the U.S. federal government owed its lenders over $17.577 trillion. Our chart below reveals who Uncle Sam's biggest creditors are:


----------



## ekim68

Student debt holds back many would-be home buyers



> Of the many factors holding back young home buyers - rising prices, tougher lending standards, a still-shaky job market - none looms larger than the recent explosion of college debt.


----------



## ekim68

TSA Pre Open to All: Breeze Through Airport Security for $17 a Year



> The TSA Pre program lets you quickly go through security at participating airports-no need to take off your shoes and belt. Until recently, the program was only for select individuals, but as of December 2013, it's open to everyone-and seems like a pretty good deal.





> The program requires an application, fingerprinting, and background check for $85. The application asks a series of questions to make sure you are of sound mind and not a risk (previous criminal history, and so on). Once approved, your Pre Status is good for five years, allowing you to use the express lane at security on most major flights. That calculates to about $17 a year.


----------



## ekim68

What Happens When a Dark Money Group Blows Off IRS Rules? Nothing.



> The Government Integrity Fund spent most of its money on election ads, despite IRS rules prohibiting a social welfare nonprofit from doing so.


----------



## ekim68

Nokia's dirty secret: The untold story of a production-ready tablet from 2001



> Around 1000 pieces of the Nokia M510 web tablet were produced in 2001 - nine years before the first iPad. But according to Nokia´s market research the consumers weren't ready for the device.


----------



## ekim68

Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation?



> My airplane home from Boston is delayed for takeoff, so the woman next to me pulls out her phones to get some work done. Like many of us, she has two-an iPhone for her personal life and a BlackBerry paid for by her employer. "It's a dog leash," she jokes. "They yank on it and I respond. If somebody from work emails me on Friday at 10 p.m., they're pissed if I don't write back in five minutes." When I ask whether she ever just turns it off, she shakes her head in annoyance, as though I'd uttered something profane. "My team leader would kill me," she says.
> 
> Cultural pundits these days often bemoan how people are "addicted" to their smartphones. We're narcissistic drones, we're told, unable to look away from the glowing screen, desperate to remain in touch. And it's certainly true that many of us should probably cool it with social media; nobody needs to check Twitter that often. But it's also becoming clear that workplace demands propel a lot of that nervous phone-glancing. *In fact, you could view off-hours email as one of the growing labor issues of our time.*


----------



## ekim68

Multifaith bid to save River Jordan may inspire peace



> I met the rabbi in an Indian restaurant in north London. We took a short walk to the Wembley mosque, where our Muslim hosts and a clutch of Christians watched quizzically as the rabbi led Jews in Sabbath prayers amid the accoutrements of a Muslim place of worship. Then the meeting began.
> 
> People from three faiths had gathered to discuss the holiness of water and how to use their shared concern for the elixir of life to rehabilitate a Middle Eastern river reduced to a trickle of sewage effluent. That pathetic, putrid trickle, hidden behind military cordons, is what remains of the River Jordan, a river that has watered civilisations for 10,000 years, has been the scene of countless baptisms, was once the lifeblood of Palestine, and is sacred to half of humanity - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.


----------



## ekim68

Is Oil Money Turning the NRA Against Hunters?



> Two new reports examine how America's "number-one hunter's organization" takes oil money and lobbies for anti-conservationist policies most hunters oppose.


----------



## ekim68

The Tipping Point Is Here: China Is the New Dominant World Power



> This week a new study released by World Bank shows that America's dominance as the world's most powerful economy since the late 19th Century is almost over.
> 
> Today's figures paint an interesting picture of the world economy - including the news that China's purchasing power is actually 20% higher than earlier thought.
> 
> That means it was 87% the size of America's economy in 2011 and given its strong growth since, China is on track to overtake the US this year.


----------



## ekim68

Its Great to be the CEO Running a Huge Criminal Bank



> Every day brings multiple new scandals. At least they used to be scandals. Now they're simply news items strained of ethical content by business journalists who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak not about evil. The Wall Street Journal, our principal U.S. financial journal ran two such stories today. The first story deals with tax evasion, and begins with this cheery (and tellingly inaccurate) headline: "U.S. Banks to Help Authorities With Tax Evasion Probe." Here's an alternative headline, drawn from the facts of the article: "Senior Officers of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Aided and Abetted Tax Fraud by Wealthiest Americans, Failed to Make Required Criminal Referrals, and Demanded Immunity from Prosecution for Themselves and the Banks before Complying with the U.S. Subpoenas: U.S. Department of Justice Caves in to Banker's Demands Continuing its Practice of Effectively Immunizing Fraud by Most Financial Elites."


----------



## ekim68

To Save the Internet We Need To Own The Means Of Distribution



> With the announcement by the FCC that cable and telephone companies will be allowed to prioritize access to their customers only one option remains that can guarantee an open internet: owning the means of distribution.
> 
> Thankfully an agency exists for this. Local government. Owning the means of distribution is a traditional function of local government. We call our roads and bridges and water and sewer pipe networks public infrastructure for a reason.
> 
> In the 19th century local and state governments concluded that the transportation of people and goods was so essential to a modern economy that the key distribution system must be publicly owned. In the 21st century the transportation of information is equally essential.


----------



## ekim68

How Iran Became One of the World's Most Futuristic Countries



> When we think about futurism, often we imagine cutting-edge technologies like bionic arms or weather machines for colonizing Mars. But if we really want to make it for another few centuries, we're going to need something that Iran has already got.
> 
> To understand Iran's breakthrough, we need to go back in time to 1993, when President Obama's science adviser John Holdren was trying to figure out how big the world's population could get before there was a major energy crisis. A respected environmental scientist, Holdren offered up a famous scenario based on the world's population at that time.
> 
> At that time, Earth held 5.5 billion people (compared to today's 7 billion), who consumed 13 terawatts of energy annually. Of course, they were not consumed equally: people in the developing world consumed on average 1 kilowatt per person, while people in the developed world consumed 7.5. Holdren suggested that given current population growth rates, the world would need 8 times more energy to fuel its 14 billion people by the end of the twenty-first century. Which would mean total collapse of the ecosystem, peak oil, and likely both.


----------



## ekim68

Justice Scalia makes embarrassing error in latest dissent



> "Scalia's dissent … contains a hugely embarrassing mistake," wrote University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber. "He refers to the Court's earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that's exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted."
> 
> Farber continued, writing, "Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it's a cringeworthy blunder."


----------



## ekim68

Is America Abandoning its Bravest Heroes Yet Again?



> If there's any truth to that pop standard's message, then America must surely love its heroes. Because, much as we lionize those who stare death in the face so that the rest of us may live peacefully, once the spotlight shifts away from the heroes of each war or disaster, as often as not our government officials callously toss those heroes aside.


----------



## ekim68

Sweden drops to 'third best' place to be a mum



> Sweden offers the world's third best deal for mothers, but was beaten to the top spot by two neighbours. In contrast, the new report said that Somalia and the US needed to buck up and invest in maternal and infant health.


----------



## ekim68

Survey: Most say journalism is headed in the wrong direction



> * Job satisfaction went from 33.3% of journalists who said they were "very satisfied" with their job in 2002, to 23.3% in 2013.
> * Six in ten say their newsrooms have shrunk during the past year, while only 13.2% report newsroom growth.
> * Just over 80% agree that social media helps promote them and their work, but only 25% say that it improves their productivity.
> * The number of minority journalists working for the U.S. news media has decreased from 9.5% in 2002 to 8.5% in 2013.
> * In the latest survey, the median age of full-time U.S. journalists increased by six years to 47 from 2002′s poll.
> * Fewer journalists say that concentrating on news that's of interest to "the widest possible audience" is extremely important.


----------



## ekim68

Nine maps that show how climate change is already affecting the US



> Climate change isn't just a problem for future generations - it's already affecting broad swaths of the United States.
> 
> That's the upshot of the National Climate Assessment, a massive new US government report detailing the current and future impacts of global warming around the country. The report is particularly useful in detailing how specific regions and sectors will be affected - and outlining some possible ways we could adapt.


----------



## poochee

May 6, 2014
*Proposed law would clarify who gets access to a deceased persons digital accounts*
By Maeve Duggan

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...ccess-to-a-deceased-persons-digital-accounts/


----------



## ekim68

Americans Are Totally Stumped by US Citizenship Test Questions



> There are 100 potential questions on the US Naturalization test. You'd think most American citizens would be able to answer six out of ten. You'd be wrong.


----------



## ekim68

How Munich switched 15,000 PCs from Windows to Linux



> Munich city council has migrated 15,000 workers from Windows to Linux. It's a great success story for Free Software, and it upset Microsoft enormously. We visited the city and talked to Peter Hofmann, the man behind the migration - so read on for all the juicy details about what went right, what went wrong, and what made Steve Ballmer sweat…


----------



## ekim68

Researchers Are Making an ATM that Spews Hot Acid at Thieves



> For wannabe thieves, nothing is more tantalizing than an empty street and a vulnerable ATM. Soon, though, they could be facing more than just failure. Taking design cues from mother nature herself, researchers are building ATMs that fend off thieves with a spray of hot, steaming foam.


----------



## ekim68

Uncle Sam runs $114 billion surplus in April



> The U.S. Treasury Department booked a $114 billion surplus in April, the largest for that month since 2008, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

The men who poisoned Charleston's drinking water now have a "new" business



> "Freedom Industries, the company whose chemical leak contaminated the tap water of 300,000 West Virginians, will cease to exist once it goes through bankruptcy, but that doesn't mean its executives are out of the chemical business," according to an excellent investigative report by The Charleston Gazette.
> 
> A January spill of a coal-cleaning chemical from one of Freedom's rusty tanks triggered a major crisis for Charleston residents, who had to find alternate sources of water. Roughly a third of them experienced negative health impacts from the polluted water, experts estimate.
> 
> But while Freedom Industries is technically going out of business, its leaders are quietly starting up again under a new name, as the Gazette explains:


----------



## ekim68

Docs obtained by Pando show how a Wall Street giant is guaranteed huge fees from taxpayers on risky pension investments



> When you think of the term "public pension fund," you probably imagine hyper-cautious investment strategies kept in check by no-nonsense fiduciary laws.
> 
> But you probably shouldn't.
> 
> An increasing number of those pension funds are being stealthily diverted into high-fee, high-risk "alternative investments" that deliver spectacular rewards for the Wall Street firms paid to manage them - but not such great returns for pensioners and taxpayers.


----------



## ekim68

A Key Reason Why U.S. Politicians Don't Understand Science



> In 1995, Congressional Republicans shut down the Office of Technology Assessment. For 23 years, this agency had published reports that provided legislators with nonpartisan analyses of science and technology issues. Last week, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) tried to reopen the agency with minimal funding.
> 
> He failed.





> This is not the first time that Holt has tried to revive the agency, and he says that he'll keep trying this year, working with colleagues in the Senate. "Funding OTA would be a minimal expense that would pay off many times over by averting foolish or wasteful policies," he says. *"Decisions made in ignorance are costly."*


----------



## ekim68

End fossil fuel burning, save $71 trillion - and preserve civilization as we know it



> High gas prices got you down? Your problems are a tiny fraction of those faced by our whole fossil fuel-addicted global society.
> 
> A new report from the International Energy Agency considers the cost of remaining hooked on antiquated, polluting, and climate-changing energy sources.


----------



## ekim68

Dean Kamen, Inventor of Segways, Builds a Much Better Prosthetic Limb



> On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a prosthetic limb that may be one of the most realistic, human-like implementations to date.
> 
> The prosthetic arm, which was created by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, could be controlled through its user's thoughts and is capable of performing complex functions.
> 
> The mind-controlled prosthetic, called the DEKA Arm, can detect up to 10 movements and is the same size and weight as a natural human arm, according to a statement from the FDA first spotted by Bloomberg.


----------



## ekim68

Just sharing a bit of history....

Misunderestimating brain damage



> John Amato dissects the Karl Rove "Hillary has brain damage" rat**** strategy in this post, laying out in detail how this is designed to create questions about her age. That's right. The man who backed Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and John McCain (in 2008) is saying that Hillary Clinton is too old to be president.
> 
> But I think people aren't giving Rove the credit he deserves. After all, he's been around someone who is obviously impaired for many years. Of course that person served as president for 8 years:


----------



## ekim68

The SEC Has Revealed Astounding Corruption in Private Equity



> As Bowden notes, the business model of private equity, which manages almost $3.5 trillion dollars of our nation's assets, has unique conflicts of interest built into the structure. Private equity firms use their client's money to do leveraged buyouts of companies. Since this gives them major operating control of both the investment and a pool of other's investment money, there are significant opportunities to shift costs and otherwise skim off their investors.
> 
> Bowden's speech has numerous examples. One scam is to fire employees of the private equity firm and rehire them immediately as "consultants." The investors are responsible for consultants' salaries, where private equity employees are paid out of their own pockets. Another is taking what most private equity investors believe to be part of management fees, things like legal and compliance costs, and billing their investors for them without the investors properly knowing it. A third is private equity firms lying about the valuation methods they use to tell investors about the returns they make each year. All of these are ways for private equity firms to take money from their investors for themselves.


----------



## ekim68

Spitting, Stalking, Rape Threats: How Gun Extremists Target Women



> Welcome to the dark side of America's war over guns.


----------



## ekim68

Bankrolled by broadband donors, lawmakers lobby FCC on net neutrality



> The 28 House members who lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to drop net neutrality this week have received more than twice the amount in campaign contributions from the broadband sector than the average for all House members.


And then this....

Websites Throttle FCC Staffers to Protest Gutting of Net Neutrality



> But that's not the only way to protest the commission's new rules. Various companies and organizations have added code to their websites that kicks in whenever there's a visit from someone who works at the FCC. While everyone else is enjoying these websites at ordinary broadband speeds, this code ensures that FCC staffers view them at dial-up speeds reminiscent of the 1990s.


----------



## ekim68

Turkmenistan's Astonishing Attempt To Build A City Of The Future



> Turkmenistan was once an important stop on the Silk Road, and the country still has 2,000 years of architectural masterpieces. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, Turkmenistan's capital city Ashgabat has become a futuristic wonderland, with free internet and some astonishing architecture.


----------



## ekim68

Meet the GooseBuster: The Drone That's Saving Ottawa From Poop



> You're on the beach. It's a lovely sunny day, then, out of nowhere, a remote-controlled helicopter sporting bright flashing lights and blasting the menacing howl of a gray wolf through loud speakers pops up and puts you in its sights.
> 
> Although it sounds like science fiction, this is a realistic day at the beach this summer in Canada's capital, Ottawa. That is, if you're a goose.


----------



## ekim68

The Hanford radioactive waste cleanup deal 25 years later



> SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - The cleanup of the nation's largest collection of radioactive waste left over from the production of nuclear weapons was supposed to be nearing an end by now.
> 
> Twenty five years ago, a landmark agreement was signed to deal with the millions of gallons of waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington. More than $30 billion has already been spent under the so-called Tri-Party Agreement signed by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington state Department of Ecology.
> 
> If everything had gone according to plan, the work would be only about five years away from completion. But Hanford officials are still decades and tens of billions of dollars away from finishing the cleanup of the radioactive mess.


----------



## ekim68

Here's how terrible U.S. broadband service really is



> The U.S. has its fare share of issues when it comes to the Internet, between the National Security Agency's mass surveillance and the ongoing battle over net neutrality. With so many entities threatening the fundamental nature of the Internet, improving the quality of America's Internet has, for the most part, fallen off the radar.
> 
> If you were to tell someone in Hong Kong or Singapore how much you pay for your broadband Internet service in the U.S. and the speeds you receive in return, they would be shocked.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Here's how terrible U.S. broadband service really is


Thanks for the link.


----------



## ekim68

Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free
By Steve Wozniak



> I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I'm asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to "sign on" with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I'm a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.
> 
> That's how the people think. They don't want this to encroach on their Internet freedom.


----------



## ekim68

Subscription TV and ISPs Plummet, Cell Phone Satisfaction Climbs



> ANN ARBOR, Mich., (May 20, 2014) - Subscription TV and Internet service providers (ISPs) sink to the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index in its annual measure of communications industries. According to the latest ACSI results, ISPs drop 3.1% to an ACSI score of 63 on a 100-point scale, while subscription TV falls 4.4% to 65. These industries, which include many of the same companies, are the worst performing among 43 tracked by the ACSI. Meanwhile, customer satisfaction with cell phones improves 2.6% to 78 and wireless phone service remains at 72.


----------



## ekim68

America dumbs down



> Charles Darwin's signature discovery-first published 155 years ago and validated a million different ways since-long ago ceased to be a matter for serious debate in most of the world. But in the United States, reconciling science and religious belief remains oddly difficult. A national poll, conducted in March for the Associated Press, found that 42 per cent of Americans are "not too" or "not at all" confident that all life on Earth is the product of evolution. Similarly, 51 per cent of people expressed skepticism that the universe started with a "big bang" 13.8 billion years ago, and 36 per cent doubted the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.


----------



## ekim68

It was bound to happen....

Blizzard sues Starcraft II cheat hackers



> Activision Blizzard is trying to sue hackers who have created cheats for its Starcraft II video game.
> 
> The publisher says the software undermines online multiplayer battles and could cause players to lose interest in the title.


----------



## ekim68

NYC Dept of Health used Yelp reviews to shutter dirty restaurants



> Off the top of your head, can you think of a quick, simple, and anonymous way to report a food borne illness you may have contracted at a restaurant? And even if you can, have you ever done so? If not, you're not alone. In 2012, New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) found that residents weren't turning to the city's free 311 service to make such complaints, but rather they were reporting their experiences in Yelp reviews.
> 
> A study published on the CDC's website details the resulting 9-month collaboration between New York City's DOHMH, Yelp, and Columbia University "to explore the potential of using Yelp to identify unreported outbreaks." The study discovered 468 actionable complaints, 97 percent of which hadn't been officially reported to the city and analyzed roughly 294,000 Yelp restaurant reviews with three criteria in mind: descriptions of sickness (vomiting, diarrhea, etc.), multiple people being mentioned as ill, and a 10-hour-or-more lead before illness kicked in.


----------



## ekim68

When This Teacher's Ethnic Studies Classes Were Banned, His Students Took the District to Court-and Won



> Curtis Acosta's classes in Mexican American Studies gave kids pride in their heritage-until the Arizona Legislature canceled them. That's when his students became activists, and some real-life lessons began.


----------



## ekim68

Jon Stewart Slams Blatant Republican Hypocrisy on Veterans



> While arguably, the Republicans might have their very first bona fide scandal regarding the Obama administration with the Veterans Administration mess, last night Jon Stewart pointed out the teeny weeny, slightly inconvenient fact that when it comes to taking care of veterans, Republicans in the Senate are giant hypocrites. Time and again, they have shot down bills which would bring real help and relief to those Americans who have fought and sacrificed in war. Just two examples include a bill that would have expanded healthcare and education for returning veterans that was shot down in the Senate, mostly due to lack of support from Republicans. And another in which Mitch McConnell tried to slip an "unrelated poison pill" of additional sanctions on Iran into a bill to help veterans, guaranteeing the bill's failure.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Jon Stewart Slams Blatant Republican Hypocrisy on Veterans


Indeed!


----------



## ekim68

The One Percent at State U



> State universities have come under increasing criticism for excessive executive pay, soaring student debt, and low-wage faculty labor. In the public debate, these issues are often treated separately. Our study examines what happened to student debt and faculty labor at the 25 public universities with the highest executive pay (hereafter "the top 25") from fall 2005 to summer 2012 (FY 2006 - FY 2012). Our findings suggest these issues are closely related and should be addressed together in the future.


----------



## ekim68

Can US eliminate invasive species by eating them?



> HOUSTON - It seems like a simple proposition: American lakes, rivers and offshore waters are filling up with destructive fish and crustaceans originally from other parts of the world, many of them potential sources of food.
> 
> So why not control these invasive populations by getting people to eat them?
> 
> The idea has gained momentum recently from the lionfish, which invaded the Gulf of Mexico but was successfully marketed to restaurants and today appears to be in decline.


----------



## ekim68

House bans the military from acknowledging climate science



> The notoriously anti-science House Science Committee has hit a new low, voting on Thursday to approve a spending bill amendment that "would prohibit defense spending on climate change research and the social cost of carbon analysis." Translated: The Pentagon is being ordered to ignore climate science.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> House bans the military from acknowledging climate science


:down:


----------



## ekim68

The Comcast-FCC Revolving Door



> The proposed merger between cable giants Comcast and Time Warner is a hotly contested issue in Congress, and angers flared again at a recent Senate hearing on the merger last week.
> 
> Most of the senators seemed ambivalent about the merger and wouldn't say whether they supported or opposed it, but one senator in particular stuck out from the rest: Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.).
> 
> "I don't like this revolving door," Franken said in an April 13 interview with CNN. "I don't like this revolving door between regulators and Comcast. I thought that was kind of tacky that one of the FCC commissioners, I think just four months after they approved the Comcast/NBC deal, went over to work a high-paying job at Comcast. I just don't like that."


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street Threaten to Blow Up Economy If They're Prosecuted



> Banksters Pretend that Prosecuting Wall Street Crime Will Blow Up the EconomyThe Department of Justice is "considering" initiating criminal charges against 2 banks.
> 
> In response, the normal cast of characters is saying - as they have for years - that prosecuting banks will cause a meltdown of the economy.
> 
> The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York recently mocked the silly claims of gloom and doom:
> 
> "Companies, especially financial institutions, will do almost anything to avoid a tough enforcement action and therefore have a natural and powerful incentive to make prosecutors believe that death or dire consequences await," he said. "I have heard assertions made with great force and passion that if we take any criminal action, the skies will darken; the oceans will rise; nuclear winter will be upon us; and the world as we know it will end."
> 
> *As we've repeatedly noted, this is wholly untrue.*


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Wall Street Threaten to Blow Up Economy If Theyre Prosecuted


Really!


----------



## ekim68

Don't Cry for Donald Sterling



> Poor, poor Donald Sterling. He's having his beloved basketball team pried out of his hands and all he'll get for it is about four times more than anyone has ever gotten before for selling a NBA franchise. At two billion dollars, it's second only to the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the history of American sports. Thanks, Steve Ballmer, for really showing that Donald Sterling. I'm sure he's learned his lesson.


----------



## ekim68

Missing From The Story: LulzSec Informant Sabu Released Early Because He Got LulzSec To Hack FOR The FBI



> Earlier this week, there were plenty of reports about how Hector Xavier Monsegur, also know as "Sabu," the leader/turned informant of the Anonymous spinoff hacking project LulzSec, was released from jail early for his "extraordinary cooperation" with the FBI. Technically, this was at his sentencing, and he was given "time served" (amounting to about 7 months in jail). Most folks have noted that the "extraordinary cooperation" involved handing over the names and information on other LulzSec members, including Jeremy Hammond, who was recently sentenced (by the same judge) to 10 years in prison.
> 
> However, that seems to leave out the other, increasingly troubling, aspect of the Sabu story -- which was that he didn't just "cooperate" with the FBI in fingering various LulzSec members, he actually gave them orders (which first came from the FBI) on who to hack, including key government computers in a variety of foreign countries. It seems likely that this was the "extraordinary cooperation" that helped Sabu secure a much shorter sentence.


----------



## ekim68

Solar to match coal in China by 2016, threatening fossil dominance 



> Here is a story to cheer us all up. Wuxi Suntech Power expects the cost of electricity from solar modules match to coal-powered stations in China as soon as 2016. If so, we are entering a dramatically different world.
> 
> The company's chief executive, Eric Luo, told RenewEconomy that grid parity is at hand, even in competing with the cheapest and dirtiest form of fossil fuels.
> 
> "We are sure that by 2016 - or at the latest 2017 - the levellised cost of solar PV will be the same as coal-fired generation. It is going to completely transform the energy market in China," he said.
> 
> Coal makes up 69pc of China's energy supply. It is the biggest single cause of Airpocalypse, the suffocation of Chinese cities in perma-smog. The Communist Party is hell-bent on cutting reliance before the middle classes rise up in fury.


----------



## ekim68

Our Economy Wants You to Be In Debt-5 Things You Can Do to Take Charge



> All that debt adds up. About 75 percent of Americans are in debt right now and owe a total of more than $11.5 trillion, according to Forbes magazine. That's about three times the amount of spending the Obama Administration requested in its 2015 federal budget.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Marshals Seize Cops' Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU



> A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn Tuesday when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.





> Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. A stingray can see and record a device's unique ID number and traffic data, as well as information that points to its location. By moving a stingray around, authorities can triangulate a device's location with greater precision than is possible using data obtained from a carrier's fixed tower location.


----------



## ekim68

7 Cities Making Their Urban Rivers Swimmable Again



> It's almost time for another steamy, sweaty summer in the city-and nothing looks like it might cool you off more than that sparkling waterway winding through the center of your downtown. But can you really swim in it? In more and more cities, the answer is a refreshing yes.
> 
> Your grandparents might remember taking a dip in the local stream back in the day, but thanks to decades of environmental ignorance, gallons of industrial sludge and sewage runoff have been collectively diverted into our rivers. Now cities are getting their acts together and restoring their vital waterways for recreation.


----------



## ekim68

VA Care: Still the Best Care Anywhere?



> This regional imbalance in capacity relatively to demand makes it very difficult to manage the VA with system-wide performance metrics. Setting a benchmark of 14 days to see a new primary care doc at a VA hospital or clinic in Boston or Northern California may be completely reasonable. But trying to do the same in Phoenix and in a handful of other sunbelt retirement meccas is not workable without Congress ponying up for building more capacity there.
> 
> Once you have this background, it becomes easy to understand certain anomalies in this scandal. If care is really so bad, for example, why did all the major veterans services remain unanimous in recent testimony before Congress in their long-stranding praise for the quality of VA health care? And why have they remained stalwart in defending the VA against its many ideological enemies who want to see it privatized? It's because, by and large, VA care is as good, if not better than what vets can find outside the system, including by such metrics as wait times.


----------



## ekim68

China seeks to wipe Tiananmen from popular memory



> China's vast censorship machine does its utmost to wipe the slightest reference to the Tiananmen crackdown from books, television and the Internet, scrubbing the issue from public discussion and even from the minds of its younger generation.
> 
> In an example of George Orwell's "1984" dictum that "who controls the present controls the past", it reflects both the ruling Communist Party's immense power and its enduring sensitivity about its actions on June 3-4, 1989.
> 
> The overnight clearing of the square at the heart of Beijing, where student-led protesters had demanded reforms for seven weeks, left hundreds dead -- by some estimates more than 1,000 -- and the party isolated from its people and the world.
> 
> A third of China's population today was born afterwards, while many of those alive at the time hesitate to broach the sensitive topic -- leaving a huge swathe of those under 25 ignorant of the event.


----------



## ekim68

FCC Comment Page Buckles To Its Knees After John Oliver Asks Everyone To Comment



> On Monday morning, we wrote about John Oliver's brilliant report on net neutrality, which ended with a stirring "call to action" for internet commenters to tell the FCC why it should preserve a free and open internet.
> 
> Many of our commenters noted that the FCC comment page that Oliver pointed to, FCC.gov/comments, appeared to be down for most of the day, either suggesting wonderful irony or that Oliver's call to action has been monumentally successful. The FCC has put up some tweets in which it apologizes for technical difficulties, without explaining why they were occurring beyond "heavy traffic."


----------



## ekim68

U.S. says 77,000 banks, firms sign up to fight tax evasion



> (Reuters) - About 77,000 foreign and U.S. banks and financial institutions, including some in Russia, have registered with the United States to comply with a new law meant to fight tax dodging by Americans, the U.S. Treasury Department said on Monday.
> 
> Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs Robert Stack said in a statement that the high level of registrations so far showed "strong international support" for the law, set to take effect on July 1.
> 
> The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) will require foreign banks, investment funds and other institutions to tell the U.S. government about Americans' accounts that are worth more than $50,000.


----------



## ekim68

Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber-But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused



> In light of the ongoing net neutrality battle, many people have begun looking to Google and its promise of high-speed fiber as a potential saving grace from companies that want to create an "internet fast lane." Well, the fact is, even without Google, many communities and cities throughout the country are already wired with fiber-they just don't let their residents use it.
> 
> The reasons vary by city, but in many cases, the reason you can't get gigabit internet speeds-without the threat of that service being provided by a company that wants to discriminate against certain types of traffic-is because of the giant telecom businesses that want to kill net neutrality in the first place.


----------



## ekim68

Signs from the near future


----------



## ekim68

Red states are most dependent on federal money



> Wallethub compared the direct and indirect federal subsidy to all 50 states and DC by comparing federal taxes remitted; federal funding as a fraction of state revenue; and number of federal jobs per capita and produced a ranked list of the states with the greatest federal dependency. Unsurprisingly, the top ten are overwhelmingly Republican dominated "red" states with low state taxes and low average per-capita incomes thanks to harsh labor laws -- these states necessarily depend on federal money to make up the shortfall from their own politically expedient tax-holidays, and lack the robust middle-class who pay the largest percentage of their income in tax.
> 
> The top ten in order of dependency are Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, Tennessee, South Dakota and Arizona. The five states most independent of federal subsidy are (in order): Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Connecticut.


----------



## ekim68

In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good



> NEW ORLEANS - The second-graders paraded to the Dumpster in the rear parking lot, where they chucked boxes of old worksheets, notebooks and other detritus into the trash, emptying their school for good.
> 
> Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans's Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.
> 
> With the start of the next school year, the Recovery School District will be the first in the country made up completely of public charter schools, a milestone for New Orleans and a grand experiment in urban education for the nation.


----------



## ekim68

Public Banking & Economic Democracy



> Private banks have not always been accepted institutions, fixtures of commerce, and purveyors of most of our economic transactions. Throughout US history, there have been robust public conversations about banks, largely due to their propensity to derail the economy when their business models fail. One example of this was in rural Vermont in 1806, when the state established their first public bank. Testimony on that bill, from Governor Tichenor lays out the problem:
> 
> _Banks, by facilitating enterprises both hazardous and unjustifiable, are natural sources of all that class of vices which arise from the gambling system and which cannot fail to act as sure and fatal, though slow, poisons to the republic in which they exist._
> 
> The current public banking discussion revives this tradition after 100 years of a private central banking model that has failed us. Private banks are behind the rapidly growing disparity between the rich and the poor, due to their need for a boom and bust, bubble making "growth" economy, which drives impoverishment and ecological devastation.


----------



## ekim68

Wikipedia Mining Algorithm Reveals The Most Influential People In 35 Centuries Of Human History



> Whatever your interest in history, most of what you have learned will be strongly influenced by your language and your cultural background. The historical figures who feature strongly in Chinese schools will differ dramatically from those that feature in US schools, or Indian schools or Russian ones.


----------



## ekim68

Wow, Tetris is thirty years old....


Ten Tid-bits as Tetris Turns Thirty



> Tetris is 30 years old today. Here are ten things you might not know about the game:


----------



## ekim68

Cable Companies Are Astroturfing Fake Consumer Support to End Net Neutrality



> Consumer advocates everywhere are demanding that the Federal Communication Commission continue down its current path for shelving net neutrality and allowing a two-tiered internet. That is, if cable company-created front groups and other industry-funded organizations are to be believed.


----------



## ekim68

Police officer safety or surplus zeal: Military equipment spurs debate



> In a pole barn in Franklin, sharing space with a motorcycle and a boat, sat an imposing military vehicle designed for battlefields in Iraq or Afghanistan, not the streets of Johnson County.
> 
> It is an MRAP - a bulletproof, 60,000-pound, six-wheeled behemoth with heavy armor, a gunner's turret and the word "SHERIFF" emblazoned on its flank - a vehicle whose acronym stands for "mine resistant, ambush protected."
> 
> "We don't have a lot of mines in Johnson County," confessed sheriff Doug Cox, who acquired the vehicle. "My job is to make sure my employees go home safe."





> "The United States of America has become a war zone," he said. "There's violence in the workplace, there's violence in schools and there's violence in the streets. You are seeing police departments going to a semi-military format because of the threats we have to counteract. If driving a military vehicle is going to protect officers, then that's what I'm going to do."


----------



## ekim68

Gun Control Measures Are Going Nowhere, So Here's a Bulletproof Blanket for Your Kids



> One way to curb mass shootings in America's schools would be for Congress to pass gun control legislation. But since that plan failed miserably, an enterprising father in Oklahoma is offering another solution-equipping children with bulletproof blankets.
> 
> The Bodyguard Blanket™ was developed by Steve Walker, a father of two elementary school students who was horrified by the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 children and six adults dead. In the 14 months following Newtown, there were at least 44 school shootings. "We wanted our children to have a layer of protection immediately," Walker told Oklahoma NBC affiliate KFOR. "They can be stored in the classroom, and, when seconds count, they can be easily applied."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Gun Control Measures Are Going Nowhere, So Here's a Bulletproof Blanket for Your Kids


:up:


----------



## ekim68

The F-35 Fighter Plane Is Even More of a Mess Than You Thought



> The US military's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft is proving to be a pain in the neck in more ways than one.
> 
> Not only did the Pentagon spend almost $400 billion to buy 2,400 aircraft-about twice as much as it cost to put a man on the moon-the F-35 program is 7 years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget. This at a time when cuts in the defense budget are forcing the Pentagon to shrink the size of the military.


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## ekim68

If You Want to Stop Violence Against Women, Ban Men



> It turns out that not only was W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson's Washington Post editorial offensive, they misinterpreted a major data point cited to back up their claims that if women were married, there would be less domestic violence. They also totally downplayed the real threat here: men.
> 
> As Erin pointed out yesterday, and as FiveThirtyEight's Mona Chalabi points out today, the piece ignored the connection between wealth and marriage. But Witcox and Wilson also used a chart that, according to the study author, didn't explain the whole picture.


----------



## ekim68

The Definitive Guide to Every Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory (So Far)



> From killing cats to faking concussions, all the dastardly deeds attributed to the former secretary of state and First Lady.


----------



## ekim68

What's the Penalty for Pundits Who Get It Wrong?



> Five years ago, Arthur Laffer -- creator of the Laffer curve and a member of President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board from 1981-89 -- wrote an op-ed article. It was a grab bag of his pet peeves: opposition to Federal Reserve policies in response to the financial crisis and concern about the "unfunded liabilities of federal programs,'' including Social Security and Medicare. And, of course, he decried deficits, which in large part are the result of his thesis that tax cuts often increase revenue. *As it turns out, for the most part, they don't. *
> 
> The article he penned on June 11, 2009? "Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates." "Alas," he wrote "I doubt very much that the Fed will do what is necessary to guard against future inflation and higher interest rates."
> 
> At the time, the yield on the 10-year Treasury was 3.86 percent, and we were in a crisis-driven deflationary environment of negative 1.4 percent inflation. Today, the 10-year yields 2.65 percent and inflation is running at less than 2 percent.
> 
> Inflation wasn't the only thing Laffer whiffed on. He projected a budget deficit of 13 percent of gross domestic product and warned that it was going to get worse. Instead, the deficit fell dramatically during the next five years and last year it was less than 5 percent of GDP.
> 
> *Pretty much every single warning, every data point, every item Laffer complained about was wrong.
> 
> Why does this happen, and why are there no penalties for being so inaccurate? *


----------



## ekim68

​Developing Nations Deal with Climate Change More Successfully



> More than a dozen tropical developing countries have implemented policies to reduce rates of deforestation and cut their net emissions of global warming pollution. According to recent studies, it's working. In fact, these countries may have already accomplished more for the climate than many developed nations.
> 
> In the 1990s, an average of 16 million hectares of forest were being cleared per year, which accounted for about 17% of all climate emissions. By the early 2000s, deforestation was down 19% to 13 million hectares. Currently, deforestation is responsible for about 10% of climate emissions globally.


----------



## ekim68

Millions of Microbeads from Soap Have Contaminated the Great Lakes



> Who doesn't like smooth, exfoliated skin? How about fish living in the Great Lakes?
> 
> On top of invading Asian carp and algae blooms, the Great Lakes are being polluted with tiny plastic beads from soap. The polyethylene beads are most commonly found in exfoliating facial scrubs, but they also appear in body washes and toothpastes. Americans buy products containing 573,000 pounds of them every year. Incredibly, a single tube of Johnson & Johnson facial scrub Clean & Clear, for example, contains 330,000 beads.
> 
> These microbeads wash down our drains, accumulate in our oceans and, according to a recent study, even flow out into our troubled Great Lakes. There, the tiny plastic beads can be mistaken for fish food. If just eating plastic isn't bad enough for the fish, these beads also soak up toxins like PCBs and pesticides in the water.


----------



## ekim68

With Patent Giveaway, Tesla Shows Silicon Valley What Ingenuity Means



> Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that by openly sharing its patent portfolio with the rest of the world, his company will help expand the market for electric cars.
> 
> His stance underscores the sentiment-widely held in Silicon Valley-that today's technology moves too fast for the U.S. patent system. But the attention Tesla's move is getting turns it into something bigger: a boost to the larger patent reform movement, which aims to reduce patent litigation across the tech world.
> 
> "What you're looking at here is the beginning of a new culture with regard to patents," says Julie Samuels, executive director at the public policy think tank and research outfit Engine. "A lot of companies in the high tech space are dismayed with how the system is shaping up, so they're trying to come up with creative ways to navigating around that system and get back to the business of innovating and creating."


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## ekim68

Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don't want them to 



> Forced pooling isn't some kind of college pool party that jocks compel nerds to attend, resulting in wacky hijinks. It's a grim legal tool, dating back nearly a century in some states, that allows drillers to tap the fossil fuels beneath a reluctant landowner's property - if enough of their neighbors sell their drilling rights. The philosophy of such laws is that subterranean pools of oil and natural gas pay no heed to property lines.
> 
> As hydraulic fracturing takes grip across the nation, frackers are taking advantage of state laws that were drafted to allow forced pooling for conventional gas and oil drilling.


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## ekim68

The Big Lobotomy



> Last September, as they scrambled to decide on one final ultimatum before shutting down the federal government, Republican House leaders came up with what seemed like an odd demand: to strip their own staff of health care benefits.
> 
> At the time, staffers reacted to the news with a mixture of despair and disbelief. "It was like getting sucker-punched by your boss," one aide told me. "Everyone was thinking, What's the point? How is screwing us going to help you?"


----------



## ekim68

Jon Stewart Drops a Truth Bomb on John McCain and Other Warmongers



> Jon Stewart went after the warmongers who were dead wrong about Iraq in the first place and now have the gall to go on TV and blame the entire mess on Barack Obama. People who really should have crawled under a rock in shame and stayed there, Paul Wolfowitz, Lindsey Graham, and most notably, the wrongest of them all, John McCain, are making the rounds so much, "you'd have thought they won 'Dancing With the Stars,' Stewart quips.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Nissan, BMW Interested in Talks with Tesla About Vehicle Charging



> Tesla's decision to open source its patents has piqued the interest of a few of the world's larger car manufacturers.
> 
> According to the Financial Times, Nissan and BMW are allegedly "keen" to chat with Tesla about possibly working together to develop charging networks that all three manufacturers' vehicles could use.
> 
> Musk's announcement was a bit of a surprise, with some seeing it as helpful suggestion by the company for pushing the growth of the electric vehicle market to new heights.


----------



## ekim68

The Shadow Internet That's 100 Times Faster Than Google Fiber



> When Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said the tech giant might bring 10 gigabits per second internet connections to American homes, it seemed like science fiction. That's about 1,000 times faster than today's home connections. But for NASA, it's downright slow.
> 
> While the rest of us send data across the public internet, the space agency uses a shadow network called ESnet, short for Energy Science Network, a set of private pipes that has demonstrated cross-country data transfers of 91 gigabits per second-the fastest of its type ever reported.
> 
> NASA isn't going bring these speeds to homes, but it is using this super-fast networking technology to explore the next wave of computing applications. ESnet, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy, is an important tool for researchers who deal in massive amounts of data generated by projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project. Rather sending hard disks back and forth through the mail, they can trade data via the ultra-fast network. "Our vision for the world is that scientific discovery shouldn't be constrained by geography," says ESnet director Gregory Bell.


----------



## ekim68

The sad old motels of Barstow, California



> Barstow, California, once a shining oasis along the sweltering asphalt of Route 66, is now but a relic of times nearly forgotten. A photo gallery by Charles Platt.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> The sad old motels of Barstow, California


Wow two years ago we stayed at the *Best Motel* that it shows. Was not the best place but after long drive that was the town we stopped in.


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## ekim68

Teaching creationism as scientifically valid now banned in all UK public schools



> LONDON, June 18 (UPI) --The United Kingdom has banned the teaching of creationism as scientifically valid in all schools receiving public funding.
> 
> The government released a new set of funding agreements last week including clauses which specifically prohibit pseudoscience.
> 
> "The parties acknowledge that clauses 2.43 and 2.44 of the Funding Agreement [which preclude the teaching of pseudoscience and require the teaching of evolution] apply to all academies. They explicitly require that pupils are taught about the theory of evolution, and prevent academy trusts from teaching 'creationism' as scientific fact," one clause reads.


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## ekim68

Stroke diagnosis made through woman's selfie video



> A selfie video that a 49-year-old Toronto-area woman took to show numbness and slurred speech she was experiencing helped doctors to diagnose her as having a mini-stroke, after she had earlier been given a diagnosis of stress.


----------



## ekim68

Terrified Of Tesla, NADA Launches Campaign To Tout Benefits Of Franchise Dealerships



> That "misinformation" stems in large part from Tesla fans who've been pushing to overturn decades-old franchise laws and bring Tesla's sleek, all-electric cars to their respective states. So far, public sentiment seems to support Tesla -- after all, everyone loves an underdog. But NADA is hoping to change the tone of the debate.
> 
> To do that, it's produced the two-and-a-half minute video clip embedded above. In bold strokes, NADA paints automakers as big, bad corporate fat cats who don't give a flying flip about consumers. Dealerships, on the other hand, are like a hot apple pie that Aunt Bee has delivered right to your windowsill: American, homey, and convenient.


----------



## ekim68

FLASHBACK: Remember When Paul Wolfowitz Said Not to Worry About Sectarian Violence in Iraq?



> The former Bush administration official is perhaps the worst person to give advice about the current crisis in Iraq-but that hasn't stopped him from speaking out.





> But the real question is, what was he doing on television anyway? Like his neocon comrades-Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, and others-Wolfowitz does not deserve to be presented as an expert with important ideas about the ongoing mess. He and the rest of this gang should have had their pundit licenses revoked after the Iraq War. They got it all wrong: WMD, the cost of the war, the consequences of the invasion. And these errors were compounded by the deaths of nearly 4,500 US service men and women-and 180,000 or more civilian Iraqi casualties. (Here's a partial list of Kristol's pre-war errors and misrepresentations.) So why care what they have to say now?


----------



## ekim68

10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing



> Many ideas have left the world of science and made their way into everyday language - and unfortunately, they are almost always used incorrectly. We asked a group of scientists to tell us which scientific terms they believe are the most widely misunderstood.


----------



## ekim68

Harley-Davidson's first electric motorcycle is Project LiveWire and you can ride it



> Legendary motorcycle builder Harley-Davidson teased an electric motorcycle with a video yesterday and now here it is. Project LiveWire is a part of Harley's attempt to expand its relevance beyond current riders and show off its new tech, with a not-in-production bike that it says is much more than just a trade-show prototype. Project LiveWire packs its electric motor into a polished case underneath the bike, and clearly the manufacturer is concerned about how customers may feel about losing signature touches like the V-twin engines and chrome pipes.


----------



## ekim68

When drones fall from the sky



> More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation.
> 
> Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military drones have malfunctioned in myriad ways, plummeting from the sky because of mechanical breakdowns, human error, bad weather and other reasons, according to more than 50,000 pages of accident investigation reports and other records obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act.


----------



## ekim68

Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job



> When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September-penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself-it made the news because she was a professor. That a French professor of twenty-five years would be let go from her job without retirement benefits, without even severance, sounded like some tragic mistake.


----------



## ekim68

Everytime AT&T Wants Federal Approval Of Merger Or Policy, It Promises It's Necessary To Deliver 100% Broadband... Then Doesn't Deliver



> We've covered in the past how Verizon has a long history of making promises to regulators to get special deals, and then never delivering. Usually these promises involve providing high speed fiber to the home connections, for which they get massive tax breaks and subsidies... and then never delivering. And, if people finally point out that it didn't deliver, it lobbies to drop the requirements that it had agreed to abide by (but never actually did). Of course, there's a very similar story with AT&T, and telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick, who's been the leading voice on these broken promises for years, has the details. In fact, what he notes is that AT&T has made some rather specific promises about providing broadband to get approval of mergers, but has never delivered. And now it's doing the same for its attempted merger with DirecTV.


----------



## ekim68

Worst States to Make a Living 2014



> Nearly five years into the economic recovery, many Americans are still struggling to find work. But in many cases, the places they live may have something to do with that struggle.
> 
> The fourth-annual MoneyRates.com study of the Best and Worst States to Make a Living reveals that working conditions among U.S. states are far from equal. This analysis is based on each state's Compensation and Quality Factor, a proprietary metric by MoneyRates.com.


----------



## ekim68

The Higher the Pay, the Worse the CEO



> CEOs are made of teflon. No matter how hot things get, nothing sticks to them.
> 
> And that's bad news, because things have never been hotter in the corner office. CEO compensation shot up by 937 percent from 1978 to 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute. During that same period, compensation for the average worker grew by a measly 10.2 percent.
> 
> Today the average CEO earns 296 times the average worker.





> In his report "Performance for Pay? The Relation Between CEO Incentive Compensation and Future Stock Price Performance," Cooper and his colleagues found that paying CEOs more money can embolden them in bad ways. It can breed cocky executives who make poor business decisions, like over-investing in dodgy enterprises or agreeing to "value-destroying" mergers and acquisitions.
> 
> According to the study, statistically speaking, companies led by these sorts of arrogant, high-paid CEOs experienced a three-year negative return of 15.15 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Judge rules no-fly list violates travelers' rights



> A federal judge Tuesday ordered the government to revise its post-Sept. 11 no-fly list, ruling it violates Americans' constitutional rights to travel freely and to effectively challenge being blacklisted because of alleged links to terrorism.
> 
> "The court concludes international travel is not a mere convenience or luxury in this modern world. Indeed, for many international travel is a necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society," wrote U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown in Portland, Ore. "Accordingly, on this record the court concludes plaintiffs inclusion on the no-fly list constitutes a significant deprivation of their liberty interests in international travel."


----------



## ekim68

Have you checked your old Private Messages lately? I just did and found that I miss some of those people...Sometimes I think that Time is a Villain.........


----------



## ekim68

Researchers Find and Decode the Spy Tools Governments Use to Hijack Phones



> Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones.
> 
> The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently of each other at Kaspersky Lab in Russia and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs in Canada, who say the findings provide great insight into the trade craft behind Hacking Team's tools.
> 
> The new components target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users and are part of Hacking Team's larger suite of tools used for targeting desktop computers and laptops. But the iOS and Android modules provide cops and spooks with a robust menu of features to give them complete dominion over targeted phones.


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## ekim68

William Rivers Pitt | They Belong in Prison, Not on TV



> Never mind the fact that I and so very many others spent so much time and energy for so many years trying to stop all this from happening. Never mind the fact that the perpetrators of this enormous fraud, this smash-and-grab robbery, this looting of the Treasury, this act of first-degree murder on a massive scale, all walked away scot-free to pursue new careers and live lives of comfort. Amazingly enough, that's not the worst part.
> 
> The worst part is that they're all on my television again, trying to blame President Obama for the circumstances created by their own feckless, murderous decisions.


----------



## ekim68

China Builds Artificial Islands in South China Sea



> Sand, cement, wood, and steel are China's weapons of choice as it asserts its claim over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brunei have sparred for decades over ownership of the 100 islands and reefs, which measure less than 1,300 acres in total but stretch across an area about the size of Iraq. In recent months, vessels belonging to the People's Republic have been spotted ferrying construction materials to build new islands in the sea. Pasi Abdulpata, a Filipino fishing contractor who in October was plying the waters near Parola Island in the northern Spratlys, says he came across "this huge Chinese ship sucking sand and rocks from one end of the ocean and blasting it to the other using a tube."


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Have you checked your old Private Messages lately? I just did and found that I miss some of those people...Sometimes I think that Time is a Villain.........


Nope, just heard that Time is a Bandit....


----------



## ekim68

Truth Facts: A Series of Hilarious (And All Too True) Infrographics


----------



## ekim68

Edible Wrappers Just Solved the Only Bad Thing About Cupcakes



> Cupcakes could quite possibly be one of the world's most perfect foods-a tiny cake, just for you!-were it not for those annoying wrappers you have to peel away. But thanks to Dr. Oetker, those are now edible too.


:up:


----------



## ekim68

ReWalk's rehab exoskeleton now approved for home use



> The ReWalk exoskeleton has been helping paraplegics walk in US rehab centers for years, but now that it got certified by the FDA, almost anyone who can afford it can finally get one. Unlike the one-size-fits-all version for rehab facilities, the personal system that got the agency's approval is customized for each user and is designed for use in various indoor and outdoor environments. Still, the two share the same design: they both have metal braces that support the body, motors that provide movement and a backpack that supplies energy. They also have a wrist remote control, where users can issue the sit, stand or walk commands.


----------



## ekim68

Here's What Our Space Junk Looks Like After It's Crashed Back To Earth



> What goes up toward space can come crashing down again-in the plains of Texas and the deserts of Saudi Arabia, through barn roofs and into the Amazon. Check out these photographs of battered and decaying pieces of rocketry that are now merely space junk.


----------



## ekim68

These Deliciously Geektastic Cakes Look Amazing [Pics]


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> These Deliciously Geektastic Cakes Look Amazing [Pics]


----------



## ekim68

Cardiac pacemaker powered by body's own muscles developed



> Over the past few decades, cardiac pacemaker technology has improved to the point that pacemakers have become a commonplace medical implant that have helped improve or save the lives of many millions of people around the world. Unfortunately, the battery technology used to power these devices has not kept pace and the batteries need to be replaced on average every seven years, which requires further surgery. To address this problem, a group of researchers from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a cardiac pacemaker that is powered semi-permanently by harnessing energy from the body's own muscles.


----------



## ekim68

Electromagnetic system to replace steam launches on US Navy carriers



> A fighter plane taking off from a strike carrier is a dramatic sight - not the least because of the woosh and plume of steam as the catapult blasts the aircraft into the air. In a few years, such launches may still be dramatic, but they'll also be a bit quieter and very plume-free. That's because the US Navy has completed testing of its Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS); clearing it for use on the new Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carriers.





> The EMALS is designed to replace the steam-powered launch system that has been the standard on strike carriers since the 1950s. According to the Navy, EMALS is capable of being used by a wide variety of aircraft, is near-silent, and enjoys smoother acceleration and a more consistent launch speed. It also has higher launch energy, is more reliable, mechanically simpler, and is easier to maintain.


----------



## ekim68

'Immediate protection' needed for Pitcairn's marine bounty



> Researchers say that "immediate protection" is required for the waters around the remote Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific, home to one of the world's rarest and most valuable collections of marine species.


----------



## ekim68

Ford And Intel Use Facial Recognition To Improve In-Car Tech, Safety



> In order to expand the capabilities of in-car tech, Ford is working with Intel to bring facial recognition to the dashboard. The joint research project, called Project Mobil, will allow engineers to see how inward-facing cameras can be integrated into a car's existing systems to provide useful features. Ford Motor Company [NYSE:F] already believes the technology can help improve privacy and give parents a way to monitor their kids as they drive.
> 
> When someone enters a Project Mobil-equipped car uses a front-facing camera to authenticate each driver. If the system doesn't recognize the driver, it would be able to send a photo to the vehicle's owner, who could then give permission for someone else to use it.


----------



## ekim68

The Supreme Court's baffling tech illiteracy is becoming a big problem



> If one thing was clear from decisions handed down this week, it's that SCOTUS is clueless on technology.


----------



## ekim68

Why Boston Has the Best Tasting Tap Water in the Country



> If you already love Boston for its unmistakable accent and unpredictable baseball team, you might want to consider adding its tap water to your list. Boston came out on top of this year's tap water taste test, an annual competition hosted by the American Water Works Association-a network of more than 50,000 water professionals charged with keeping our water supply healthy. The honor was particularly fitting since the association's conference was held in Boston this year.
> 
> Boston's secret ingredient? Watershed protection. Between 1985 and 2012, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority-from which Boston buys its water-purchased conservation land in the watersheds that feed the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs to the city's west, the sources of Boston's water.
> 
> Forests in the protected area clean the water naturally so that by the time it gets to the city it requires only limited filtering.


----------



## ekim68

What to do if police try to search your phone without a warrant



> In a profound win for digital privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police officers must obtain a warrant before searching your phone. If they don't, the search is illegal-a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment.





> So, what is a law-abiding citizen like yourself supposed to do if an officer tries to snoop on your phone without a warrant? Here's what.


----------



## ekim68

US National Archives To Upload All Holdings To Wikimedia Commons



> Ever since the National Archives and Record Administration launched the Open Government Plan in 2010, it has increasingly been uploading content to Wikipedia to digitize and gain a wider reach for its holdings. But all this time, uploading its digitized holdings to the Wikimedia Commons was a side project. Now, as mentioned in the 2014 Open Government Plan published earlier this month, the project is a core part of the NARA, according to The Signpost.


----------



## franca

19 June 2014
I bet she regrets asking her question
A lesson in how to answer a simple question about Muslims

HERE


----------



## poochee

franca said:


> 19 June 2014
> I bet she regrets asking her question
> A lesson in how to answer a simple question about Muslims
> 
> HERE


Good show!:up:


----------



## ekim68

What Everyone's Getting Wrong About Facebook's "Creepy" Study



> If you've been anywhere near this great, big internet of ours over the past few days, you've probably heard about Facebook's outrageous breach of trust. Except, at least this time, Facebook might not be entirely in the wrong.


----------



## ekim68

The NSA Revelations All in One Chart



> This is a plot of the NSA programs revealed in the past year according to whether they are bulk or targeted, and whether the targets of surveillance are foreign or domestic. Most of the programs fall squarely into the agency's stated mission of foreign surveillance, but some - particularly those that are both domestic and broad-sweeping - are more controversial.


----------



## ekim68

Google Glass to be banned from all UK cinemas 



> If you've just acquired a Google Glass headset for £1,000, don't show it off at the movies. UK cinemas are to ban the headsets over fears that the gadgets can be used to make pirate copies of Hollywood blockbusters.
> 
> Two years after its US release, Google finally made a prototype of its hi-tech eyewear available in Britain last week. The spectacles, which allow the wearer to read emails, take videos, and access the internet via a display fixed above the right eye, are being offered to "Explorers" for £1,000.


----------



## ekim68

Congress Quietly Deletes a Key Disclosure of Free Trips Lawmakers Take



> It's going to be a little more difficult to ferret out which members of Congress are lavished with all-expenses-paid trips around the world after the House has quietly stripped away the requirement that such privately sponsored travel be included on lawmakers' annual financial-disclosure forms.
> 
> The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings.


----------



## ekim68

Besieged by the rising tides of climate change, Kiribati buys land in Fiji



> Nation finalises purchase of land on Vanua Levu, 2,000km away, but it may be just the first of many seeking refuge.


----------



## ekim68

California Gave New Moms and Dads Paid Leave-And It's Working



> The political conversation turned to work-family policy last week, thanks to a summit on "working families" that the White House co-sponsored with the Center for American Progress. One topic that got a lot of attention was paid family leave. The U.S. is the only country in the developed world that doesn't guarantee workers time off, with at least some pay, in order to take care of a newborn or other relative who needs care. To many Americans, the idea probably seems hopelessly foreign-the kind of thing they do in the worker paradises of Sweden or Denmark or France, but not here in the U.S.
> 
> That conception is wrong. The federal government hasn't passed a law guaranteeing paid leave, but a handful of states have. The first was California, in 2002. It didn't happen without a fight and, at the time, business lobbies and conservatives predicted that mandating paid leave would be a disaster-crippling firms, slowing down the economy, and so on. So far, that hasn't happened. On the contrary, the early results are encouraging, except for one glaring problem. Lots of Californians still don't know the law exists.


----------



## ekim68

They are building the first personal maglev transport system in Israel



> SkyTran-a NASA Space Act company-is finally building a pilot of its computer-controlled, two-person high speed maglev transport system. Cars run 20-feet above the ground and can be ordered by a smartphone app.
> 
> While the initial trial in Israel will only involve a 1,500-feet closed campus loop, the plan is to build something much larger in the near future.


----------



## ekim68

B.C. put a price on carbon. What happened next will surprise you 



> The B.C. carbon tax is built on a simple tenet of human behavior: When the price of something goes up, people will consume less of it. It actually applies to not just gasoline, but to all sources of atmospheric carbon, including natural gas and propane, and is based on how much carbon they emit. For example, since natural gas burns cleaner than gasoline, it is taxed at a lower rate. This ensures emissions are priced in proportion to their impact on the climate.
> 
> As a result, British Columbia's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are now nearly 20 percent below the rest of Canada's. This put the province "within spitting distance" of its goal to reduce emissions 6 percent below 2007 levels by 2012 a year ahead of schedule, says Mary Polak, B.C.'s minister of the environment.


----------



## ekim68

Fascinating graphics show who owns all the major brands in the world



> All the biggest product brands in the world are owned by a handful of corporation. Food, cleaning products, banks, airlines, cars, media companies... everything is in the hands of these megacorporations. These graphics show how everything is connected.


----------



## ekim68

Water protected from fracking, British agencies say



> -No hydraulic fracturing will be allowed if it poses a threat to groundwater and drinking water supplies, a British environmental director said Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

Fortune 100 companies saved $1.1B using renewable energy



> Clean energy is no longer just the bastion of crunchy granola types and companies hoping to improve their public image.
> 
> Increasing the use of renewable energy has become a targeted goal of almost half of Fortune 500 companies, and with good reason. According to a new report, more than half of Fortune 100 companies collectively saved $1.1 billion in energy costs by rolling out renewable energy programs.


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous vehicles to join the US Army



> Over the next quarter of a century, the US Pentagon sees robots becoming more and more a part of military life with robot warplanes, submersibles, and infantry vehicles taking their place on the battlefields of the future. It may conjure up a very flashy vision of Transformer-like killing machines, but the US Army sees the first robots as autonomous vehicles used in the more prosaic task of delivering groceries and other supplies.


----------



## ekim68

What Are They Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming? 



> It starts with Al Gore.
> 
> When it comes time to teach his high school sophomores about global warming, Wyoming science teacher Jim Stith shows An Inconvenient Truth. The green documentary delivers an unambiguous message: Human activity is driving dangerous climate change.
> 
> But the third-year teacher is no devotee of the former vice president. "I make sure they watch it on a day I'm gone because I can't stand to listen to him talk," Stith said.
> 
> And he doesn't teach Gore's conclusions as settled science. After the film, his class watches a movie called The Great Global Warming Swindle. It trots out an array of scientists, politicians, and economists who dispute the idea that climate change is man-made.


----------



## ekim68

Germany's green energy boom is leaving a 'trail of blood' on coal companies



> Since the beginning, the commercial growth of renewable energy has been a laborious, often painful matter of government pushes, tax incentives and campaigning for greater awareness. In Germany, however, the energy market is on the cusp of evolving to the next step: An era in which the sun and the wind replace fossil fuels through the sheer, unstoppable force of the market.


----------



## ekim68

Oklahoma's earthquake epidemic linked to wastewater disposal



> Oklahoma has unexpectedly become the earthquake capital of the United States - with some 240 small earthquakes magnitude 3.0 or more this year. That's about twice as many as California has gotten.
> 
> In a new study in Science, researchers say they've pinpointed a likely culprit - disposal wells that are used to bury massive amounts of wastewater from oil and gas operations.
> 
> Oklahoma's oil and gas industry has been booming since 2008, thanks to various advanced techniques such as "dewatering" operations and hydraulic fracturing. But these activities can create millions of barrels of wastewater that is difficult to treat and often gets injected back underground into disposal wells.
> 
> A smaller number of Oklahoma's injection wells, the Science study found, seem to be putting pressure on faults and triggering seismic activity - often as far as 20 miles away. In fact, just four injection wells associated with a dewatering operation near Oklahoma City were likely responsible for one-fifth of the region's earthquakes since 2008.


----------



## ekim68

Jobs Charted by State and Salary



> The chart below shows what people do and what they get paid. These vary depending on where you live. Select a state in the drop-down menu, and use the slider to adjust the median annual salary.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Jobs Charted by State and Salary


Neat chart.


----------



## ekim68

Designed Protein Overcomes Epstein-Barr Virus Strategy Of Evading Immune System



> Researchers have for the first time using powerful computers and algorithms designed a completely novel protein that kills virally infected cells, including ones which are associated with certain kinds of cancers.
> 
> Proteins are the internal machines of cells that have particular molecular shapes and carry out functions specific for each shape. The designed protein is called BINDI, which stands for BHRF1-INhibiting Design acting Intracellularly. BINDI was made to target cells that carry Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The novel protein binds the virus in the "picomolar" range, or about 1000 times more tightly than most drugs on the market.
> 
> There is precedence for designing superstable proteins though most of these lacked biological function. And there is precedence for designing new functions within existing scaffolds of proteins. However thus far there have been no examples of both designed new structure and function simultaneously, which is the great advance in this work.


----------



## ekim68

States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth



> Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate.
> 
> The minimum wage went up in 13 states - Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington - either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is .99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is .68 percent.


----------



## ekim68

The iPhone 6's Battery Will Be Built By 'Foxbot' Robots In China



> The largest private employer in all of China and one of the biggest supply chain manufacturers in the world, Foxconn announced it will soon start using robots to help assemble devices at its several sprawling factories across China, IT Home reports (via MacRumors).
> 
> Apple, one of Foxconn's biggest partners to help assemble its iPhones, iPads, will be the first company to use the new service.
> 
> Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices.


----------



## ekim68

Uber Cuts The Price Of An UberX By 20% In New York City, Making It Cheaper Than A Taxi



> Now we know why car-hailing app Uber raised a whopping $1.2 billion in funding: It's starting a price war with its rivals.
> 
> Uber announced in a blog post on Monday it would cut the prices of its UberX service in New York City by 20% - but it's only for a limited time.
> 
> Uber says this makes it cheaper to use UberX than taking a traditional yellow taxi.


----------



## ekim68

I am Muslim and Republican - and was attacked by people in my party



> Earlier this year, I attended an event with former House speaker Newt Gingrich, despite knowing of his stereotypical attitude towards Muslims. I realized then the power of one voice to change people's prejudices - and how rarely people like me use ours: I was the first Muslimah to whom he had ever spoken.
> 
> Yes, I am Muslim, and I am a Republican - and that's why I was at the Heritage Foundation panel on Benghazi last month, where I asked the now-infamous question about how conservatives deal with the vast majority of people of my faith who are peaceful. Americans don't expect minorities - especially Muslims - to be Republicans, and it happens often in conservative circles that I am the only Muslim woman in the audience.
> 
> I became Republican because I felt that my Islamic values - pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-business, pro-trade - aligned best with the Republican party platform.


----------



## ekim68

Network Sunday Shows All Ignore Strong Jobs Report And Record Stock Surge



> When is the U.S. economy not a topic worth addressing on the Sunday morning talk shows? Apparently when there's lots of good news to discuss.
> 
> At least it seemed that way this past Sunday when all four of the network Sunday morning talk shows ignored last week's surprisingly strong jobs report, which indicated nearly 300,000 news jobs were created in the month of June. Consequently, the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, the lowest level since September 2008.
> 
> The jobs surge meant America had logged its highest January-through-June job-growth rate since 1999. (The U.S. has added 1.4 million jobs since December, making it the best half-year since the recession ended.) And over the past 52 months of jobs growth, businesses have created nearly 10 million jobs.
> 
> Also ignored by all the Sunday hosts and guests was the fact that the Dow Jones stock exchange on Thursday for the first time surpassed the 17,000 mark, "another in a string of records for the index that has lifted portfolios in a five-year bull market for stocks," according to the Associated Press.


----------



## ekim68

Stopping harmful climate change is surprisingly cheap



> Saving our skins might be surprisingly cheap. To avoid dangerous climate change, the world needs to boost spending on green energy by $1 trillion a year. That sounds scarily large, *but we could cover a lot of it using the subsidies currently handed to fossil fuels.*


----------



## ekim68

Climate science denier group must pay damages for frivolous lawsuit against UVA, scientist



> Virginia's highest court has ruled that the American Tradition Institute (ATI), a free-market think tank that promotes climate science denial, must pay damages to the University of Virginia and former professor Michael Mann for filing a frivolous lawsuit against them. The decision comes in a case that has sparked controversy about the abuse of public records laws to harass climate scientists.
> 
> Mann, who now directs Penn State's Earth Systems Science Center, has been a target of climate science deniers for his research showing that the recent spike in global temperatures -- the so-called "hockey stick" graph -- is linked to the burning of fossil fuels. A Facing South investigation found that ATI had connections to fossil-fuel interests. The group, which last year changed its name to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (EELI), is a spin-off of the American Tradition Partnership, a dark-money group that has been embroiled in campaign finance controversies.


----------



## ekim68

Newly discovered fungus holds clues to stopping superbugs



> A research team from McMaster University, the University of British Columbia and Cardiff University has discovered a fungus in the soil of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia that may offer hope in an increasingly fraught battle against drug-resistant bacteria.
> 
> Drug resistant bacteria is an increasing problem across much of the world. "Antibiotic resistance ... is now a major threat to public health," according to the World Health Organisation (WHO)


----------



## ekim68

Cutting the cord: Why I kicked my cable TV company to the curb



> Summary: I decided I was sick of spending crazy amounts of money for video content I could get for free, or for far less using various streaming services.


----------



## ekim68

Aussietank stores water for dry spells, collapses for storage



> Learning from Australia's arid climate and recent struggles with drought, the Aussietank was developed to aid households in times of dry periods and water restrictions. The collapsible and portable water tank comes flat-packed in three different sizes and has recently become available to the USA market. It could help households hit by the North American drought to harvest water without the expense of permanent water tank installation.


----------



## ekim68

New urgency targets mysterious kidney disease in Central America



> SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - Bringing new urgency to a mysterious kidney disease afflicting the region's agricultural laborers, Central America's health ministries signed a declaration Friday citing the ailment as a top public health priority and committing to a series of steps to combat its reach.
> 
> Over the last two years, the Center for Public Integrity has examined how a rare type of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is killing thousands of agricultural workers along Central America's Pacific Coast, as well as in Sri Lanka and India. Scientists have yet to definitively uncover the cause of the malady, although emerging evidence points to toxic heavy metals contained in pesticides as a potential culprit.


----------



## ekim68

How fissile material falls through the cracks



> Most people would agree that keeping track of dangerous material is generally a good idea. So it may come as a surprise to some that the arrangements that are supposed to account for weapon-grade fissile materials-plutonium and highly enriched uranium-are sketchy at best. The most recent example involves several hundreds kilograms of plutonium that appear to have fallen through the cracks in various reporting arrangements.
> 
> Earlier this year, Masafumi Takubo, a Japanese researcher (and member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials), was putting together a report on the use of plutonium-containing MOX fuel in Japan's nuclear reactors. What he discovered in the process was that the public record of Japan's plutonium holdings failed to account for about 640 kilograms of the material. The error made its way to the annual plutonium management report that Japan voluntarily submits to the International Atomic Energy Agency (these are known as INFCIRC/549 reports). The 640 kg in question-not a trivial amount by any measure-were not included in the two most recent reports that Japan sent to the IAEA
> 
> No plutonium was actually lost, and the IAEA was quick to confirm that its own safeguards, which are there to ensure that no nuclear material is diverted, were applied at all times.


----------



## ekim68

Cleanup area extends nearly 2 miles after N.D. spill



> MANDAREE, N.D. (AP) - The path of brine spilled from an underground North Dakota pipeline extends nearly 2 miles down a steep ravine, but dead vegetation is limited to about 200 yards from the source of the spill, a company official said Thursday.
> 
> Miranda Jones, vice president of environmental safety and regulatory at Crestwood Midstream Partners Inc., said the cause of the spill appears to involve a separation of the pipe that carries saltwater, a byproduct of oil and natural gas production. Crestwood subsidiary Arrow Pipeline LLC owns the pipeline.
> 
> Jones said the path of the brine is 8,240 feet long, and the company has estimated around 1 million gallons spilled. Officials have said it damaged trees, brush and grasses in the area.


----------



## ekim68

Ted Cruz Launches Senate Fight To Auction Off America's Public Lands



> After a busy few months trying to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder, increase carbon pollution, and wipe out limits on campaign contributions, Tea Party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is now working to sell off America's national forests, parks, and other public lands.
> 
> On Tuesday, Cruz filed an amendment to the Bipartisan Sportsmen's Act of 2014 (S. 2363) to force the federal government to sell off a significant portion of the country's most prized lands in the West. The amendment would prohibit the federal government from owning more than 50 percent of any land within one state, and requires the government to transfer the excess land to the states or sell it to the highest bidder.


:down:


----------



## ekim68

DARPA tests bullet-sized homing missiles



> The US military has been testing in-flight guidance for .50-caliber bullets, turning the projectiles into miniature homing missiles.


----------



## ekim68

These Weird Rainbow Ghosts Show How Wi-Fi Signals Are Shaped



> Luis Hernan is like a modern day ghost hunter. Only instead of searching for lost souls, he's looking for the technological apparitions that surround us every day. In Digital Ethereal, Hernan, a PhD student at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, has been investigating the invisible wireless infrastructures in order to glean a better understanding about how these wireless systems are designed and how we interact with them.


----------



## ekim68

Countries spending the most on the military



> To determine the top 10 countries that spent the most on their military in 2013, 24/7 Wall St. examined SIPRI data on military expenditure in over 170 countries. We reviewed SIPRI data on military exports, imports and military expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product. We also reviewed GDP and GDP growth figures from the International Monetary Fund.
> 
> These are the countries with the highest military expenditures.


----------



## ekim68

Church of England votes 'yes' to women bishops



> (Reuters) - The Church of England voted on Monday to allow women to become bishops, a historic decision which overturns centuries of tradition in a Church that has been deeply divided over the issue.


(Equality; Imagine that.... )


----------



## ekim68

Argentina's Loss to Germany Nothing Compared to Financial Rout By U.S.



> If there were poetic justice in the world, Argentina would have beaten Germany in the last three minutes of World Cup play instead of vice versa. Germany represents everything that's wrong with the world financial system. Argentina is the epic case of countries whose economies are screwed by policies championed by Germany-and, unfortunately, by the United States, as well.
> 
> Let me explain.


----------



## ekim68

One in three Alzheimer's cases preventable, says research



> One in three cases of Alzheimer's disease worldwide is preventable, according to research from the University of Cambridge.
> 
> The main risk factors for the disease are a lack of exercise, smoking, depression and poor education, it says.
> 
> Previous research from 2011 put the estimate at one in two cases, but this new study takes into account overlapping risk factors.


----------



## ekim68

Creepy New Seat Monitors Your Heart, Knows When You're Falling Asleep



> Soon, your car may know your heart rate-and may take control from you if it doesn't like what it sees.
> 
> A new project from Nottingham Trent University in the UK is working on an electrocardiogram (ECG) built into the driver's seat to detect heart rate and determine when the driver is too fatigued-or worse, falling asleep-in order to improve road safety.


----------



## ekim68

Meet 'Project Zero,' Google's Secret Team of Bug-Hunting Hackers



> When 17-year-old George Hotz became the world's first hacker to crack AT&T's lock on the iPhone in 2007, the companies officially ignored him while scrambling to fix the bugs his work exposed. When he later reverse engineered the Playstation 3, Sony sued him and settled only after he agreed to never hack another Sony product.
> 
> When Hotz dismantled the defenses of Google's Chrome operating system earlier this year, by contrast, the company paid him a $150,000 reward for helping fix the flaws he'd uncovered. Two months later Chris Evans, a Google security engineer, followed up by email with an offer: How would Hotz like to join an elite team of full-time hackers paid to hunt security vulnerabilities in *every popular piece of software that touches the internet?*


----------



## ekim68

The Spanish Town Where People Come Before Profit



> "The best thing they have here in Marinaleda, and you can't find this in other places, is the [general] assembly," says long-term civil servant for the Marinaleda council, Manuel Gutierrez Daneri. He continues, "Assembly is a place for people to discuss problems and to find the solutions," pointing out that even minor crimes are collectively addressed via the assembly, as the town has no police or judicial system since the last local cop retired.


----------



## ekim68

In the name of security, German NSA committee may turn to typewriters



> Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament's National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he's considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group's work.
> 
> In an appearance (German language) Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. "In fact, we already have [a typewriter], and it's even a non-electronic typewriter," he said.
> 
> If Sensburg's suggestion takes flight, the country would be taking a page out of the Russian playbook. Last year, the agency in charge of securing communications from the Kremlin announced that it wanted to spend 486,000 rubles (about $14,800) to buy 20 electric typewriters as a way to avoid digital leaks.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> In the name of security, German NSA committee may turn to typewriters


Interesting!


----------



## ekim68

Studies: Stand Your Ground Laws Lead To More Homicides, Don't Deter Crime



> Homicides increase under the "castle doctrine" or Stand Your Ground laws, according to two studies published since 2012, while the laws do not appear to deter crime in any significant way.
> 
> Researchers at Georgia State and Texas A&M universities used different methodologies and data sources to reach their conclusions, but they ended up in the same place: More people are killed after these laws are passed.
> 
> Researchers at Texas A&M University, for a study published in the Journal of Human Resources, concluded that homicides had increased by 8 percent in the more than 20 states that had passed "castle doctrine" laws, many of which include Stand Your Ground provisions. That equals 600 additional homicides every year in those states, they wrote.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft aims to power Chicago datacenter with wind power



> Microsoft said it will buy 175 megawatts of wind energy from the Pilot Wind Project in Illinois in a 20-year pact. The purchase adds to the 110 megawatts of energy from the Keechi Wind Farm in Texas last year.
> 
> For Microsoft, the Pilot Wind Project energy purchase boils down to power its Chicago datacenter. Pilot Wind is operated by EDF Energy. Microsoft's purchase gives the Pilot Wind project a steady revenue stream and Microsoft gets to offset its carbon output.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Creepy New Seat Monitors Your Heart, Knows When Youre Falling Asleep


Why creepy!!? Anything that can lessen the number of accidents caused by drivers falling asleep, should, in my opinion, be welcomed.


----------



## ekim68

I suspect the 'creepy' thing is a draw to the Headline and thus the story, and you're right about it should be welcomed...:up:


----------



## ekim68

This Creepy Invasive Plant Is Wreaking Havoc In North America



> The Giant hogweed, a long-stemmed plant originally from Central Asia, is currently spreading like wildfire around certain parts of the United States and Canada. Not only is it drowning out the local flora, it's also a noxious weed that, when touched, can cause blisters, long-lasting scars - and even blindness.


----------



## ekim68

As China Stalks Satellites, U.S. and Japan Prepare to Defend Them



> In May 2013 the Chinese government conducted what it called a science space mission from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China. Half a world away, Brian Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force officer, wasn't buying it. The liftoff took place at night and employed a powerful rocket as well as a truck-based launch vehicle-all quite unusual for a science project, he says.
> 
> In a subsequent report for the Secure World Foundation, the space policy think tank where he works, Weeden concluded that the Chinese launch was more likely a test of a mobile rocket booster for an antisatellite (ASAT) weapon that could reach targets in geostationary orbit about 22,236 miles above the equator. That's the stomping grounds of expensive U.S. spacecraft that monitor battlefield movements, detect heat from the early stages of missile launches, and help orchestrate drone fleets. "This is the stuff the U.S. really cares about," Weeden says.


----------



## ekim68

Forbes Media sold to Chinese group Integrated Whale



> After 97 years of family ownership, Forbes Media has announced it has sold a majority stake in the company to a Hong Kong-based group of international investors.
> 
> Forbes Media - which includes Forbes magazine - was sold to Integrated Whale Media Investments for an undisclosed sum.


----------



## ekim68

The airborne panopticon: How plane-mounted cameras watch entire cities



> On June 28, 2012, in Dayton, Ohio, police received reports of an attempted robbery. A man armed with a box cutter had just tried to rob the Annex Naughty N' Nice adult bookstore. Next, a similar report came from a Subway sandwich shop just a few miles northeast of the bookstore.
> 
> Coincidentally, a local company named Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) was flying a small Cessna aircraft 10,000 feet overhead at the time. The surveillance flight was loaded up with specialized cameras that could watch 25 square miles of territory, and it provided something no ordinary helicopter or police plane could: a Tivo-style time machine that could watch and record movements of every person and vehicle below.
> 
> After learning about the attempted robberies, PSS conducted frame-by-frame video analysis of the bookstore and sandwich shop and was able to show that exactly one car traveled between them. Further analysis showed that the suspect then moved on to a Family Dollar store in the northern part of the city, robbed it, stopped for gas-where his face was captured on video-and eventually returned home.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> This Creepy Invasive Plant Is Wreaking Havoc In North America


Another curse on North America.


----------



## ekim68

Electric cars for all government fleets-UK



> Government is set to lead by example as all of its car fleets are provided with funding to introduce plug-in cars and vans, Transport Minister Baroness Kramer announced today (17 July 2014).
> 
> The £5 million ultra low emission vehicle (ULEV) readiness project is just the first step in plans to make electric cars and other plug-in vehicles commonplace in government fleets.
> 
> It will allow every central government fleet to review its arrangements and consider how greener vehicles can be used. Over 150 plug-in vehicles will be added to government fleets in the first wave of the scheme.


----------



## ekim68

Washington state just lopped up to $2,500 off the cost of solar panels. Here's how. 



> Until now, the process of legally installing solar panels on a building in Washington has been what it is in most of the U.S.: while there are state and national building codes, each county enforces them differently. What this meant was that the process of putting in solar ranged from the very simple (a solar panel installation was seen as the equivalent of putting on an extra layer of shingles) to the complicated and prolonged (any installation, no matter how much of a no-brainer, required a full set of plans, signed by a licensed structural engineer, which added between $800-$2,500 to the final bill.) Solar installers were spending a lot of time learning about how permits were handled from county to county, and avoiding some areas altogether because the process was so daunting.
> 
> Then this April, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued an executive order to deal with carbon emissions - and that order paved the way for the standardization and simplification of solar permitting. It was a surprisingly agreeable process, says Mia Devine, a project manager at Northwest Solar Communities, a coalition that helped with the rule changes. "The mandate of the governor's office really made people pay attention. It actually passed unanimously."


----------



## ekim68

A much larger and more dangerous movement": Right-wing militias thrive post-Bundy - and the media won't talk about it



> Three months after the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch, the Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a report-"War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right"-stating what should have been obvious at the time, but which most media coverage utterly obscured: The standoff was not some quirky, standalone event that spontaneously just happened out of the blue. Rather, it was a highly coordinated event reflecting the threat of a larger militia movement, which in turn has drawn together multiple threads of far-right ideology over the course of the last 40 years.
> 
> On the purely tactical level, the report notes that Bundy's armed supporters had "overwhelming tactical superiority" due to their pre-positioning on the high ground above the confrontation-under the direction of a Montana militia member and Iraq War veteran-which is a primary reason why the Bureau of Land Management wisely withdrew. On a somewhat broader level, the report warns of the events' ripple effect. "Just in the months since the Bundy 'victory,' tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West - in Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah."
> 
> That's in addition to the violent Las Vegas rampage of Bundy supporters Jerad and Amanda Miller, which left three innocents dead along with the two shooters.


----------



## ekim68

Temple University researchers eliminate the HIV virus from cultured human cells for first time



> (Philadelphia, PA) - The HIV-1 virus has proved to be tenacious, inserting its genome permanently into its victims' DNA, forcing patients to take a lifelong drug regimen to control the virus and prevent a fresh attack. Now, a team of Temple University School of Medicine researchers has designed a way to snip out the integrated HIV-1 genes for good.
> 
> "This is one important step on the path toward a permanent cure for AIDS," says Kamel Khalili, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Temple. Khalili and his colleague, Wenhui Hu, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Temple, led the work which marks the first successful attempt to eliminate latent HIV-1 virus from human cells. "It's an exciting discovery, but it's not yet ready to go into the clinic. It's a proof of concept that we're moving in the right direction," added Dr. Khalili, who is also Director of the Center for Neurovirology and Director of the Comprehensive NeuroAIDS Center at Temple.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Temple University researchers eliminate the HIV virus from cultured human cells for first time


:up:


----------



## ekim68

World's largest dome structure completed in Singapore



> Work was recently completed on a big, bold, and presumably very expensive architectural project - and for a change, it's not located in Dubai or China. The Singapore Sports Hub is a mammoth new sports complex containing the East Asian city state's new National Stadium: a 55,000 capacity venue that boasts the notable achievement of being the world's largest dome structure.


----------



## ekim68

A Map of Who's Got the Best (And Worst) Internet Connections in America



> In the digital age, access to high speed internet is fundamentally important. But some regions of the country are still left out in the cold. We took a look at where you can get the best-and not best-internet in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

Powering Villages With Solar Instead of Dirty Fossil Fuels



> Dharnai village in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, is now lit-up by a Greenpeace India solar-powered micro-grid.
> 
> Enter the village and you'll see electric poles all around. The solar micro-grid supplies the electricity for homes, street lighting for roads and lanes, and water pumps.
> 
> Dharnai is the first village in India where all aspects of life are powered by solar. The 100 kilowatt (kW) system powers the 450 homes of the 2,400 residents, 50 commercial operations, two schools, a training centre and a health care facility. A battery backup ensures power around the clock.


----------



## ekim68

Call for end to 'throwaway society'



> MPs have called for a ban on food waste going in to landfill.
> 
> The report by the Environmental Audit Committee also called for lower VAT on recycled products and longer warranty periods on consumer goods.
> 
> It concluded that a "circular economy" approach is needed to save resources as the world's population rises.
> 
> In England, 8.5 million tonnes of local authority-collected waste goes to landfill, according to Government figures.
> 
> If Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are included, the amount of waste in the UK being buried is in the region of 11 million tonnes.


----------



## ekim68

Drilling in Pennsylvania has damaged the water supply 209 times in last seven years



> Whether or not you think that's alright depends on your perspective. According to Patrick Creighton, those numbers are pretty good - so many oil and natural gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania in the past seven years that 209 problem wells is a mere 1 percent of the total. But Creighton happens to be the spokesperson for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group composed of natural gas drillers. So there's that.
> 
> According to Steve Hvozdovich, 209 is a lot. "You are talking about somebody's drinking water supply." But then Hvozdovich works for the environmental group Clean Water Action. He would like clean drinking water.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change: If we pretend it isn't happening, will it go away?
_Lawrence M. Krauss_



> I happened to be in Canberra last week as the Australian government repealed its tax on carbon emissions, which has required the country's biggest emitters to pay as much as 25 Australian dollars (about $23.50, US) per metric ton of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere. With the vote in the Australian Senate, following a previous vote in the House of Representatives, Australia-one of the world's largest per capita emitters of carbon-moved from being well ahead of the international curve to the back of the pack when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.





> The analogy of an ostrich burying its head in the sand to avoid danger is clichéd but, even so, particularly appropriate to this case. An ostrich that buried its head in the sand on an ocean beach would seem particularly poorly situated to avoid a possibly rising tide. Sillier still: The ostrich that, with its head underground, refused to allow others to keep watch, to see if the tide comes in.


----------



## ekim68

Western U.S. states using up ground water at an alarming rate



> For the past 14 years, drought has afflicted the Colorado River Basin, and one of the most visible signs has been the white bathtub rings around the red rocks of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two biggest dammed lakes on the river. But there is also an invisible bathtub being emptied, below ground. A new study shows that ground water in the basin is being depleted six times faster than surface water. The groundwater losses, which take thousands of years to be recharged naturally, point to the unsustainability of exploding population centers and water-intensive agriculture in the basin, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming.


----------



## ekim68

Darkroom over digital: Film photography still popular at some local schools



> In the age of camera-equipped smart phones and inexpensive digital cameras, the odds are good that most people in high school or younger have never seen a roll of film or used an "analog" camera - much less developed film and paper prints in a darkroom.
> 
> But film photography isn't dead yet, at least not in New England. Plenty of local people, in fact, are still teaching, learning, and doing "analog" photography.
> 
> "We have at least 40 accounts with schools buying film, chemicals, and paper for classes," said Laura Roberts, public affairs liaison at Newtonville Camera in Newtonville, who handles photographic supply accounts at the store.


----------



## ekim68

The evolution of video game controllers in 16 cool photos



> Javier Laspiur made this series of pictures showing the evolution of video game controllers throughout history.


----------



## ekim68

Post-9/11 vets fight suicide, mental health issues



> The newest generation of combat veterans is struggling with integration into civilian life, confronted by suicidal thoughts, mental-health issues, unemployment and the inability to get timely assessments of their disability claims.
> 
> Yet post-9/11 veterans who have used the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system generally have a favorable impression of the medical services provided, according to a nationwide survey of 2,089 members of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.


----------



## ekim68

Oil drilling in North Dakota raises concerns about radioactive waste



> Every weekday, about a dozen large garbage trucks peel away from the oil boom that has spread through western North Dakota to bump along a gravel road to the McKenzie County landfill.
> 
> The trucks drive up to a scale flanked by something seldom found in rural dumps - two 8-foot-tall yellow panels that essentially form a giant Geiger counter.
> 
> Two or three times a day, the radiation detector blares like a squad car, because under tons of refuse someone has stashed yard-long filters clotted with radioactive dirt from drilling sites.
> 
> The "socks" are supposed to be shipped to out-of-state processing plants. But some oil field operators, hoping to save tens of thousands of dollars, dump the socks in fields, abandoned buildings and landfills.


----------



## ekim68

Quenching the world's water and energy crises, one tiny droplet at a time



> In the Namib Desert of Africa, the fog-filled morning wind carries the drinking water for a beetle called the Stenocara.
> 
> Tiny droplets collect on the beetle's bumpy back. The areas between the bumps are covered in a waxy substance that makes them water-repellant, or hydrophobic (water-fearing). Water accumulates on the water-loving, or hydrophilic, bumps, forming droplets that eventually grow too big to stay put, then roll down the waxy surface.
> 
> The beetle slakes its thirst by tilting its back end up and sipping from the accumulated droplets that fall into its mouth. Incredibly, the beetle gathers enough water through this method to drink 12 percent of its body weight each day.
> 
> More than a decade ago, news of this creature's efficient water collection system inspired engineers to try and reproduce these surfaces in the lab.


----------



## ekim68

Brings to mind the Water Suits the Rebels wore in Dune....


----------



## ekim68

Oh, the other side of the equation....

Comcast Employees Spill How Hellish Life Is on Their End of the Phone



> Last week, the Comcast call heard 'round the world struck a major chord with nearly everyone. We've all had that maddening phone call with a sales rep who just won't quit. What you might not realize is that as we're slamming our heads against our phones, they are too. It's not they won't stop, but that they can't stop-and they hate it just as much. Here's what life is like on the other end of the line.


----------



## ekim68

Resistant 'Nightmare Bacteria' Increase Fivefold in Southeastern U.S.



> There's worrisome news here in the southeastern U.S., buried in a journal that is favorite reading only for superbug geeks like me. The rate at which hospitals are recognizing cases of CRE - the form of antibiotic resistance that is so serious the CDC dubbed it a "nightmare" - rose five times over between 2008 and 2012.
> 
> Within that bad news, there are two especially troubling points. First, the hospitals where this resistance factor was identified were what is called "community" hospitals, that is, not academic referral centers. That's an important distinction, because academic medical centers tend to be where the most cutting-edge care is performed, and where the sickest people are. As a result, they are where last-resort antibiotics are used the most, and therefore where resistance is most likely to emerge. That CRE was found so widely not in academic centers, but rather in community hospitals, is a signal that it is probably moving through what medicine calls "the community," which is to say, anywhere outside healthcare. Or, you know, everyday life.
> 
> A second concern is that the authors of the study, which is in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, assume that their finding is an underestimate of the actual problem.


----------



## ekim68

Dirty Dozen Spampionship - which country is spewing the most spam?



> With the 2014 World Cup complete, and the Commonwealth Games just round the corner, we thought it was a good time to publish the latest SophosLabs Spampionship charts.
> 
> We measured which computers in the world sent the most spam in the second quarter (April, May and June) of 2014, and turned our measurements into a pair of League Tables.
> 
> The first table shows the amount of spam per country by pure volume:


----------



## ekim68

The Judges Approving the NSA's Surveillance Requests Keep Buying Verizon Stock



> When the National Security Agency would like to take a look at all of the metadata of phone calls made by people using Verizon, a program revealed last summer by Edward Snowden, they must obtain approval from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (better known as the FISA Court), which typically grants such requests. VICE has obtained disclosures that reveal for the first time since this program was made public that FISA Court judges have not only owned Verizon stock in the last year, but that at least one of the judges to sign off on the NSA orders for bulk metadata collection is a proud shareholder of the company complying with these requests.


----------



## ekim68

Why the FCC Will Ignore Your Net Neutrality Comment and Listen to ISPs Instead



> The federal government is considering killing off net neutrality and allowing internet service providers like Comcast to create a so-called "fast lane." This would allow them to charge more to "prioritize" certain content, a deeply controversial prospect. So, the Federal Communication Commission is hosting an open comment period to solicit the public's thoughts about the whole situation before a rule becomes final. Unfortunately, if the past is any indicator, the agency is going to be throwing the vast majority of the public's comments away without considering them, and will instead focus on the comments of the ISPs that helped write the rule in the first place.


----------



## ekim68

Driverless cars get green light for testing on public roads in UK



> The UK is to encourage the development of driverless cars on its roads, it was announced on Wednesday, with a multimillion-pound research fund and a review into the relevant laws around road safety.
> 
> The business secretary, Vince Cable, said a £10m fund will be made available for driverless car researchers in the UK, joint funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Bis) and the Department for Transport (DfT).
> 
> "The excellence of our scientists and engineers has established the UK as pioneers in the development of driverless vehicles through pilot projects," said Cable. "Today's announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society."


----------



## ekim68

A third of consumers with credit files had debts in collections last year



> About 77 million Americans have a debt in collections, a new report finds.
> 
> That amounts to 35 percent of consumers with credit files or data reported to a major credit bureau, according to the study released Tuesday by the Urban Institute and Encore Capital Group's Consumer Credit Research Institute. "It's a stunning number," said Caroline Ratcliffe, senior fellow at the Urban Institute and author of the report. "And it threads through nearly all communities."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> A third of consumers with credit files had debts in collections last year


----------



## ekim68

Times Are Good-for Investment Bankers, Anyway



> Time magazine (7/17/14-subscription required) has some good news for you, courtesy of investment banker and former Clinton Treasury official Roger Altman: "Surprise: The Economy Isn't as Bad as You Think."
> 
> After noting that "in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 63 percent of respondents said the US is on the wrong track," Altman insists that "despite the pessimistic mood, America is experiencing a profound comeback."





> If, like Altman, you're part of the elite that has benefited from a soaring stock market and a climate-wrecking energy boom, you may well be feeling optimistic right now. If you're part of the majority that's still hurting after six years of "recovery," thinking that the US is on the wrong track isn't pessimism-it's realism.


----------



## ekim68

As an aside, we just had another firetruck go by with blaring sirens....We live on a busy street and that happens, but I'm kind of torn by the fact that I think the noise interrupts my life and then I realize that what they're doing is far more important....


----------



## ekim68

Tesla will open up its Supercharger patents to boost electric car adoption



> Tesla's CEO has been carefully dropping hints that he might "do something controversial" with his company's collection of technology patents, and now we know what he's on about. Speaking at the UK launch of the Tesla Model S yesterday, Elon Musk said that he specifically wants to open up the designs for his Supercharger system in order to create a standard technical specification that other electric car makers can adopt. As part of this, it's possible that Tesla might need to give away some intellectual property about components within the cars themselves, but the general idea ties in with a commitment Musk made a while ago about not wanting Superchargers to become a "walled garden." Besides, it makes a lot of sense -- especially when you imagine what it'd be like today if we had to put up with manufacturer-specific gas stations.
> 
> Then again, Superchargers are more than just fancy plug-in points: they're also a business model in which electricity is given away "free for life" for Model S owners, with all costs factored into the upfront price of the car.


----------



## ekim68

Inside the huge solar farm that powers Apple's iCloud



> The skies are threatening to pour on the Apple solar farm but as the woman in charge of the company's environmental initiatives points out: The panels are still putting out some power. Apple is still greening its act.
> 
> The company, which once drew fire from campaigners for working conditions in China and heavy reliance on fossil fuels, is now leading other technology companies in controlling its own power supply and expanding its use of renewable energy.





> Data centers, with their densely packed rows of servers and requirements for climatically controlled conditions, are notorious energy hogs. Some use as much power as a small city. In Apple's case, the North Carolina data center requires as much power as about 14,000 homes - about three times as much as the nearby town of Maiden.
> 
> Charging up a smartphone or tablet takes relatively little electricity, but watching an hour of streamed or internet video every week for a year uses up about as much power as running two refrigerators for a year because of the energy powering data centers elsewhere.


----------



## ekim68

Century-Old Pipe Break Points to National Problem



> The rupture of a nearly century-old water main that ripped a 15-foot hole through Sunset Boulevard and turned a swath of the University of California, Los Angeles, into a mucky mess points to the risks and expense many cities face with miles of water lines installed generations ago.
> 
> The flooding sent more than 20 million gallons of water cascading from a water main in the midst of California's worst drought in decades and as tough new state fines took effect for residents who waste water by hosing down driveways or using a hose without a nozzle to wash their car.
> 
> Much of the piping that carries drinking water in the country dates to the first half of the 20th century, *with some installed before Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House.*


----------



## ekim68

Behold These Incredible Works Of Architecture Made Out Of Living Trees



> Now these are the ultimate tree houses. Living trees are guided into the shapes of towers, cathedrals, and pavilions, creating wooden structures that continue to grow and bud and bloom.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Behold These Incredible Works Of Architecture Made Out Of Living Trees


Beautiful!


----------



## hewee

Wow that is so cool.


----------



## ekim68

Vision-correcting displays



> Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new display technology that automatically corrects for vision defects - no glasses (or contact lenses) required.
> 
> The technique could lead to dashboard-mounted GPS displays that farsighted drivers can consult without putting their glasses on, or electronic readers that eliminate the need for reading glasses, among other applications.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Used This 'Spooky' Propaganda to Kill Off a Local Internet Competitor



> In the days leading up to Halloween back in 2004, residents of the small town of Batavia, Illinois received a flier in the mail, from Comcast. Here's what it said: "Having Halloween Nightmares? Ghosts? Goblins? Witches?… A Municipal Broadband Utility?"
> 
> The city (and two others nearby) were getting ready to vote on a referendum measure that would have created a locally owned fiber network, set to be both faster and cheaper than the services offered by Comcast and SBC Communications, which is now owned by AT&T.


----------



## ekim68

World's top PR companies rule out working with climate deniers



> Some of the world's top PR companies have for the first time publicly ruled out working with climate change deniers, marking a fundamental shift in the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around the issue of global warming.
> 
> Public relations firms have played a critical role over the years in framing the debate on climate change and its solutions - as well as the extensive disinformation campaigns launched to block those initiatives.


----------



## ekim68

Students Build an Electric Car With Better Range Than a Tesla



> Tesla has a new competitor, and it's not from BMW or General Motors. It's from Australian university students, whose electric Sunswift eVe set a new world record for fastest average speed-more than 60mph-over 500 kilometers (310 miles) on a single battery charge, on July 23. That's a big deal: Range is the biggest issue holding back the widespread adoption of EVs, and this record shows the car can drive hundreds of miles at a reasonable highway speed. It stomped on the old record, a mere 45 mph, and drove farther than even the Tesla Model S, the current king of EVs, can go on a full charge.
> 
> The eVe is a lovely-looking car whose battery pack can be charged from a regular wall outlet, or using the array of solar panels on its hood and roof. It's the fifth vehicle made by the students, from the University of New South Wales; its predecessors date back to 1996 and include the IVy, which still holds the record for fastest drive by a solar-powered vehicle at 55 mph, set in 2011.


----------



## ekim68

11 of the Most Groundbreaking Structures of the Year



> Every year the Institution of Structural Engineers picks out the most interesting pieces of structural engineering out there, highlighting an aspect of design that tends to get overlooked. Today, it announced its picks for 2014-and they range from an Apple store to an ape enclosure.


----------



## ekim68

Implanted Neurons become Part of the Brain



> Scientists at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have grafted neurons reprogrammed from skin cells into the brains of mice for the first time with long-term stability. Six months after implantation, the neurons had become fully functionally integrated into the brain. This successful, because lastingly stable, implantation of neurons raises hope for future therapies that will replace sick neurons with healthy ones in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients, for example. The Luxembourg researchers published their results in the current issue of 'Stem Cell Reports'.


----------



## ekim68

Creepy Photos of Crumbling Soviet-Era Architecture



> The Soviet system failed in practice, and now 23 years after its collapse the physical remains of Communism are crumbling as well. In a series of 10 trips through Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the Baltics, including a tour of Chernobyl and a climb atop a frigid Bulgarian mountain, English photographer Rebecca Litchfield braved radiation and KGB-style interrogation techniques to capture the beauty of this bygone era in a series called Soviet Ghosts.


----------



## ekim68

The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.



> Last weekend, Toledo's 400,000 residents were sent scrambling for bottled water because the stuff from the tap had gone toxic-so toxic that city officials warned people against bathing their children or washing their dishes in it. The likely cause: a toxic blue-green algae bloom that floated over the city's municipal water intake in Lake Erie. On Monday morning, the city called off the don't-drink-the-water warning, claiming that levels of the contaminant in the water had fallen back to safe levels. Is their nightmare over?


----------



## ekim68

Don't worry, Californians can paint their dead lawns green



> When California regulators approved $500-a-day fines for overwatering lawns, suburbanites across the state gasped, "However will I keep my neighbors in check without a superior lawn to lord over them??"
> 
> Now, a solution: Slap on a fresh coat of green paint. The specially formulated (and supposedly nontoxic) grass dye lasts three to six months. It's catching on. "Companies that promise to paint lawns are cropping up all over California," National Journal reports. "The service lets homeowners cut back on water use without sacrificing curb appeal."


----------



## ekim68

Spurs hire Becky Hammon as assistant coach



> There's a reason the San Antonio Spurs are one of best organizations in the NBA.
> 
> Tuesday, the team named Becky Hammon an assistant coach, *making her the first female paid by an NBA team to be an assistant.*


----------



## ekim68

Monsanto Ordered to Pay $93 Million to Small Town for Poisoning Citizens



> Big wins can happen in small places. The West Virginia State Supreme Court finalized a big blow to the biotech giant Monsanto this month, finishing a settlement causing Monsanto to pay $93 million to the tiny town of Nitro, West Virginia for poisoning citizens with Agent Orange chemicals.


----------



## ekim68

Algorithm predicts US Supreme Court decisions 70% of time



> A legal scholar says he and colleagues have developed an algorithm that can predict, with 70 percent accuracy, whether the US Supreme Court will uphold or reverse the lower-court decision before it.
> 
> "Using only data available prior to the date of decision, our model correctly identifies 69.7 percent of the Court's overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes," Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law scholar, wrote on his blog Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Flower-Shaped Buildings Turn Cities Into Artificial Gardens


----------



## ekim68

Lakota Women Work to Fend Off South Dakota's Epic Drought



> The green of the hills was deceptive, she said. The appearance of lushness was only on the surface. People here had begun to notice the changing climate; after a drought that had persisted in the region on and off for 15 years, this summer's heavy rains had inundated the South Dakota plains. But the dry ground, she said, was unable to absorb the large quantities of rain, which ran off into flooded creeks down the Missouri River, without ever replenishing the aquifer.
> 
> Mni's goal, she explained to the camera, is to bring Cheyenne River's water table back into balance. It's an ambitious one: By constructing thousands of small dams in creeks and gulleys all over the reservation-essentially beaver dams built by humans-organizers hope to slow storm runoff long enough to enable the absorption of water back into the ground.


----------



## ekim68

Is There a Hidden Cost to your New Xfinity Router



> With the hopes of creating a nationwide public WiFi network, Comcast has been pushing new Xfinity WiFi routers into its customers' homes that broadcast a public wireless network in addition to the home Internet connection. It's an interesting idea that has been embraced by some, but has raised questions about security with others. As a bandwidth-obsessed engineer, my immediate inclination was to wonder where the heck the extra bandwidth for the public hotspot was coming from, and what kind of hidden electricity costs that might come with.
> 
> We ran some tests with one of these dual-signal routers in our office, and found that it was indeed costing Xfinity customers several dollars extra per month to support the public hotspot with this particular router.


----------



## ekim68

Ky. school district drops federal lunch program



> FORT THOMAS, Ky. - Lunch at Fort Thomas Independent Schools may include more French fries, fewer vegetables and larger portions this year. One thing that won't be on the menu: federal dollars.
> 
> The Campbell County, Ky., district is opting out of the federal school lunch program, forfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding.
> 
> The reason: Kids didn't like their healthful lunches.
> 
> "The calorie limitations and types of foods that have to be provided ... have resulted in the kids just saying 'I'm not going to eat that,' " said Fort Thomas Superintendent Gene Kirchner.
> 
> The 2,800-student district joins a small but growing number of school districts across the country - mostly wealthy districts that can afford to forfeit the money - that have dropped out of the federal program in the *wake of stricter nutritional standards.*


----------



## ekim68

British people trust Wikipedia more than the news



> Around two thirds of British people trust the authors of Wikipedia entries to tell the truth, many more than trust newspaper journalists.


----------



## ekim68

An NSA "Reform Bill" of the Intelligence Community, Written by the Intelligence Community, and for the Intelligence Community



> Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, introduced HR 4291, the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act (.pdf), to end the collection of all Americans' calling records using Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Both have vehemently defended the program since June, and it's reassuring to see two of the strongest proponents of NSA's actions agreeing with privacy advocates' (and the larger public's) demands to end the program. *The bill only needs 17 lines to stop the calling records program, but it weighs in at more than 40 pages. Why? Because the "reform" bill tries to create an entirely new government "authority" to collect other electronic data.*


----------



## ekim68

Rules prevent solar panels in many states with abundant sunlight



> Florida is one of several states, mostly in the Southeast, that combine copious sunshine with extensive rules designed to block its use by homeowners to generate power.
> 
> States like Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York - not known for clear, blue skies - have outpaced their counterparts to the south in the installation of rooftop solar panels.
> 
> While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business.


----------



## ekim68

'Terror Cam' Which Scans Crowd for Would-be Killers Invented in China



> Scientists at China's Southwest University in Chongqing are working on a new type of camera that takes Big Brother to a whole new level - the camera is meant to detect highly stressed individuals so that police can catch them before they commit a crime.
> 
> The camera makes use of hyperspectral imaging, i.e. a "stress sensor" that measures the amount of oxygen in blood across visible areas of the body, such as the face.
> 
> Chinese authorities are deeply concerned about the recent spate of deadly attacks occurring in public places, such as the mass stabbing attack by eight knife-wielding extremists in the city of Kunming, Yunnan in March, which left 29 civilians dead and over 140 others injured.


----------



## ekim68

Google, Asian telecoms to build $300 million undersea cable to Japan



> (Reuters) - Search engine Google Inc and five Asian telecom and communications companies have agreed to invest about $300 million to develop and operate a trans-Pacific cable network connecting the United States to Japan.
> 
> To be named "FASTER," the cable network will have an initial capacity of 60 terabits per second and will connect Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, Oregon and Seattle to Chikura and Shima in Japan.


----------



## ekim68

Here's How to Save Swimmers Without Killing Sharks



> It's that time of year when you'll be inundated with all things shark, what with Sharknado 2 and "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel. And so scientists want to remind you that we can coexist with the landlord, as surfers refer to the ocean's top predator.
> 
> "More humans are killed by toasters, cows, or vending machines than are killed by sharks, and heart disease kills about a million times as many people as sharks do," David Shiffman, a shark scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in a commentary published Monday in the journal Animal Conservation. "Many commonly used 'shark control' strategies involve killing sharks with the goal of reducing the probability of a swimmer encountering a shark."
> 
> Amid shark culls, such as the one in Western Australia, scientists in Brazil found that a strategy of catching sharks and relocating them resulted in a 97 percent drop in attacks off the coastal city of Recife between 2004 and 2011.


----------



## ekim68

Meet the First Woman to Win Math's Most Prestigious Prize



> As an 8-year-old, Maryam Mirzakhani used to tell herself stories about the exploits of a remarkable girl. Every night at bedtime, her heroine would become mayor, travel the world or fulfill some other grand destiny.
> 
> Today, Mirzakhani - a 37-year-old mathematics professor at Stanford University - still writes elaborate stories in her mind. The high ambitions haven't changed, but the protagonists have: They are hyperbolic surfaces, moduli spaces and dynamical systems. In a way, she said, mathematics research feels like writing a novel. "There are different characters, and you are getting to know them better," she said. "Things evolve, and then you look back at a character, and it's completely different from your first impression."


----------



## ekim68

Has the era of the 'climate change refugee' begun?



> Tuvalu's coastline consists of white and sandy beaches, green palm trees and mangroves. It is hard to imagine that anybody would want to leave this small island nation, located between Australia and Hawaii, voluntarily. But Tuvalu has become the epicenter of a landmark refugee ruling that could mark the beginning of a wave of similar cases: On June 4, a family was granted residency by the Immigration and Protection Tribunal in New Zealand after claiming to be threatened by climate change in its home country, Tuvalu. The news was first reported by the New Zealand Herald on Sunday.
> 
> The small Pacific island nation sits just two meters above sea level. If the current sea level rise continues, experts believe the island might disappear in approximately 30 to 50 years.


----------



## ekim68

Campaign Mounts to Declassify 9/11 Report's References to Alleged Saudi Involvement



> Nearly 13 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the extent of Saudi involvement in the deaths of almost 3,000 people remains unclear - but according to members of Congress and the families of victims, information about this has been suppressed ever since the publication of a 2002 congressional investigation into the plot.


----------



## ekim68

Telegram not dead STOP Alive, evolving in Japan STOP



> August 13, 2014, 3:16 PM - Throughout Japan, an army of workers stands ready to ensure important messages are delivered as quickly as possible. But they don't work in data centers maintaining email servers. They deliver telegrams.
> 
> Staff from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), one of the world's largest telecom companies, still drive around big cities and even board ships to remote Japanese islands hand-delivering telegrams from friends, loved ones and business partners.
> 
> The couriers are continuing a 145-year-old tradition, from 1869, when a government agency that preceded NTT began telegraphy services between Tokyo and the port of Yokohama.


----------



## ekim68

Coal Still Is Top Source of Electricity in U.S.; Where Does Your State Stand? 



> Since the first quarter of 2001, overall electricity generation from all fuel sources has risen 13% in the U.S. The main sources of that electricity have changed slightly.
> 
> In 2014 more states use natural gas as their main fuel for electricity generation compared to 2001, while several fewer states use coal than at the start of the millennium.


----------



## ekim68

Swimarium: The virtual reality swimming pool



> If you've ever fancied scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef but can't afford it, this idea from OVA Studio might provide a solution. The Swimarium is a design concept in which LED screens are placed all around a pool to create an immersive virtual swimming experience that would let you dive anywhere in the world.


----------



## ekim68

World's first 'smartphone' celebrates 20 years



> The IBM Simon went on sale to the public on 16 August 1994 and combined mobile phone technology with a wide range of computing features.
> 
> To mark the 20th anniversary, London's Science Museum is putting it on display in its new Information Age gallery.
> 
> "The Simon wasn't called a smartphone back then," said curator Charlotte Connelly.
> 
> "But it had a lot of the features we see today. It had a calendar, it could take notes and send emails and messages and combined all of this with a cell phone."


----------



## ekim68

Just living close to Walmart makes you fat



> New research published in the Journal of Transport & Health offers more evidence to bolster theories we already had: People living in dense, urban environments are far healthier than people living in the 'burbs.
> 
> Specifically, according to two engineers at the University of Connecticut and Colorado University, it's the design of the street grid that makes the biggest difference. The more intersections between streets, the lower the rates of those four American juggernauts: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. In other words, the more walkable the city, the better its residents' health.
> 
> According to the report, broad, multi-laned streets, characteristic of suburban sprawl, are linked with higher levels of obesity and diabetes. Same goes for "big box" stores, which are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 higher rates of obesity. The reason? Both factors indicate that the neighborhood is less friendly to pedestrians.


----------



## ekim68

Skip the Shark Week mockumentaries and watch real sharks on these live cams instead



> You love watching sharks - who doesn't? But it's hard to ignore the fact that the Discovery Channel has apparently run out of science, used up all of its hyperbole, and just started making stuff up.
> 
> Let's face it. Shark Week has jumped… Well, it's jumped itself.
> 
> But you still need your shark fix, right? Well, we at Grist are here to help. We've pulled together six of the best live shark cams from aquariums across the U.S. of A. It's The People's Shark Week!


----------



## ekim68

If driverless cars save lives, where will we get organs?



> It's a dark thought, and the sort of thing only a futurist would think of. Which is why I'm not surprised that Bre Pettis, founder and CEO of the 3D printing company Makerbot, brought it up. When I asked him about 3D-printed organs earlier this summer at the Northside Festival, a conference in Brooklyn, he told me that 3D-printed body parts won't become a reality until autonomous vehicles arrive to market. It makes for a surprising connection between two futuristic technologies.
> 
> "The self-driving car is coming, and right now, our best supply of organs comes from car accidents," he said. "So, if you need an organ you just wait for somebody to have an accident, and then you get their organ and you're better." I suggested that was a dark way of looking at it.


----------



## ekim68

Fighting (Tasty) Invasive Fish With Forks And Knives



> It's been called "Fishzilla." It breeds fast, has no natural predators and can grow to be 4 feet long. The northern snakehead hangs out in grassy shallows, making it hard to catch.
> 
> But a couple of years ago, Maryland started promoting the snakehead as an eating fish. Its harvest has increased from zero to 5,000 pounds a year.


----------



## ekim68

Hunger in America: 1 in 7 rely on food banks



> Nationwide, 25% of military families - 620,000 households - need help putting food on the table, according to a study by Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks.
> 
> "The results are alarming," says Bob Aiken, chief executive officer of Feeding America. "It means that people in America have to make trade-offs. They have to pick between buying food for their children or paying for utilities, rent and medicine."
> 
> One in seven Americans - 46 million people - rely on food pantries and meal service programs to feed themselves and their families, the study found.


----------



## ekim68

Hemp fibres 'better than graphene'



> The waste fibres from hemp crops can be transformed into high-performance energy storage devices, scientists say.
> 
> They "cooked" cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors "on a par with or better than graphene" - the industry gold standard.
> 
> Electric cars and power tools could harness this hemp technology, the US researchers say.
> 
> They presented their work at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco.


----------



## ekim68

Local police involved in 400 killings per year



> WASHINGTON - Nearly two times a week in the United States, a white police officer killed a black person during a seven-year period ending in 2012, according to the most recent accounts of justifiable homicide reported to the FBI.
> 
> On average, there were 96 such incidents among at least 400 police killings each year that were reported to the FBI by local police. The numbers appear to show that the shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last Saturday was not an isolated event in American policing.


----------



## ekim68

Symantec And Security Starlets Say Anti-Virus Is Dead



> The world's biggest IT security company Symantec has admitted anti-virus software is "dead" and it doesn't think of the technology as a money maker anymore.
> 
> The comments came from the company's senior vice president for information security, as a handful of other companies released reports trying to put the final nail in the coffin of anti-virus.
> 
> Whilst Dye told the Wall Street Journal it was still worth buying anti-virus to stop some threats, it still let through around 55 percent of attacks. And yet Symantec still counts on anti-virus for 40 percent of its revenues.


----------



## ekim68

How Much Sleep Does Your City Get?



> It may often feel like you're running on a little less sleep than you should. But is how much sleep you're getting (or not getting) a function of where you live? Here are the cities that sleep the most and the least.
> 
> Jawbone, which makes the Up fitness tracker device, crunched the data from their users from around the world to see how much sleep they were really getting. And it turns out that everyone is a little sleep-deprived, though there's a lot of variation between the individual cities.


----------



## ekim68

Shoddy U.S. roads and bridges take a toll on the economy



> America's transportation infrastructure, once an engine of mobility and productivity, has fallen into such disrepair that it's become an economic albatross.
> 
> Consumers shell out billions of dollars for extra car repairs every year. Insufficient and poorly maintained roads mean costly bottlenecks for businesses, which discourage expansion and hobble American companies competing in the global economy.


----------



## ekim68

Taku-Tanku portable tiny house can be towed by bike



> The tiny house movement is as much about lifestyle as it is size of dwelling. Simplicity and efficiency are key characteristics of such a house. Not only is Stereotank's Taku-Tanku very small, it has few components, can be easily assembled, and even towed by a bicycle.


----------



## ekim68

Watch Six Months of Fracking Fires Blaze Across the Country



> Massive fires light up the sky in U.S. states at the center of a fracking boom.
> 
> The fires-known as flaring-are a symptom of the rapid spread of the controversial drilling technique. Cities and towns across the country are scrambling to keep up with a newfound surplus of natural gas, and towering flames arise when excess gas is burned off at drill sites.


----------



## ekim68

Congress banned from editing Wikipedia for transphobic revisions



> For the third time in less than two months, Congress has been temporarily banned from editing Wikipedia.
> 
> The anonymous congressional staffer who has become famous for his or her eyebrow-raising Wikipedia edits has been blocked for a month after a recent round of transphobic revisions.
> 
> The IP address 143.231.249.138, which is assigned to the House of Representatives, received the editing block Wednesday for writing offensive things on Wikipedia articles for the term "tranny," the Camp Trans protest, the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black, and a condition known as body integrity identity disorder.


----------



## ekim68

Fracking operations get even closer to drinking water sources than we thought



> Fracking companies have tried their best to quell the public's fears about the practice. But, uh, they're not doing a very good job of it. A new study shows that oil and gas companies are fracking at much shallower depths than previously thought - sometimes even through potential underground sources of drinking water.
> 
> To be clear, the study - which looked at the fracking operations at two geological formations in Wyoming - did not find current drinking water sources to be contaminated. But Stanford researchers Dominic DiGiulio and Robert Jackson did discover that, even as oil and gas companies usually report that fracking takes place thousands of feet below aquifers, some fracking chemicals actually get scarily close to aquifers that have been categorized as safe for human consumption.


----------



## ekim68

Wearable device shipments have soared in the past year



> In case you had any doubts that wearable devices were catching on, Canalys just delivered some tangible proof. The analyst group estimates that the tech industry shipped roughly 4.5 million smartwatches and fitness trackers in the first half of 2014, or nearly 700 percent more than it managed a year earlier.


----------



## ekim68

New enzyme targets for selective cancer therapies



> Thanks to important discoveries in basic and clinical research and technological advances, the fight against cancer has mobilized into a complex offensive spanning multiple fronts.
> 
> Work happening in a University of Alberta chemistry lab could help find new and more selective therapies for cancer. Researchers have developed a compound that targets a specific enzyme overexpressed in certain cancers -- and they have tested its activity in cells from brain tumours.


----------



## ekim68

Thanks To The Clean Air Act, We Breathe 3 Million Fewer Tons Of Toxins Each Year



> Actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act have caused U.S. toxic air emissions to drop "significantly" - in some cases by more than half - since the law was amended in 1990, the regulatory agency told Congress in a report Thursday.
> 
> Since 1990, an estimated 3 million tons of toxins from mobile and stationary sources have been removed from the air every year, according to the report. Emissions of benzene, a pollutant found in natural gas, have dropped in outdoor air by 66 percent, while the amount of mercury from man-made sources like coal plants has dropped by nearly 60 percent, the report said. The amount of lead has decreased the most, by 84 percent since 1990.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Thanks To The Clean Air Act, We Breathe 3 Million Fewer Tons Of Toxins Each Year


:up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

All soon to increase again with the increase in Flare off from fracking.

Why, if they cannot transport it, do they frack for it in the first place? Surely it would be better to conserve the supplies for the future, or is it too much greed now??


----------



## ekim68

Welcome to the Capitalistic model of not seeing beyond the next Quarterly Profit....


----------



## ekim68

Four students invented nail polish that detects date rape drugs



> Checking to see if your drink has been tampered with is about to get a whole lot more discreet. Thanks to the work of four North Carolina State University undergrads, you'll soon be able to find out without reaching for a testing tool. That's because you'll already have five of them on each hand.
> 
> The team - Ankesh Madan, Stephen Gray, Tasso Von Windheim, and Tyler Confrey-Maloney - has come up with a creative and unobtrusive way to package chemicals that react when exposed to Rohypnol and GHB. They put it in nail polish that they're calling Undercover Colors.


----------



## ekim68

In search of libertarians



> The question of whether libertarianism is gaining public support has received increased attention, with talk of a Rand Paul run for president and a recent New York Times magazine story asking if the "Libertarian Moment" has finally arrived. But if it has, there are still many Americans who do not have a clear sense of what "libertarian" means, and our surveys find that, on many issues, the views among people who call themselves libertarian do not differ much from those of the overall public.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Four students invented nail polish that detects date rape drugs


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Just Six Months After the Olympics, Sochi Looks Like a Ghost Town



> It's been almost exactly six months since the Sochi Olympics wrapped up and the world promptly moved on to speculating about the Rio 2016. Since then, the area has been left holding the proverbial bag-which as Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy shows us, is full of too many buildings and not enough people to occupy them.


----------



## ekim68

Many Parents are Unable to See Their Children Have Unhealthy Body Weight: Study



> Many American parents are blind to their children's obesity and weight issues, finds a study.
> 
> It is a known fact that parents are less likely to accept their chubby children need some serious weight watching and diet. A new research by the Georgia Southern University in Statesboro found mothers and fathers fail to detect increase in body weight of children aged between six and 11. The experts compared survey analysis of parents on children's health and body weight conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during 2005 to 2010 and 1988 to 1994. They noticed of- late, parents and care-givers were in denial and 24 percent less likely to recognize bulging waistlines and flab as obesity.


----------



## ekim68

2014 Best Bang for the Buck Rankings - National Universities



> For the second year in a row, in addition to our public good-based evaluations, we've released a rankings set based on the economic value students receive per dollar.


----------



## ekim68

Why Smart Clothing Will Kill the Fitness Tracker Wristband



> Jawbone, Fitbit, Misfit - your days are numbered. The era of the fitness wristband may already be over. The next generation of fitness gadgets is already here, as companies figure out ways to incorporate all the sensors used to track your movement into things you're already wearing.
> 
> Why wear an extra piece of equipment, and a geeky one at that, if you can get something that's already built into your clothing?


----------



## ekim68

Buffett puts shareholders ahead of patriotism in Canadian deal



> (Reuters) - Warren Buffett may be most famous for the billions of dollars he has made from investing but he is also well known as a cheerleader for the United States. The Oracle of Omaha routinely exhorts investors to put their money in America, "the mother lode of opportunity," as he wrote in his annual letter this year.
> 
> So Buffett's participation in fast-food chain Burger King Worldwide Inc's purchase of coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons Inc - complete with relocation of Burger King's domicile to Canada - might at first blush raise questions about his patriotism.
> 
> Investors and tax experts say Miami-based Burger King's move to Canada through a so-called tax inversion will help curb its U.S. tax bill.


----------



## ekim68

The Expanding World of Poverty Capitalism



> In Orange County, Calif., the probation department's "supervised electronic confinement program," which monitors the movements of low-risk offenders, has been outsourced to a private company, Sentinel Offender Services. The company, by its own account, oversees case management, including breath alcohol and drug-testing services, "all at no cost to county taxpayers."
> 
> Sentinel makes its money by getting the offenders on probation to pay for the company's services. Charges can range from $35 to $100 a month.
> 
> The company boasts of having contracts with more than 200 government agencies, and it takes pride in the "development of offender funded programs where any of our services can be provided at no cost to the agency."
> 
> Sentinel is a part of the expanding universe of poverty capitalism. In this unique sector of the economy, costs of essential government services are shifted to the poor.


----------



## ekim68

Tom Hanks' new app an homage to manual typewriters



> A new app for the iPad aims to recreate the nostalgic sense of typing on a manual typewriter, but ramped up to meet the demands of digital-age word processing.
> 
> The brainchild of Oscar-winning actor and collector of vintage typewriters Tom Hanks, the app, perhaps aptly called Hanx Writer, replicates the aural and visual sensations of old-fashioned typing.
> 
> "In the late 70s's I bought a typewriter - portable enough for world travel and sturdy enough to survive decades of 10-fingered beatings," Hanks stated in a note shared in the app.
> 
> "I've since acquired many more - each different in design, action and sound. Each one stamps into paper a permanent trail of imagination through keys, hammers, cloth and dye," he wrote.
> 
> The app allows users to type emails, letters and stories on a virtual typewriter, accompanied by the sound of clanking keys as each character appears on the page beneath the type hammer.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Tom Hanks' new app an homage to manual typewriters


----------



## ekim68

A Map of Every Device in the World That's Connected to the Internet



> Where is the internet? This map might explain it better than any statistics could ever hope to: The red hot spots show where the most devices that can access the internet are located.
> 
> This map was made on August 2 by John Matherly, the founder of Shodan, a search engine for internet-connected devices. Matherly, who calls himself an internet cartographer, collected the data to put it together by sending ping requests to every IP address on the internet, and storing the positive responses. A ping is a network utility that sends an echo-request message (known as a packet) to an IP address-the internet's version of "hey, are you there?"


----------



## ekim68

Singapore's surreal Supertree Grove and Cloud Forest



> There are places on this Earth where you simply stand, slack-jawed, and pinch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming - and Singapore's Gardens by the Bay is as surreal a place as I've ever been. This billion-dollar techno-garden theme park is absolutely stunning right through, but the two stand-out highlights are its signature Supertree Grove - a collection of giant cyborg trees - and the Cloud Forest - a gigantic bio-dome that recreates the environment and climate of a mountaintop forest at sea level. As a bonus, there's also the world's tallest indoor waterfall.


----------



## ekim68

States with Medical Marijuana Have Fewer Painkiller Deaths



> In the U.S., 23 states and the District of Columbia allow their residents to legally use medical marijuana. And, according to a new study, death certificates reveal that states with a medical marijuana law have lower rates of deaths caused by narcotic painkiller overdoses than other states.
> 
> Only California, Oregon and Washington had laws effective prior to 1999, the point when the researchers began their analysis. Ten other states put laws on their books between 1999 and 2010. The researchers analyzed each state in the years after a medical cannabis law came into effect.
> 
> Overall, the states with these laws had a nearly 25 percent reduction in opioid overdose deaths. The study was published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine.


----------



## ekim68

Millions of historic images posted to Flickr



> An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.
> 
> Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added.
> 
> The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.
> 
> The images have been difficult to access until now.


----------



## ekim68

How big telecom smothers city-run broadband



> Tullahoma is just one battlefront in a nationwide war that the telecommunications giants are fighting against the spread of municipal broadband networks. For more than a decade, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. have spent millions of dollars to lobby state legislatures, influence state elections and buy research to try to stop the spread of public Internet services that often offer faster speeds at cheaper rates.
> 
> The companies have succeeded in getting laws passed in 20 states that ban or restrict municipalities from offering Internet to residents.


----------



## ekim68

When our wearables talk with our doctors



> But even today's 2.0 devices have a fairly limited application. While they do collect data over time and communicate with smartphones, their impact won't truly be known until this fall. That's when Apple, Google and Samsung will launch platforms (HealthKit, Google Fit and SAMI, respectively) enabling consumers to aggregate health data from a number of devices, and relay the information to other parties including health care providers and electronic health records. Apple and EHR company Epic Systems have already announced a partnership, and Allscripts is reportedly in talks with the Cupertino-based company.





> The link to medical providers, some analysts and doctors say, has the potential to transform health care and medical research by boosting the number of patients doctors can treat, shifting treatment to more preventative measures and lowering the costs of care and insurance.
> 
> "It's a straightforward way of connecting the data end to end from the consumer's home straight to the physician's office," says Jim Taschetta, iHealth chief marketing officer.


----------



## ekim68

Google reveals crisis response map for Tokyo



> Google has unveiled an interactive map for citizens of Tokyo to make crisis preparation in the event of natural disasters easier in the future.
> 
> On Friday, the tech giant revealed the map in a post on the Google Asia Pacific blog. The time of the announcement is close to the 91st anniversary of the Great Kanto earthquake, a combination of earthquake and tsunami which is considered to be the worst natural disaster ever to strike Japan. The country, which is quake-prone due to its location, had to recover following the 1923 earthquake, tsunami and fires which took the lives of approximately 140,000 people.


----------



## ekim68

Mexican woman to become oldest ever person at 127 - and says CHOCOLATE is her secret to long life



> A Mexican woman who will become the oldest human ever to have lived when she turns 127 tomorrow has claimed chocolate is to credit for her longevity.
> 
> Leandra Becerra Lumbreras was born on 31 August, 1887, meaning she was 27 at the beginning of World War I and 82 when man first set foot on the moon.


----------



## ekim68

Radioactive wild boar roaming the forests of Germany



> Twenty-eight years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, its effects are still being felt as far away as Germany - in the form of radioactive wild boars.
> 
> Wild boars still roam the forests of Germany, where they are hunted for their meat, which is sold as a delicacy.
> 
> But in recent tests by the state government of Saxony, more than one in three boars were found to give off such high levels of radiation that they are unfit for human consumption.


----------



## ekim68

Mexican Judge Departs From Script, Turns Monsanto's Mexican Dream Into Legal Nightmare



> The U.S. agribusiness giant Monsanto is long accustomed to getting its own way. Through a combination of back-channel lobbying, opaque political funding and revolving-door politics, the multinational agrochemical and biotechnology corporation has subverted, corrupted and infiltrated the elected governments of countries around the world, from the smallest and poorest to the biggest and richest.
> 
> However, if recent events in Europe and Latin America are any indication, the tide may well be subtly turning against the interests of Monsanto and its fellow GMO oligopolies and in the favor of independent food growers and consumers.


----------



## ekim68

2014 Checking Account Cost Comparison Report



> With all the current costs associated with a basic checking account - from monthly maintenance fees to ATM withdrawal charges to money transfer costs - one can hardly keep track of their growing structural complexity. These days, a customer could even be assessed a fee just for speaking with a bank teller. And those costs can vary by hundreds of dollars depending on several factors, including one's usage habits and banking institution.
> 
> In the heels of WalletHub's annual Checking Account Transparency Report and to further assist consumers, WalletHub compared the annual costs of 65 checking accounts offered by the 25 largest U.S. consumer-facing banks, based on total asset volume as reported by the FDIC. In order to do so, we constructed five consumer profiles by using a variety of theoretical usage patterns.


----------



## ekim68

What City Will Run Out of Water First?



> As drought threatens more areas of the world, we're hearing a steady stream of stories about cities, towns and regions whose water supply is interrupted temporarily.
> 
> That's led experts to investigate what major world city could be the first to run out of water entirely. And it could be a city right here in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

September 3, 2014
50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act



> "Lots of people never set foot in a wilderness sanctuary, but they like the idea, the concept that somewhere Nature is working her will in the absence of the heavy hand of man," he explains. "Whether it's a trip to the zoo, or a heavily used city park, there's something in the American people, inherited from their grandfathers and grandmothers who were the frontier vanguard that developed this country, for the outdoors. Even if they've never had a camping trip, never sampled Nature, they are an alliance of people who speak for unspoiled landscapes, rivers, mountains and deserts."


----------



## ekim68

Aerial drones to help protect endangered species of rhino



> Aerial drones, whether they be dropping bombs, books or burritos, have attracted a certain degree of controversy in recent times. While the potential of the technology is plain to see, many aren't convinced that the benefits will outweigh the risks associated with unmanned vehicles zipping about in the sky above. With its recent field testing of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to protect an ailing rhino population, Airware are determined to help the industry shed some of these negative connotations.
> 
> Airware is a California-based company that specializes in the development of autopilots for unmanned aircraft systems. It recently teamed up with the Oj Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya to test a drone equipped with Airware's autopilot platform and control software that will allow it to act as both a deterrent and surveillance tool. The system uses fixed and gimbal-mounted cameras to deliver real-time digital video and thermal images to rangers on the ground, enabling them to deploy a security team in the event of an incident.


----------



## ekim68

The 33 Things to Eat, Drink, See, and Do Before Climate Change Ruins Everything



> You're the kind of person who likes his boardwalks above water. You don't have allergies. You like winter. You want your champagne to come from the Champagne region of France-not some unromantic corner of England hundreds of miles to the north. You like cherry pie. You like oysters. You eat fish. You don't eat jellyfish. You're the kind of person, then, who needs the Matter handbook to a burning planet, a compendium of real scientific findings that look at how the globe may change over the next fifty years and beyond. Think of it as your guide to the good life before climate change melts it away.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> The 33 Things to Eat, Drink, See, and Do Before Climate Change Ruins Everything


Been to Joshua Tree


----------



## ekim68

We're gonna have to change our thinking about wasting/using water from now on, eh?


----------



## hewee

We are in sad shape for water around here.

They also just added smart water meters.

MANDATORY Water Restriction
http://sswd.org/index.aspx?recordid=173&page=28

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/c...Most-Productive-Farming-Valley-273339641.html

You can see this for miles and miles going down the freeway. It's all dry and that was the last two falls that I seen this so it may of been around longer. But each year it's worse.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Drought-Feds-cut-water-to-Central-Valley-farmers-5256131.php


----------



## ekim68

Army can't track spending on $4.3b system to track spending, IG finds



> More than $725 million was spent by the Army on a high-tech network for tracking supplies and expenses that failed to comply with federal financial reporting rules meant to allow auditors to track spending, according to an inspector general's report issued Wednesday.
> 
> The Global Combat Support System-Army, a logistical support system meant to track supplies, spare parts and other equipment, was launched in 1997. In 2003, the program switched from custom software to a web-based commercial software system.
> 
> About $95 million was spent before the switch was made, according to the report from the Department of Defense IG.
> 
> As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Russian bank hires two former U.S. senators



> Gazprombank GPB (OJSC), a Russian bank targeted with sanctions by President Obama over the Ukraine crisis, has hired two former U.S. senators to lobby against those sanctions, according to a new disclosure filed with the Senate.
> 
> Gazprombank is controlled by Russia's state-owned energy company Gazprom, the country's largest gas producer; it supplies about a third of Europe's natural gas.
> 
> In a filing submitted Friday and effective that day, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Senator John Breaux, D-La., are listed as the main lobbyists under the Gazprombank account for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, lobbying on "banking laws and regulations including applicable sanctions."


----------



## ekim68

These Beautiful Giant Sculptures Support Power Lines With Style



> Electricity pylons, or transmission towers, usually aren't the most interesting structures, just basic towers that keep electrical wires aloft. But some architects have designed innovative towers that are more than mere eyesores.


----------



## poochee

Very nice!


----------



## ekim68

The Oldest Pyramid in Egypt is Being Destroyed by its Own Restoration Team



> The oldest pyramid in Egypt, the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, is being destroyed by the very company the Egyptian government has hired to restore it. The roughly 4,600-year-old structure has been in trouble since an earthquake hit the region in 1992, but in a difficult political and economic climate for the country, those now tasked with preserving the pyramid are doing more harm than good. Egyptian activists claim the company, Shurbagy, doesn't even have the necessary experience to be undertaking the work in the first place, and they have launched a campaign against the Minister of Antiquities, Mamdouh al-Damaty, claiming a "full-fledged crime" has been committed.


----------



## ekim68

America's public schools remain highly segregated



> Fifty million children will start school this week as historic changes are under way in the U.S. public school system. As of 2011 48 percent of all public school students were poor* and this year, students of color will account for the majority of public school students for the first time in US history.
> 
> What is surprising about these shifts is that they are not leading to more diverse schools. In fact, the Civil Rights Project has shown that black students are just as segregated today as they were in the late 1960s, when serious enforcement of desegregation plans first began following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.


----------



## ekim68

iWatch Marks Real Start of Tim Cook Era



> You've probably already marked your calendars for Sept. 9, but I'll give you another good reason to do so. It's not just the day Apple will likely unveil the highly anticipated iPhone 6 and iWatch. It's also the day CEO Tim Cook will finally step out from Steve Jobs' very large shadow.
> 
> For the last couple of years, critics have complained that Apple has rested on its laurels by not truly innovating or debuting products in new categories. There's some merit to this criticism, but it's a mistake to conflate being the first-to-market with success. That's never been Apple's modus operandi. Apple reinvents categories. Steve Jobs did it with the iPhone and iPad, and now Cook will attempt to do the same with wearables.


----------



## ekim68

Detroit fire department has alert system made of pop cans, doorbells



> Detroit is so broke that firefighters get emergency alerts through pop cans, coins, door hinges, pipes and doorbells.
> 
> And they make these gizmos themselves - one involving a pop can that gets tipped over by an incoming fax. The clink of the can means there's an emergency. Then there's the chain-reaction gadget: a fax hits a door hinge, which then tugs on a wire, which then sets off a doorbell.
> 
> "It sounds unbelievable, but it's truly what the guys have been doing and dealing with for a long, long time," said Detroit Deputy Fire Commissioner John Berlin, adding that technological upgrades are long overdue. "We're in desperate need. We're probably 30 years behind."


----------



## ekim68

Apple computer less powerful than phone could sell for $500K



> An original Apple-1 computer valued at $300,000 to $500,000 is up for sale. The computer, one of the 50 hand-built by Steve Wozniak in 1976, will be sold by Bonhams on Oct. 22 as part of its History of Science auction. The fine art auction house will be previewing the computer to the public in San Francisco later this month and is touting the relic's value.


----------



## ekim68

Does holding kids back a year help them academically? No. But schools still do it.



> It may seem to make sense to hold back for a year a student who can't read well but a mountain of research shows that it doesn't actually help. Unfortunately, school reformers don't seem to care what the research says.


----------



## ekim68

The Declining U.S. Reliance on Foreign Investors



> The United States has been borrowing from the rest of the world since the mid-1980s. From 2000 to 2008, this borrowing averaged over $600 billion per year, which translates into U.S. spending exceeding income by almost 5.0 percent of GDP. Borrowing fell during the recent recession, as would be expected, and then rebounded with the recovery. Since 2011, however, borrowing has trended down and fell to 2.4 percent of GDP in 2013, the smallest amount as a share of GDP since 1997.


----------



## ekim68

This House's Rooms Rotate With the Touch of a Button



> The delightful, surprising design of the Sharifi-ha House by Tehran-based architecture firm Next Office centers around its rotating box-shaped rooms on three floors. The motorized rooms can each be turned 90 degrees to make them outward- or inward-facing according to the weather. The angles at which the boxes are pivoted change the disposition of the rooms and the appearance of the house's narrow facade.


----------



## ekim68

America Keeps People Poor On Purpose: A Timeline of Choices We've Made to Increase Inequality 



> In his deeply researched book 'Who Stole the American Dream?', Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith reports on the structural choices that have brought the United States to a crisis of inequality. He decribes "the heyday of the middle class," from the mid-1940's to the mid-1970's, when higher wages gave tens of millions of families steady income to spend, generating consumer demand, expansion of production, and higher living standards. Social movements of the 1960's building on labor agreements from earlier decades, pushed new legal protections for consumers and the environment. Smith's detailed timeline from the book, excerpted and adapted here, *charts how strategic lobbying and legislation over the next four decades gave corporations dominion over the economy and eroded the security of the American middle class.*


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> America Keeps People Poor On Purpose: A Timeline of Choices We've Made to Increase Inequality


Need to get the Tar and Feathers out on Our Government.


----------



## ekim68

Or at least the Lobbyists who control our Government....:up:


----------



## ekim68

Honey, we could have a new weapon in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria



> We've seen several promising developments arise in recent years in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or so-called "superbugs", from antibiotic "smart bombs" and hydrogels to "ninja polymers" and natural proteins. The latest potential weapon to join the armory comes from a substance used for thousands of years to fight infections - raw honey.
> 
> Researchers at Sweden's Lund University have identified a unique group of 13 lactic acid bacteria found in the honey stomach of bees and passed onto fresh honey. When the bacteria, which produces a range of active microbial compounds, was applied to various severe would pathogens, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Pseudomonas aeruginosa and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), it was able to counteract them all.


----------



## ekim68

6 Ways to Bring More Empathy to the Internet 



> Whether it's sharing cute photos of your pet on Instagram, posting birthday messages on Facebook, or starting your own video blog on YouTube, the Internet is constantly offering us more ways to connect.
> 
> However, all this interconnection doesn't necessarily result in a better understanding between individuals. Relating to others with empathy-that is, putting oneself in the shoes of another person to understand and share their feelings-is often more difficult to do online than in real life.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Or at least the Lobbyists who control our Government....:up:


You got that right.


----------



## ekim68

Hawaii ramps up efforts to move homeless people from tourists areas



> Officials say visitors are complaining about the islands' homeless population and warn they may not return for another holiday.


----------



## ekim68

Short walking breaks found to reverse negative effects of prolonged sitting



> BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- An Indiana University study has found that three easy -- one could even say slow -- five-minute walks can reverse harm caused to leg arteries during three hours of prolonged sitting.
> 
> Sitting for long periods of time, like many people do daily at their jobs, is associated with risk factors such as higher cholesterol levels and greater waist circumference that can lead to cardiovascular and metabolic disease. When people sit, slack muscles do not contract to effectively pump blood to the heart. Blood can pool in the legs and affect the endothelial function of arteries, or the ability of blood vessels to expand from increased blood flow.


----------



## ekim68

Yahoo says gov't threatened $250,000 a day fine



> WASHINGTON (AP) - Yahoo said Thursday the government threatened to fine the company $250,000 a day if it did not comply with demands to go along with an expansion of U.S. surveillance by surrendering online information, a step the company regarded as unconstitutional.
> 
> The outlines of Yahoo's secret and ultimately unsuccessful court fight against government surveillance emerged when a federal judge ordered the unsealing of some material about Yahoo's court challenge.
> 
> In a statement, Yahoo said the government amended a law to demand user information from online services, prompting a challenge in 2007 during the George W. Bush administration.
> 
> "Our challenge, and a later appeal in the case, did not succeed," Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell said in a statement.


----------



## ekim68

San Diego Unified Got An Armored Vehicle Under Military Surplus Program



> San Diego Unified School District recently acquired a tank.
> 
> Well, it's as big as a tank, and it's in the garage of Morse High School.
> 
> It's actually a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, more commonly called an MRAP. The U.S. military has used these vehicles in Afghanistan and Iraq wars. They're capable of withstanding improvised explosive devices and smashing through barricades. Police departments around the country use similar vehicles for SWAT team deployments.





> The vehicle's worth about $730,000, but like all equipment in the 1033 program it was free. San Diego Unified spent about $5,000 to ship it from storage in Texas to San Diego.


----------



## ekim68

Pedalist velomobile could be a head-turning alternative to driving



> Well, the popular Elf velomobile may be in for some competition. San Diego-based Virtue Cycle Solutions has developed a sort of electric cargo trike/pedal car type thing of its own, that it's hoping to bring to production sometime soon. We had a chance to take a peek at the snazzy-looking prototype at Interbike 2014.


----------



## ekim68

iPhone 6 presales begin -- with US Apple Store caught napping



> The launch of the new iPhone 6 models is supposed to be Apple's biggest. But the company's online store wasn't up to the task at the start.


----------



## ekim68

City of Turin decides to ditch Windows XP for Ubuntu and €6m saving



> €6m: the amount the municipality of Turin hopes to save over five years by switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux in all of its offices.
> 
> The move will mean installing the open source operating system on 8,300 PCs, which will generate an immediate saving of roughly €300 per machine (almost €2.5m altogether, made up from the cost of Windows and Office licences) - a sum that will grow over the years as the need for the renewal of proprietary software licences vanishes, and the employees get used to the new machines.


----------



## ekim68

If Tesla's Gigafactory can run on 100% renewable energy, why can't others?



> Tesla's Gigafactory, the world's largest lithium-ion battery factory, is expected to generate as much renewable energy as it needs to operate -- and then some.
> 
> Last week, Tesla announced it would build its factory outside of Reno, Nevada.
> 
> Using conservative estimates, the Gigafactoy's trifecta of renewable energy sources could generate more than 2,900MWh of renewable electricity daily, which amounts to 20% more than it needs, according to Tom Lombardo, a professor of engineering and technology at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill.
> 
> "These are conservative estimates on production and worst-case estimates on consumption, and it's clear that there's enough renewable energy to run the plant with some to spare," Lombardo wrote in wrote in a recent blog.


----------



## ekim68

The most educated countries in the world



> More people access higher education today than ever before. One in three adults in developed countries held a college degree in 2012, a substantial increase from 2000 when just over one in five had attained such qualifications.
> 
> According to data recently released by the Organization for Co-operation and Development (OECD), more than half of Russian adults held tertiary degrees in 2012 - the equivalent of college degree in the United States - more than in any other country reviewed. Meanwhile, less than 4% of Chinese adults had tertiary qualifications in 2012, less than in any other country. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 countries with the highest proportion of adults holding a college degree.


----------



## ekim68

Players Help Power the Lights on This Soccer Field Just by Running



> As they make their way up and down the field chasing the ball, the players on this new soccer pitch in Rio de Janeiro are actually helping to keep the lights powered when the sun sets. Because underneath the artificial turf are 200 special tiles that work like tiny generators to harness the kinetic energy of the players and turn it into electricity.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Players Help Power the Lights on This Soccer Field Just by Running


Need something like that on the roads and freeways. Just think of all the power that could be made.


----------



## ekim68

Get Over It and End Cuban Embargo



> U.S. policies toward Cuba are anachronistic and perplexing.
> 
> The embargo is a Cold War relic that has long ago stopped serving its intended purpose. It was adopted after the now-defunct Soviet Union tried to establish nuclear bases on the island, bringing the two superpowers to the verge of nuclear war.
> 
> But what purpose does the embargo serve today? A half-century later, we have to wonder why it continues. A humanitarian crisis grips the island. You might not read about it in U.S., but overseas media reports on it regularly. The Guardian last week reported that, "US economic sanctions against Cuba have cost the island nation $3.9bn in foreign trade over the past year, helping to raise the overall estimate of economic damage to $116.8bn over the past 55 years, Cuba said on Tuesday."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Get Over It and End Cuban Embargo


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Massive Floods Are Coming. We Are Not Prepared.



> The risk of flood is on the rise, and experts agree: society isn't ready for what lies ahead.
> 
> Yesterday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) published a landmark investigation on the connections between climate change, population growth and sea-level rise. The study concludes that the amount of the U.S. at risk for floods could increase 45% by 2100, doubling the number of flood-prone properties covered by the National Flood Insurance program and exacting a strenuous toll on the country's Flood Insurance Program.


----------



## ekim68

Local Motors' 3D Printed 'Strati' Car Has Just Taken Its First Test Drive



> When it comes to 3D printing, new breakthroughs and new achievements are being realized almost on a daily basis. From 3D printable human tissue, to a 3D printed life-size castle, and now a 3D printed automobile, the technology never seizes to amaze.
> 
> This week, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago, Arizona-based automobile manufacturer Local Motors stole the show. Over the six day span of the IMTS, the company managed to 3D print, and assemble an entire automobile, called the 'Strati', live in front of spectators.


----------



## ekim68

Sweden Takes a Left Turn After 8 Years of Rightist Rule



> GOTHENBURG, Sweden - After eight years of a tax-cutting, free-market government, Sweden was poised on Sunday night to turn toward the center left, as a loose coalition of left-leaning parties won a slim but clear lead in parliamentary elections.
> 
> In a violent shock to Sweden's liberal establishment, however, the far-right Sweden Democrats became the country's third force in politics, more than doubling their share of the vote to 13 percent and setting the stage to hold the balance of power in a Parliament where the center left will struggle to build a stable majority.


----------



## ekim68

Shipwreck that gave up ancient 'computer' revisited



> A shipwreck that yielded a 2,000-year-old "computer" known as the Antikythera Mechanism is being freshly explored using another remarkable piece of technology.
> 
> A new, spacesuit-like "Exosuit" is being worn by deep-sea-diving archaeologists searching a shipwreck off the coast of a Greek island over the next month. The $1.5 million suit "expands our capabilities" and will let workers "grasp, pluck, clench, and dig" around the 400-foot deep wreck for hours, an archeaologist involved with the Antikythera expedition tells AFP.
> 
> The suit is like a "wearable submarine," a diving specialist on the mission told New Scientist earlier this year. "The pressure inside is no different from being in a submarine or in fresh air. We can go straight to the bottom, spend five hours there and come straight back to the surface with no decompression."


----------



## ekim68

Court: Dealers Can't Stop Tesla From Selling Direct to MA Consumers



> Tesla Motors, the high-performance electric car company headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has won another legal skirmish in its quest to sell cars directly to consumers.
> 
> On Monday, Massachusetts' top court ruled that car dealers in the state had no right to sue Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) for its direct-sales model, which cuts out any middlemen in the car-buying process.


----------



## ekim68

Virginity worth $5,000, rules China court



> Shanghai (AFP) - A Chinese woman who sued a man for "violating her right to virginity" after he wooed her with false promises has been awarded nearly $5,000 by a court, reports said Wednesday.
> 
> The two were dating but after the woman, surnamed Chen, found out her boyfriend was already married she sued him for swindling her out of her virginity, accusing him of pretending to be single and pledging to make her his wife, Shanghai media said.


----------



## ekim68

Here's What Happened When 13 States Raised Their Minimum Wages



> In 2014, 13 states raised their minimum wages, five through legislation and eight through inflation indexing. Gould compared wage growth for the bottom 10 percent of Americans in those 13 states with the rest of America. In the former, real wages grew 0.9 percent, a non-negligible increase. In the remaining 37 states, real wages declined 0.1 percent. In other words, wage growth for the bottom 10 percent of Americans is entirely attributable to states that increased their minimum wages.
> 
> That's good news, but it's not unexpected. Conservatives largely concede that raising the minimum wage increases wages. They oppose it, they say, because it will reduce job growth. So, did that happen in those 13 states? Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden and a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, looked at the data. He found that job growth was higher in states that raised their minimum wages than it was in those that didn't (1.8 percent versus 1.5 percent).


----------



## ekim68

Sign of former times? 

There's something comical and quaint about vintage black-and-white photos from 100 years ago. Until, that is, they come to life and start acting like a dream (or a horrendous nightmare.)


----------



## ekim68

Pro-War Talking Heads on TV Have Big Ties to Military Contractors



> If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as ISIS, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired General Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle ISIS. Or as in retired General Jack Keane's case, they will make more vague demands, such as for "offensive" air strikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region.
> 
> But what you won't learn from media coverage of ISIS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world.


----------



## ekim68

High-speed gondolas envisioned for New York City



> A plan is afoot to ease the congestion of New York City's existing transportation infrastructure with a cable car system similar to London's Emirates Air Line. The East River Skyway proposal envisions a high-speed urban gondola that would offer commuters swift transport between Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, reducing travel times and providing a great view of New York City's skyline.


----------



## ekim68

The Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews is no longer just for men.



> The R&A became the latest golf club to end years of male-only exclusivity on Thursday when its members voted overwhelmingly in favor of inviting women. The vote was effective immediately.
> 
> "I can confirm that The Royal & Ancient Golf of St. Andrews is now a mixed membership club," R&A secretary Peter Dawson said in a statement.
> 
> Dawson said more than three-quarters of the club's 2,500 members worldwide voted, with 85 percent in favor. It was the first time in the R&A's 260-year history that members were allowed to vote by proxy at the annual business meeting.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Twist Radio Beams to Send Data at 32 Gigabits Per Second, 30 Times Faster than 4G LTE



> Scientists from three international universities have succeeded in twisting radio beams in order to transfer data at the speed of 32 gigabits per second, which is 30 times faster than 4G LTE wireless technology in use today.
> 
> The researchers, led by Alan Willner, an electrical engineering professor with the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, successfully demonstrated data transmission rates of 32 gigabits per second across 2.5m of free space in a basement laboratory.
> 
> "Not only is this a way to transmit multiple spatially collocated radio data streams through a single aperture, it is also one of the fastest data transmission via radio waves that has been demonstrated," said Willner.


----------



## ekim68

ISIS and the Arab World



> LONDON - An existential struggle is taking place in the Arab world today. But is it ours or is it theirs? Before we step up military action in Iraq and Syria, that's the question that needs answering.
> 
> What concerns me most about President Obama's decision to re-engage in Iraq is that it feels as if it's being done in response to some deliberately exaggerated fears - fear engendered by YouTube videos of the beheadings of two U.S. journalists - and fear that ISIS, a.k.a., the Islamic State, is coming to a mall near you. How did we start getting so afraid again so fast? Didn't we build a Department of Homeland Security?
> 
> I am not dismissing ISIS. Obama is right that ISIS needs to be degraded and destroyed. But when you act out of fear, you don't think strategically and you glide over essential questions, like why is it that Shiite Iran, which helped trigger this whole Sunni rebellion in Iraq, is scoffing at even coordinating with us, and Turkey and some Arab states are setting limits on their involvement?


----------



## ekim68

Hamster Wheel Standing Desk



> You are not reaching your current productivity potential. Numerous esteemed experts agree that standing is better than sitting and that walking is better than standing. Despite this, your workplace only provides inhumane chairs and stagnant standing desks for you to use while you struggle to get through a workday full of distractions and bodily pains.
> 
> Rise up, sedentary sentients, and unleash that untapped potential within by marching endlessly towards a brilliant future of focused work. Step forward into a world of infinite potential, bounded only by the smooth arcs of a wheel. Step forward into the Hamster Wheel Standing Desk that will usher in a new era of unprecedented productivity.


----------



## ekim68

Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free?



> This just in: Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. But will anyone believe the good news?





> So here's what you need to know: Climate despair is all wrong. The idea that economic growth and climate action are incompatible may sound hardheaded and realistic, but it's actually a fuzzy-minded misconception. If we ever get past the special interests and ideology that have blocked action to save the planet, we'll find that it's cheaper and easier than almost anyone imagines.


----------



## ekim68

Close-Up Aerial Photos of Africa's Last Elephants



> Zakouma National Park in southern Chad is famous for its large, free roaming herds of elephants. This has made it a honeypot for poachers. From 2005 to 2010, demand for ivory has reduced the park's elephant population from over 4,000 to about 450 individuals.
> 
> In a visit earlier this year, Kate Brooks took these beautiful aerial pictures of the park and its remaining elephants. Brooks is a war photographer who has spent most of her 17-year career documenting conflict in the Muslim world. She says it's no stretch to compare the slaughter of African animals to the worst human conflicts. Her forthcoming documentary, The Last Animals, will describe the increasingly sophisticated war between conservationists and poachers over elephants, and many other African animals.


----------



## ekim68

Internet Trolls Are Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Sadists



> Let's start by getting our definitions straight. An internet troll is someone who comes into a discussion and posts comments designed to upset or disrupt the conversation. Often, it seems like there is no real purpose behind their comments except to upset everyone else involved. Trolls will lie, exaggerate, and offend to get a response.
> 
> What kind of person would do this?
> 
> Canadian researchers decided to find out. They conducted two internet studies with over 1,200 people. They gave personality tests to each subject along with a survey about their internet commenting behavior. They were looking for evidence that linked trolling with the Dark Tetrad of personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadistic personality.


----------



## ekim68

No, Snowden's Leaks Didn't Help The Terrorists



> Did Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA surveillance compromise the ability of intelligence agencies to monitor terrorist groups? Contrary to lurid claims made by U.S. officials, a new independent analysis of the subject says no.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands March Against War In Moscow, St. Petersburg 



> Moscow has seen its largest opposition protest since President Vladimir Putin's inauguration to a third presidential term in May 2012.
> 
> Thousands also demonstrated in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities on September 21 against what they say is a covert Russian war in eastern Ukraine.
> 
> According to SONAR, an independent monitoring group that counted protesters passing through security checkpoints, more than 26,000 gathered for the Moscow march.


----------



## ekim68

Judge OKs serving legal papers via Facebook



> Social-media users, beware - that next Facebook "poke" could be from a process server.
> 
> In a groundbreaking court ruling, a Staten Island man got permission to use Facebook to serve his ex-wife legal notice that he doesn't want to pay any more child support.
> 
> A Family Court official ruled that Noel Biscocho could use Facebook to serve Anna Maria Antigua because other, more traditional methods to slap her with papers have not worked.


----------



## ekim68

SkyOrbiter UAVs will fly for years at a time and provide global internet access



> The internet has become a critical means of communication during humanitarian crises and a crucial everyday tool for people around the world. Now, a Portuguese company wants to make sure everyone has access to it. Quarkson plans to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transmit internet access "to every corner of the world."
> 
> Quarkson's SkyOrbiter program is similar to Google's Project Loon, which also seeks to deliver internet access to remote places. Where Google plans to float internet-enabled balloons above the earth, however, Quarkson intends to use a fleet of high-range UAVs much like the Titan Aerospace Solara 50 to deliver connectivity from orbit.


----------



## ekim68

Check out these great photos of the NYC climate march



> More than 310,000 climate-concerned citizens hit the streets of New York on Sunday for the People's Climate March. Here's what some of them looked like:


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Check out these great photos of the NYC climate march


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Check out these great photos of the NYC climate march




Time to live the USA


----------



## ekim68

Caught this traveling around Facebook today....


----------



## ekim68

De Blasio Orders a Greener City, Setting Goals for Energy Efficiency of Buildings



> In a sweeping effort to reduce its environmental impact, New York City is planning to overhaul the energy-efficiency standards of all its public buildings and to pressure private landlords to make similar improvements.
> 
> The initiative is part of a pledge, to be announced before the start of the United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday, to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels. The United Nations has pointed to that rate of decrease as a desired target for developed countries to mitigate the effects of climate change.
> 
> New York would become the largest city in the world to make the commitment, according to the city's leaders.


(I've always wondered how much it cost to light up a City in all its splendor.)


----------



## ekim68

Google will stop supporting climate change science deniers, calls them liars



> Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt today said it was a "mistake" to support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has said human-created climate change could be "beneficial" and opposes environmental regulations. Schmidt said groups trying to cast doubt on climate change science are "just literally lying."


----------



## ekim68

Via Farmworkers, Superbugs Find a Route Away from Drug-Using Farms



> One of the persistent questions regarding antibiotic use in meat production, and its effect on the health of humans who live far away from production farms, is: How do the resistant bacteria that result get from one place to another? That is: Most people accept by now that using antibiotics in livestock-raising causes drug resistance to emerge in the systems of those animals, in their guts or on their skin. But whether those newly resistant bacteria leave the farm, and how they make the trip, is both fought over and-despite much investigation-still under-researched.
> 
> Some studies have shown that bacteria can move off farms in groundwater, on the feet of flies, and via dust on the wind. What is insufficiently explored-because it is difficult to get large meat-production facilities to cooperate-is whether farm workers themselves are serving as a transport vehicle.
> 
> A new study just published (and open-access, so anyone can read it) helps to answer that question.


----------



## ekim68

Guantánamo Bay Is Crumbling Into Ruins



> In 1995, the U.S. military built a small temporary food preparation station on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base to feed an influx of Haitian and Cuban refugees. Within a year, the migrants had either repatriated to their home countries or received asylum in the U.S., and the food preparation station was used minimally, preparing about 300 meals a day. After September 11, however, the Bush administration detained hundreds of men from vaguely defined battlefields on the other side of the world and sent them to Guantánamo Bay for temporary imprisonment. These men, and the military personnel that oversaw them, needed to be fed.
> 
> The food preparation station was soon serving 3,800 meals each day. Next to the food prep station, the military hastily constructed a tent-like dining area for soldiers. The Bush administration had no long-term plans for the detention program, and the military was told to prioritize quick and inexpensive construction.They used white vinyl tension fabric for the ceilings and adorned the place with faux sea creatures, framed photographs of Guantánamo's beaches, and wall-mounted kayaks. They called it the Seaside Galley, implemented a ban on tank tops, and declared Wednesdays "taco night." The military built the facility to last five to ten years.
> 
> Eleven years later, the Seaside Galley is still in use.


----------



## ekim68

Tens of Thousands of Wisconsin Students Face New Voting Hurdles



> The last-minute reinstatement of Wisconsin's voter ID restrictions could create voting problems for over 32,000 students attending state universities.
> 
> University-issued ID cards from most public universities will not be accepted as proof of identification at the polls, and tens of thousands of students will have to go through additional hurdles before election day if they want to exercise their right to vote. University students tend to vote for Democrats, and the voter ID law was pushed by Republican legislators.
> 
> The impact on students is one other ripple in the shockwave that the 7th Circuit sent across Wisconsin last week, when a panel of appellate judges -- all appointed by Republican presidents --reinstated Wisconsin's voter ID law just seven weeks before election day. Federal district Judge Lynn Adelman had blocked the law in April as unconstitutional and violative of the Voting Rights Act.


----------



## ekim68

'I was blind… now I have bionic eyes'



> Fran Fulton is 66, and she's been fully blind for about 10 years. A few weeks ago, all that changed.
> 
> Fulton suffers from retinitis pigmentosa - a degenerative eye disease that slowly causes light-sensitive cells in the retina to die off. Over the course of several years she lost her sight, and for the past 10 years she hasn't been able to see anything at all. But in late July, Fulton was outfitted with a system called the Argus II. A pair of camera-equipped glasses are hooked up to electrodes implanted in her eyeball, which feed her brain visual information. Using the system, she can now see the world again.


----------



## ekim68

Guilty verdict in peanut trial should send warning



> ALBANY, Ga. (AP) - Food safety advocates say a guilty verdict in a rare federal food-poisoning trial should send a stern warning to anyone who may be tempted to place profits over people's welfare.
> 
> More than five years after hundreds of Americans got sick from eating salmonella-tainted peanut butter, the top executive in the company that owned the Georgia plant where it was made was convicted Friday of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, wire fraud and other crimes related the nationwide outbreak in 2008 and 2009.
> 
> Former Peanut Corporation of America owner Stewart Parnell, 60, could face more than three decades in prison for the outbreak that was linked to nine deaths and prompted one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history. His brother, Michael Parnell, and another co-defendant could face 20 years in prison or more.
> 
> Experts said it was the first time American food processors have gone to trial on federal charges in a food-poisoning case.


----------



## ekim68

Native tribes from Canada, U.S. sign treaty to restore bison to Great Plains



> BILLINGS, Mon. -- Native tribes from the U.S. and Canada signed a treaty Tuesday establishing an inter-tribal alliance to restore bison to areas of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains where millions of the animals once roamed.
> 
> Leaders of about a dozen tribes from Montana and Alberta signed the pact during a daylong ceremony on Montana's Blackfeet Reservation, organizers said.
> 
> It marks the first treaty among the tribes and First Nations since a series of agreements governing hunting rights in the 1800s. That was when their ancestors still roamed the border region hunting bison, also called buffalo.


----------



## ekim68

Drought has 14 communities on the brink of waterlessness



> Under the blistering Central Valley sun, Filiberta Sanchez and her toddler granddaughter strolled down a Parkwood sidewalk lined with yellow weeds, dying grass and trees more fit for kindling than shade.
> 
> "It was very pretty here, very pretty," said Sanchez, 56, as little Jenny crunched a fistful of parched dirt and pine needles she grabbed from the ground. "Now everything's dry."
> 
> Parkwood's last well dried up in July. County officials, after much hand-wringing, made a deal with the city of Madera for a temporary water supply, but the arrangement prohibited Parkwood's 3,000 residents from using so much as a drop of water on their trees, shrubs or lawns. The county had to find a permanent water fix.


----------



## ekim68

Maglev train reaches 500 km/hour during first public test



> YAMANASHI -
> 
> Central Japan Railway Co (JR Tokai) on Monday conducted the first public test of its new ultra-high speed magnetic levitation (maglev) train in Tsuru, Yamanashi Prefecture.
> 
> Specially invited members of the public and press were able to walk through newly designed ticket gates, and ride aboard the train as it briefly rocketed along the 42.8-kilometer test track at a speed of 500 km/hour, NTV reported.
> 
> The driverless maglev train utilizes a high-tech propulsion system called the "L-Zero" system that first brings the train to a speed of 160 km/hour. Upon reaching 160 km/hour, the train initiates the maglev system and slowly accelerates to 500 km/hour, JR Tokai said.


----------



## ekim68

Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car



> The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old's asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start.
> 
> The cause was not a mechanical problem - it was her lender.
> 
> Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car's dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March.


----------



## ekim68

Museum Day Live! Means Free Entry to 1,500-Plus Museums



> Smithsonian museums are amazing for many reasons-not least of which is the fact that entrance to all of them is free. In honor of this perk, Smithsonian Magazine sponsors the annual Museum Day Live!, when more than 1,500 museums across the country do away with admission fees for one day. This year's event-the 10th anniversary-takes place September 27.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Museum Day Live! Means Free Entry to 1,500-Plus Museums


:up:


----------



## ekim68

IBM's solar concentrator can produce energy, clean water and AC



> IBM Research and Switzerland-based Airlight Energy today announced a new parabolic dish that increases the sun's radiation by 2,000 times while also producing fresh water and air conditioning.
> 
> The new Concentrator PhotoVoltaics (CPV) system uses a dense array of water-cooled solar chips that can convert 80% of the sun's radiation into useful energy.


----------



## ekim68

What College has the most Billionaire Alumni?


----------



## ekim68

Mantis shrimps can see cancer, and scientists have now created a camera that does the same



> Scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia have discovered that mantis shrimp have an incredibly useful ability - the marine creatures are able to see a variety of cancers inside our bodies. And they've now replicated that ability in a camera that could eventually be put into a smartphone.
> 
> Mantis shrimp can see cancer, and the activity of our neurons, because they have unique eyes, known as compound eyes. This type of eye is superbly tuned to detect polarised light - a type of light that reflects differently off different types of tissue, including cancerous or healthy tissue.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Native tribes from Canada, U.S. sign treaty to restore bison to Great Plains


I think that is great. It's is better then beef. Better for you and taste better but we killed them to kill off the food they ate and for the hide but we killed off great food that we could eat also.

If you never ate it you got to try it because it taste so good and all I ever had was bison burgers at the Hilton in AZ a couple years back. So good I ate it 3 times. It just taste so good.


----------



## ekim68

Dennis Kimetto sets world mark at Berlin Marathon



> BERLIN (AP) - Dennis Kimetto set a world record by winning the 41st Berlin Marathon in 2 hours, 2 minutes, 57 seconds on Sunday.
> 
> The 30-year-old Kenyan knocked 26 seconds off the record of 2:03:23 set by compatriot Wilson Kipsang in Berlin last year to become the first man to complete a marathon in under two hours, three minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Tim Cook Says Apple's New Spaceship Campus Will be the "Greenest Building on the Planet"



> Apple's new spaceship campus could be the "greenest building on the planet" according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who made the assertion in a talk at yesterday's Climate Week NYC event. Currently under construction, the futuristic Campus 2 will be packed with impressive green features including 100 percent renewable energy-powered facilities and a massive solar array system said to be one of the world's largest for a corporate campus. But vying for the title of world's greenest building won't come cheap-the ring-shaped campus is estimated to cost more than $5 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Brain repair 'may be boosted by curry spice' 



> A spice commonly found in curries may boost the brain's ability to heal itself, according to a report in the journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy.
> 
> The German study suggests a compound found in turmeric could encourage the growth of nerve cells thought to be part of the brain's repair kit.
> 
> Scientists say this work, based in rats, may pave the way for future drugs for strokes and Alzheimer's disease.
> 
> But they say more trials are needed to see whether this applies to humans.


----------



## ekim68

Solar power is growing so fast that older energy companies are trying to stop it



> If you ask the people who run America's electric utilities what keeps them up at night, a surprising number will say solar power. Specifically, rooftop solar.





> That's a genuine problem for utilities. All these solar households are now buying less and less electricity, but the utilities still have to manage the costs of connecting them to the grid. Indeed, a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory argues that, without policy changes, this trend could soon put utilities in dire financial straits. If rooftop solar were to grab 10 percent of the market over the next decade, utility earnings could decline as much as 41 percent.
> 
> To avoid that fate, many utilities are now pushing for reforms that would at least slow the breakneck growth of rooftop solar - say, by scaling back those "net metering" laws. And that's opened up a war with many fronts. There are solar advocates who'd prefer not to see any changes. There are conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pushing to pare back solar subsidies. And there are even Tea Party groups now defending solar. Meanwhile, state regulators are struggling to find compromises that would both allow solar to expand but also ensure that there's enough money to maintain the existing grid.


----------



## ekim68

Beyond Divestment: Climate-Concerned Philanthropists Pledge to Move Billions to Wind and Solar



> As the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City approaches, efforts to address climate change through money-moving campaigns are growing.
> 
> For the past few years, this work has mostly been about divestment-people and organizations pledging not to invest in fossil fuel companies. First, students concerned about the future of the climate pressed their colleges and universities to divest from stocks in coal, gas, and oil. More than 10 small schools, including the University of Dayton, Hampshire College, and the College of the Atlantic, have complied. And, in the largest divestment in the sector, Stanford University pledged in May 2014 that its $18 billion endowment would not be invested in coal.
> 
> But it's not just colleges and universities that are divesting. Pension funds, municipalities, philanthropies, and hospitals have joined in too-as well as individual investors.


----------



## ekim68

Biologists spot huge gathering of walruses on beach near Point Lay



> With floating ice sparse in the Chukchi Sea, an estimated 35,000 walruses were found crowded onto a beach near the Northwest Alaska village of Point Lay, according to federal biologists.





> "The massive concentration of walruses onshore -- when they should be scattered broadly in ice-covered waters -- is just one example of the impacts of climate change on the distribution of marine species in the Arctic," Margaret Williams, managing director of the World Wildlife Fund's Arctic program, said in a statement.


----------



## ekim68

Cities are lapping countries on climate action



> National governments - especially the American government - are largely paralyzed on climate change. But one message from the U.N. Climate Summit and surrounding events last week was that cities can do a lot to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on their own. They account for most of the world's population and emissions. And cities, not beholden to rural, fossil-fuel dependent constituencies, often have more political freedom than national governments to address climate change.
> 
> The world's largest cities are forming organizations to coordinate their efforts and learn from one another. In 2005, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group formed. Despite the name, there are now 69 affiliated cities from more than 40 countries, accounting for a twelfth of the world's population. There are 12 member cities in the U.S. Mostly, these are green enclaves like Portland, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. But C40 also includes sprawling Los Angeles and Houston, the country's second- and fourth-largest cities.


----------



## ekim68

So farewell then Lotus 1-2-3, spreadsheet extraordinaire



> Thirty-one years is a good run for any product and that is how long we have lived with the spreadsheet that defined the PC generation, Lotus 1-2-3.
> 
> Earlier this week IBM Lotus 1-2-3. Millennium Edition, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x, and Organizer finally, quietly passed the date on which support was due to end, September 30.
> 
> So farewell 1-2-3. It may not have been the first computer spreadsheet, that honour went to VisiCorp's, Apple II-based, VisiCalc, it was the first spreadsheet designed to run on the IBM PC which had launched two years earlier. But Lotus founder, Mitch Kapor made no secret of the fact that he wanted 1-2-3. to be the best in every category.


----------



## ekim68

Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire



> The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.


----------



## ekim68

How solar energy could be the largest source of electricity by mid-century



> The sun could be the world's largest source of electricity by 2050, ahead of fossil fuels, wind, hydro and nuclear, according to a pair of reports issued today by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The two IEA technology roadmaps show how solar photovoltaic (PV) systems could generate up to 16% of the world's electricity by 2050 while solar thermal electricity (STE) from concentrating solar power (CSP) plants could provide an additional 11%. Combined, these solar technologies could prevent the emission of more than 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 - that is more than all current energy-related CO2 emissions from the United States or almost all of the direct emissions from the transport sector worldwide today.


----------



## ekim68

Beer won't make you smarter, but a compound found in hops might



> The last thing hedonists participating in Oktoberfest this week need to hear is that beer can make you smarter. While that's not true-as far as we know-new research suggests that a certain compound found in one of the main ingredients of beer can actually improve cognitive function.
> 
> Researchers at Oregon State University discovered that doses of xanthohumol, a flavonoid found in hops, improved memory and thinking in a lucky group of mice. Flavonoids are a class of compounds present in plants, known to have numerous health benefits. Last year, researchers discovered that a flavonoid found in celery and artichokes could potentially fight pancreatic cancer.





> Xanthohumol is a rare chemical compound: Hops are the only known dietary source of it. But lest beer enthusiasts get too excited, it would require drinking 2,000 liters of beer a day (or 5,636 bottles of beer) to ingest the amount of xanthohumol used in the study. Not recommended.


----------



## ekim68

The Worst Legal Advice Ever, Presented By A Clueless Blogger For An Insurance Company



> The internet is chock full of bad legal advice, but it's a bit odd to see it posted on a site for a large insurance company. Insurance company The Hartford* apparently has a website full of "small business" advice. This, by itself, is not a bad idea. Providing good content that people want is something that many companies should be doing. But the key here is "good content." Which brings us to the following article that's been passed around a few times among lawyers on Twitter. Officially, it's an article describing "5 Easy Ways to Get Sued Over Online Content & Social Media" written by Deb McAlister-Holland. Here's the stunning thing about it: nearly every word in the thing is dead wrong.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon Wireless caves to FCC pressure, says it won't throttle 4G users



> Verizon Wireless was scheduled to begin throttling certain LTE users today as part of an expanded "network optimization" program, but it has decided not to follow through with the controversial plan after criticism from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.


----------



## ekim68

Why President Obama Can't Get Any Love From the Public On the Economy



> Another month of excellent job growth, and yet his approval ratings on the economy remain tepid. Here's why.





> Finally, there's the hardening of partisanship. Most Republicans despise Barack Obama so much that he could personally pull their children from a burning building, and they'd still think that he's a jerk. No matter how many jobs get created, they're never going to tell pollsters that they approve of the job he's doing, on the economy or anything else.


----------



## ekim68

Why This Tesla Motors Co-founder Loves Electric Garbage Trucks



> Ian Wright designed what may be one of the coolest street-legal cars of all time: the electric X1 looked like a Formula 1 racecar and went from zero to 60 in a breathtaking 2.9 seconds. Now, though, all Wright wants to talk about is trucks, especially the workaday delivery trucks and garbage trucks that ply city streets.
> 
> Why the excitement? Wright is the founder of Wrightspeed, a San Jose, CA-based startup that's designed electric powertrains for medium- and heavy-duty trucks. "Garbage trucks are the perfect driving cycle for us: they get two or three miles per gallon, drive 130 miles a day with 1,000 hard stops that chew on the brakes. They're just perfect," he says.


----------



## ekim68

Israeli youths jailed for refusing to serve in army



> The anti-militarization group New Profile announced this week that two Israeli youths who refuse to serve in the army are once again being sent back to military prison.
> 
> Udi Segal, 18, has been handed down a fourth prison term and Uriel Ferera, 19, has been sent to jail for the eighth time; both were issued ten-day sentences on 29 September.
> 
> Segal and Ferera are among fifty youths who signed an open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year stating their refusal to serve in Israel's army because of its violations of Palestinians' rights.
> 
> Israeli youths are drafted into the military once they turn 18.


----------



## ekim68

With Dry Taps and Toilets, California Drought Turns Desperate



> PORTERVILLE, Calif. - After a nine-hour day working at a citrus packing plant, her body covered in a sheen of fruit wax and dust, there is nothing Angelica Gallegos wants more than a hot shower, with steam to help clear her throat and lungs.
> 
> "I can just picture it, that feeling of finally being clean - really refreshed and clean," Ms. Gallegos, 37, said one recent evening.
> 
> But she has not had running water for more than five months - nor is there any tap water in her near future - because of a punishing and relentless drought in California. In the Gallegos household and more than 500 others in Tulare County, residents cannot flush a toilet, fill a drinking glass, wash dishes or clothes, or even rinse their hands without reaching for a bottle or bucket.


----------



## ekim68

A very good read.....

The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever



> A quixotic historian tries to hold oil and gas companies responsible for Louisiana's disappearing coast.


----------



## ekim68

High Rates of Suicide, Depression Linked to Farmer Use of Pesticides



> "These chemicals that farmers use, look what they do to an insect. It ruins their nervous system," Peters said. "What is it doing to the farmer?"


----------



## ekim68

10 things that would fix the food system faster than GMO-labeling

By Nathanael Johnson



> If we want a better food system there are plenty of things that would make a bigger difference than GMO labeling. The other day I argued that labeling probably wouldn't have an effect on the big picture issues that people attach to GMOs. Here are the top 10 political initiatives that I'd rather be debating and voting on:


----------



## ekim68

Innovation shines at 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards



> A community space in Vietnam, a memorial in China, and an arboretum in Australia - all highlight the impressive variety of innovative architecture on display at this year's World Architecture Festival Awards. Held over three days in the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, Singapore last week, the awards provide an opportunity to check out some top-tier projects from all corners of the world.


----------



## ekim68

Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?



> Whenever I venture out of the Ivory Tower to deliver public lectures about the brain, by far the most likely question I can expect as the talk winds up is, "Do we really only use 10 percent of our brains?" The look of disappointment that usually follows when I say it isn't so strongly suggests that the 10-percent myth is one of those hopeful shibboleths that refuses to die simply because it would be so darn nice if it were true. I'm sure none of us would turn down a mighty hike in brainpower if it were attainable, and a seemingly never-ending stream of crackpot schemes and devices continues to be advanced by hucksters who trade on the myth. Always on the lookout for a "feel-good" story, the media have also played their part in keeping the myth alive.


----------



## ekim68

Garlic injection could tackle tree diseases



> Injecting trees with a concentrated form of garlic might help save trees in the UK from deadly diseases.
> 
> Operating under an experimental government licence, a prototype piece of technology to administer the solution is being trialled on a woodland estate in Northamptonshire.
> 
> Widespread use of the injection process is impractical and expensive.
> 
> But it could potentially help save trees of historic or sentimental value.
> 
> Garlic is one of nature's most powerful antibacterial and antifungal agents.
> 
> It contains a compound called allicin, which scientists are interested in harnessing.


----------



## ekim68

Why End War (in 2 minutes)

(Video)


----------



## ekim68

Amputees discern familiar sensations across prosthetic hand



> Patients connected to a new prosthetic system said they 'felt' their hands for the first time since they lost them in accidents. In the ensuing months, they began feeling sensations that were familiar and were able to control their prosthetic hands with more -- well -- dexterity.


----------



## ekim68

Elementary school in China builds a rooftop running track



> A Chinese elementary school located in Taizhou in China's Zhejiang province has come up with an innovative way to save space on land by building an athletic track on its roof. Designed by LYCS Architecture, the Tian Tai No.2 Primary School features an open-air rooftop basketball court, 100 meter sprinting track and a 200 meter looped running track, which is half the size of an Olympic track.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Elementary school in China builds a rooftop running track


----------



## ekim68

Light pollution



> Light pollution-the needless shining of bright lights into the night sky-has robbed whole generations of the chance to see nature on its largest scale. It is estimated that as many as eighty percent of all the people alive today have never even glimpsed the Milky Way. (When a massive power outage struck southern California in the 1990s, Los Angeles residents reportedly called 911 to express alarm about strange clouds hovering overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time.) The problem is not lighting in itself, but the billions of dollars worth of energy wasted each year by spilling light into the sky rather than confining it to the ground where it is needed.


----------



## ekim68

40,000 suicides annually, yet America simply shrugs



> Standing high above the San Francisco Bay, perched on an I-beam outside the Golden Gate Bridge railing, the man dressed neatly in khakis and a button-down shirt hesitated.
> 
> Kevin Briggs stood a few feet away, imploring him not to jump. In nearly 20 years as a California Highway Patrol officer policing the famous span, Briggs had more success than failure in talking troubled souls back from the ledge.
> 
> He and two other officers persisted for nearly an hour on this day in 2007, and the man, perhaps 35 years old, seemed touched by their earnestness. He reached over three separate times to shake Briggs' hand.
> 
> Then it was suddenly over. "He said, 'Kevin, thank you very much,' " Briggs recalls quietly, "and he left."
> 
> The man plummeted to his death in the waters below.
> 
> There's a suicide in the USA every 13 minutes.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> 40,000 suicides annually, yet America simply shrugs


----------



## DaveBurnett

They should prosecute them...!


----------



## ekim68

German colleges offer free degrees to Americans



> (CBS) -- Want to attend college for free? It can happen if you learn German.
> 
> All German universities are now free to Americans and all other international students. The last German state to charge tuition at its universities struck down the fees this week.
> 
> Even before Germany abolished college tuition for all students, the price was a steal. Typically semester fees were around $630. What's more, German students receive many perks including discounts for food, clothing and events, as well as inexpensive or even free transportation.


----------



## ekim68

These 10 Countries Have Pledged $2.3 Billion to Fight Climate Change. The US Isn't One of Them.



> Poorer countries typically get the rough end of global warming: Not only are they more likely to feel the brunt of its impacts-like rising sea levels or increased extreme weather-they also don't have enough money to face the problem. This split between the rich and poor has become a major source of frustration in the global fight against climate change. Put simply, some poorer countries say they are being asked to give up the rapid, fossil-fuel-powered development the rest of the world enjoyed while simultaneously being hit with the costs of a problem they didn't create.


----------



## ekim68

The worst countries to grow old in



> The global population is aging rapidly. Today, there are roughly 868 million people who are at least 60 years old globally, or about 12% of the world's population. By 2050, more than 2 billion people will be 60 or older, or 21% of the projected global population. In the United States, 27% of all Americans will be at least 60 years old.
> 
> HelpAge International's "Global AgeWatch 2014 Index" ranked the social and economic well-being of older residents in 96 countries. The report rated each country on four broad factors important to an aging population: supporting income security, fostering good health, employment and education, and the overall environment for older residents.. Norway was rated as the best country for older people to live in, bypassing Sweden, last year's top-rated country. Meanwhile, Afghanistan was rated the worst country for older people for the second consecutive year.


----------



## ekim68

BBCtrending: The 'rich kids of Tehran'



> An Instagram account which appears to show Tehran's wealthy young elite living like their counterparts in the West has become a sensation in Iran.
> 
> If it wasn't for the Farsi number plates, you'd be forgiven for thinking the account belonged to a rich American living in sun-drenched Los Angeles. But this - apparently - is Tehran, the Iranian capital, where women are forbidden from going uncovered in public places, and alcohol is strictly forbidden.


----------



## ekim68

Drones Over the Amazon on the Lookout for Environment Threats 



> Following a training conducted by the group Tushevs Aerials in August 2014, indigenous leaders from the Loreto and Madre de Dios regions in Peru are discovering how drones can play a prominent role in monitoring environmental threats to the rainforest.
> 
> The workshops were held in the community of Saramuro located on the Marañón River and brought together 15 participants from various Amazonian communities, including members of the Embera-Wounaan community in Panama. The participants took part in sessions using flight simulators and learned how to use software to plan flights using the autopilot feature. There were also sessions on how to evaluate the data and create maps from the photographs collected by the drone.


----------



## ekim68

"Fracking for the cure"? Susan G. Komen gets it all wrong, again



> Here's a question: Is the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation insane? More tone deaf than the NFL, the GOP and Fox News, combined? Just doesn't give a damn anymore? It would appear so.
> 
> How else to explain that, a scant two years after the infamous pink-everything cancer foundation insulted all intelligent women everywhere by yanking its support for Planned Parenthood (and then frantically reinstating it, and then dumping its CEO, and then having a very public meltdown/shame session that nearly destroyed the organization's reputation forever), all of which was only a couple years after teaming up with that beloved bastion of healthy eating, Kentucky Fried Chicken - here they are again, joining forces with a company that specializes in, uh, ripping apart the earth so violently, it can cause earthquakes.


----------



## ekim68

Watch for These Lesser-Known Depression Symptoms



> Depression can be tough to recognize, especially in teenagers. Keep an eye out for these symptoms to make sure you-and your teen-get help as soon as you see the danger signs.
> 
> A recent study from Social Indicators Research revealed an evolution of depression symptoms in students since 1980. It's important for parents to know what depression looks like so they can help their teenager stay mentally fit and, more importantly, safe.


----------



## ekim68

Bear Town USA



> KAKTOVIK, Alaska - In Betty Brower's memories, there is always ice. Even in the summer, when the sea around Barter Island was open, she could look out and see the jagged shapes of icebergs on the horizon.
> 
> Brower is 81 years old, a great-grandmother who has lived all her life along the northern coast of the Beaufort Sea, the last 60 years in this Inupiat village of about 250 people on Barter Island. In the mid-1990s, summer ice began to disappear, she said recently, speaking in Inupiaq as her daughter Marie Rexford interpreted. The period of open water grew longer, she said. And then came the bears.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Bear Town USA


Interesting.


----------



## ekim68

One-Third of Food Is Lost or Wasted: What Can Be Done



> From our farms to grocery stores to dinner tables, 30 percent of the food we grow is never eaten. We can do better.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Patent Office Now Rejecting 78 Percent Of Business Method Patents



> Ever since the Supreme Court ruling on software patents in the Alice vs CLS Bank case, there seems to be a decline on both patent lawsuits and "business method" patent approvals by the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office). The rejection rate of business method patents has jumped from 24 percent in January of this year to 78 percent this July. It looks like a major shift in the patent battles is about to happen.


----------



## ekim68

Welcome to America's Second Tornado Season



> As the days grow shorter and the weather turns colder, many people think they're in the clear and safe from tornadoes. However, the changing weather specifically makes us more vulnerable to tornadoes. Today's severe weather is a hard reminder that we're in the second peak of tornado season.


----------



## ekim68

GOP voter ID law gets crushed: Why Judge Richard Posner's new opinion is so amazing



> If you read just one top-to-bottom dismantling of every supposed premise in support of disenfranchising Photo ID voting restrictions laws in your lifetime, let it be this one [PDF].
> 
> It is a dissent, released on Friday, written by Judge Richard Posner, the Reagan-appointed 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was the one who approved the first such Photo ID law in the country (Indiana's) back in 2008, in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County case which went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Posner's ruling was affirmed.
> 
> If there was ever evidence that a jurist could change their mind upon review of additional subsequent evidence, this is it. If there was ever a concise and airtight case made against Photo ID laws and the threat they pose to our most basic right to vote, this is it. If there was ever a treatise revealing such laws for the blatantly partisan shell games that they are, this is it.


----------



## ekim68

Pablo Escobar's hippos are wreaking havoc in Colombia



> According to the BBC, hippos once owned by Pablo Escobar are still roaming the grounds of the late Colombian drug lord's former home, presenting a problem for locals and wildlife officials, who aren't sure the best way to contain or control them.


----------



## ekim68

Wind Power Is Actually Cheaper Than Coal, Says Leaked Government Report



> A leaked report shows that wind is the hands-down cheapest energy source in Europe, beating the presumably dirt-cheap coal and gas by a mile. Conventional wisdom holds that clean energy is more expensive than its fossil-fueled counterparts; politicians who oppose incentives for solar and wind routinely point to their cost as an omnipresent hurdle.
> 
> Yet truly honest cost comparisons show that renewable energy sources are often cheaper than their carbon-heavy competition. The report, which was prepared for the European Commission, shows as much: it demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy, period.
> 
> The Guardian, which examined a copy of the leaked report-it was completed for a study on energy costs for the European Commission, but was conspicuously omitted from the final draft-relays the findings: "for every megawatt hour (MW/h) of electricity generated, onshore wind costs roughly €105 (£83) [or $130 USD] per MW/h, compared to gas and coal which can cost up to around €164 [$208] and €233 [$295] per MW/h, respectively."
> 
> "Nuclear power, offshore wind and solar energy are all comparably inexpensive generators, at roughly €125 per MW/h," the report says.
> 
> *The problem is, those higher healthcare and environmental costs, which economists call externalities, aren't paid for by the fossil fuel companies, but the public. As in you, the taxpayer.*


----------



## ekim68

Orphanage care linked to thinner brain tissue in regions related to ADHD



> Under the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, thousands of Romanian children were placed in overcrowded orphanages with bleak conditions and minimal human contact. Even after the 1989 revolution, the legacy of institutionalization continued. Only recently has research and public concern over early childhood environments caused changes in policies.
> 
> University of Washington research on children who began life in these institutions shows that early childhood neglect is associated with changes in brain structure. A paper published this month in Biological Psychiatry shows that children who spent their early years in these institutions have thinner brain tissue in cortical areas that correspond to impulse control and attention.


----------



## ekim68

We're Sitting on 10 Billion Barrels of Oil! OK, Two



> Lee Tillman, chief executive officer of Marathon Oil Corp., told investors last month that the company was potentially sitting on the equivalent of 4.3 billion barrels in its U.S. shale acreage.
> 
> That number was 5.5 times higher than the proved reserves Marathon reported to federal regulators.
> 
> Such discrepancies are rife in the U.S. shale industry. Drillers use bigger forecasts to sell the hydraulic fracturing boom to investors and to persuade lawmakers to lift the 39-year-old ban on crude exports.


----------



## ekim68

Submersible Exosuit lets divers plunge to 1,000 ft below the surface



> Thanks largely to Hollywood blockbuster franchises, humanity seems to be in the grips of a global obsession with exosuits. The fixation is informing the designs of future military tech and may even play a role in how we operate in space. Canadian based Nuytco Research hopes to bring its own Exosuit to the sea floor, allowing divers to safely operate at depths of up to 1,000 ft (305 m) with none of the nasty pressure-induced side effects that so often ruin a deep sea diver's day.


----------



## DaveBurnett

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wi...eaper-than-coal-says-leaked-government-report

I liked the "if you take into account" used in the argument which then totally ignores noise and visual impact from turbines.


----------



## ekim68

A long but good read.....

The Bad News About the News



> In 1998, Ralph Terkowitz, a vice president of The Washington Post Co., got to know Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were looking for backers. Terkowitz remembers paying a visit to the garage where they were working and keeping his car and driver waiting outside while he had a meeting with them about the idea that eventually became Google. An early investment in Google might have transformed the Post's financial condition, which became dire a dozen years later, by which time Google was a multi-billion dollar company. But nothing happened. "We kicked it around," Terkowitz recalled, but the then-fat Post Co. had other irons in other fires.


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wi...eaper-than-coal-says-leaked-government-report
> 
> I liked the "if you take into account" used in the argument which then totally ignores noise and visual impact from turbines.


Most of what I've read about them is that locations are chosen away from the populous. I've seen a few huge Wind Farms and I kind of like the visual aspects...They keep a Desert from becoming Boring.... And I like the fact that they don't exhale carcinogens....


----------



## ekim68

Jobless claims drop to 14-year low



> WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment aid dropped to the lowest level in 14 years last week, the latest signal that companies are cutting fewer workers and hiring could remain healthy.


----------



## ekim68

Wind blows away fossil power in the Nordics, the Baltics next



> Wind power is blowing gas and coal-fired turbines out of business in the Nordic countries, and the effects will be felt across the Baltic region as the renewable glut erodes utility margins for thermal power stations.
> 
> Fossil power plants in Finland and Denmark act as swing-producers, helping to meet demand when hydropower production in Norway and Sweden falls due to dry weather.
> 
> The arrival of wind power on a large scale has made this role less relevant and has pushed electricity prices down, eroding profitability of fossil power stations.


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## DaveBurnett

> Most of what I've read about them is that locations are chosen away from the populous. I've seen a few huge Wind Farms and I kind of like the visual aspects...


I've got one being built in iew of my bedroom window. It's not many towers, but they are on top of a hill and and visible for miles around.


----------



## ekim68

We Need a Federal Law Banning Public Subsidies for Private Companies



> American states, counties, and cities routinely offer huge tax incentives and subsidies to private businesses in order to lure those businesses into locating themselves in a particular place. Spend a little to get a lot, the theory goes. Priming the pump of economic development, etc. *The problem is that what is supposed to be spending for the public's benefit in fact benefits only private corporations. And it should be outlawed.*


----------



## ekim68

Green tea nanocarrier delivers cancer-killing drugs more effectively



> Many of us drink green tea for its wonderful health benefits, including proven antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-aging and anti-cancer properties. Now, researchers in Singapore have taken its cancer-fighting properties to the next level, developing a green tea-based nanocarrier that encapsulates cancer-killing drugs. It is the first time green tea has been used to deliver drugs to cancer cells, with promising results. Animal studies show far more effective tumor reduction than use of the drug alone while significantly reducing the accumulation of drugs in other organs.


----------



## ekim68

Cops Need a Warrant to Grab Your Cell Tower Data, Florida Court Rules



> Americans may have a Florida drug dealer to thank for expanding our right to privacy.
> 
> Police departments around the country have been collecting phone metadata from telecoms and using a sophisticated spy tool to track people through their mobile phones-often without obtaining a warrant. But a new ruling out of Florida has curbed the activity in that state, on constitutional grounds. It raises hope among civil liberties advocates that other jurisdictions around the country may follow suit.


----------



## ekim68

Here Are The Most Conservative And Liberal Names In America



> The most conservative and liberal names in America are Doyle and Natasha.


----------



## ekim68

Hundreds of Earthquakes In Ohio Linked To Fracking



> You can't blame hydraulic fracturing for every natural disaster, but newly published research has linked 400 small earthquakes in Ohio last year to the geology-busting technique.
> 
> Let me emphasize that the earthquakes were small. So small, in fact, that every one is believed to have gone unfelt by anyone on Earth's surface.
> 
> That being said, the earthquakes represent the first known instance of seismic activity in the area. They were also three orders of magnitude larger than expected, according to seismologist Paul Friberg, co-author of the study describing the activity in the latest issue of Seismological Research Letters.


----------



## ekim68

36 Playtime Products That'll Make You Feel Like a Kid Again



> The work week is finally finished-it's time to have some fun. But not all fun is designed equally. For our annual Design|Life special issue, we've gathered 36 of the coolest gadgets, games and home wares that will help you forget about the office, and do it in style.


----------



## ekim68

Poor kids who do everything right don't do better than rich kids who do everything wrong



> America is the land of opportunity, just for some more than others.
> 
> That's because, in large part, inequality starts in the crib. Rich parents can afford to spend more time and money on their kids, and that gap has only grown the past few decades. Indeed, economists Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane calculate that, between 1972 and 2006, high-income parents increased their spending on "enrichment activities" for their children by 151 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, compared to 57 percent for low-income parents.
> 
> But, of course, it's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a child's formative early years.


----------



## ekim68

In Texas, It's Easier to Buy an Assault Weapon Than to Vote



> Whiners. Bounders. Ingrates. Talking about the incessant griping and sniping currently buzzing over long overdue Republican reforms requiring citizens to produce a government issued ID before casting a vote. From the outcry you'd think the GOP was organizing competitive kitten clubbings. Again.
> 
> Oh for crum's sakes, settle down people. It's just an ID. You need one to fly or buy or ply or even take out a library book. What is wrong with insuring the integrity of the electoral process? This isn't voter suppression, it's voter protection.
> 
> Which is why in the great state of Texas, it's easier to buy an automatic weapon than register to vote and a gun permit is considered proper ID but a University student ID, not so much. Because the 2nd Amendment trumps the 14th,15th & 19th Amendments. Always has. Always will. Simple math.
> 
> And no, not even paid investigators could find more than thirty examples of voter fraud in the entire country over the last 15 years, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.


----------



## ekim68

America Can Nearly Quadruple Its Renewable Electricity By 2030



> A recent Union of Concerned Scientists (USC) study found that America can nearly quadruple its renewable electricity in the next 15 years, reaching 23% by 2030. This comes in response to the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal that America set a modest goal of 12% renewable energy by 2030. Rachel Cleetus, Senior Climate Economist of UCS, referred to the EPA's goal as just a fraction above "business as usual." The UCS found raising this target, to +23% of the nation's electricity from non-hydro renewable sources by 2030, would cost the average household only about 18 cents per month. Cleetus described this as a realistic and affordable goal: "Looking at the way renewable energy is ramping up and costs are falling dramatically, there is a real opportunity to go farther."


----------



## ekim68

Building the Largest Ship In the World, South Korea



> The Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built, the pride and joy of the largest shipping company in the world. The ship was a huge hit with the public last year when it docked in Copenhagen for a week, 50,000 people visited, tours were given and an exhibition about the boat was made.


----------



## ekim68

Yes, Mass Shootings Are Occurring More Often



> New research from Harvard shows a chilling rise in public mass shootings-and debunks a popular claim that they haven't increased.


----------



## ekim68

Harley-Davidson goes electric



> On June 18, 2014, Harley-Davidson shocked the motorcycle community by announcing an electric motorcycle prototype called Project LiveWire. The Project LiveWire teaser video showed a bike screaming down route 66, emitting a sound that vaguely resembled a turbine. I could barely believe what I saw, so I immediately spent time reading comments about LiveWire-naturally, the reaction was mixed. Some gave props to Harley-Davidson for thinking outside the box; others complained "this is no Harley."


----------



## ekim68

32 Cities Want to Challenge Big Telecom, Build Their Own Gigabit Networks



> More than two dozen cities in 19 states announced today that they're sick of big telecom skipping them over for internet infrastructure upgrades and would like to build gigabit fiber networks themselves and help other cities follow their lead.
> 
> The Next Centuries Cities coalition, which includes a couple cities that already have gigabit fiber internet for their residents, was devised to help communities who want to build their own broadband networks navigate logistical and legal challenges to doing so.
> 
> Over the last several months, there's been a Federal Communications Commission-backed push for cities to build their own broadband networks because big telecom companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon either don't or won't offer competitive broadband speeds in certain parts of the country.


----------



## ekim68

The Kink in the Human Brain



> This is a moment at which anyone with the capacity for reflection should stop and wonder what we are doing.
> 
> If the news that in the past 40 years the world has lost over 50% of its vertebrate wildlife (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish) fails to tell us that there is something wrong with the way we live, it's hard to imagine what could. Who believes that a social and economic system which has this effect is a healthy one? Who, contemplating this loss, could call it progress?
> 
> In fairness to the modern era, this is an extension of a trend that has lasted some two million years. The loss of much of the African megafauna - sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyaenas and amphicyonids (bear dogs), several species of elephant - coincided with the switch towards meat eating by hominims (ancestral humans). It's hard to see what else could have been responsible for the peculiar pattern of extinction then.
> 
> As we spread into other continents, their megafaunas almost immediately collapsed. Perhaps the most reliable way of dating the first arrival of people anywhere is the sudden loss of large animals.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. oil exports at highest level since 1957



> WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The United States exported more crude oil than it has in more than 50 years, analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration finds.
> 
> EIA in its weekly petroleum status report said the United States exported 401,000 barrels of oil per day in July, the latest full month for which data are available.


----------



## ekim68

Top 10 Greenest Countries in the World



> How green is your native land? The 4th edition of the Global Green Economy Index, produced by private U.S.-based consultancy Dual Citizen LLC, has just been released, and you can look it up. The index provides an in-depth look at how 60 countries and 70 cities are doing in developing more environmentally friendly economies, in actual performance and in how experts perceive their performance.


----------



## ekim68

The intelligent and interactive roads of tomorrow



> A lot has been written about intelligent highways since the eighties. However, until now the focus of innovation was on the car. Heijmans and Studio Roosegaarde tackle this issue on a large scale by innovating the road deck with designs such as 'Glow-in-the-dark Lining', 'Dynamic Paint', 'Interactive Light' and 'Electric Priority Lane'. Together they want to make the road sustainable and interactive through means of smart lighting, harvesting energy, and traffic signs that adapt to the road situation. The design and interactivity of Studio Roosegaarde and Heijmans' specialized knowledge and experience brings out the best of two worlds. Although the differences between the two companies are great, they share their most important goal: innovating the Dutch landscape.


----------



## ekim68

Sweat-analyzing skin patch could replace blood sampling



> Nobody likes having blood samples drawn. What's more, such samples typically have to be analyzed in a lab before they're able to tell us anything. But now scientists at the University of Cincinnati and the US Air Force Research Laboratory are developing a system in which a Band-Aid-like skin patch is able to gather and transmit medical data in almost real time, by analyzing the patient's sweat ... and you just need a smartphone to read it, no poking or prodding required.


----------



## ekim68

Americans don't have a constitutional right to vote - it's time for that to change



> On Saturday, the US Supreme Court decided - in a ruling that lacked any accompanying explanation - that a controversial voter ID law in Texas will be in effect this November, notwithstanding a contrary decision from a trial court.
> 
> The legal arguments around these kinds of voter ID laws, which tend to disproportionately disqualify non-white voters, hinge on whether they constitute a form of illegal (or unconstitutional) racial discrimination. But the fact that the legal, political, and constitutional arguments need to get pushed into a narrow racial discrimination frame is itself a symptom of the real problem: it's about time American citizens obtained a constitutional right to vote.


----------



## ekim68

Breathalizer app calls Uber if you're drunk



> By the time drivers usually find themselves using a breathalyzer, it's too late - they've already gotten behind the wheel.
> 
> A new device called the Breeze, from Burlingame startup Breathometer, will let drivers with smartphones learn how intoxicated they are before being pulled over by police - and before they put themselves or others in danger.
> 
> Plus, it can summon a ride from Uber if users blow over the legal limit.


----------



## ekim68

It Shouldn't Hurt This Much to Get a Mortgage



> Under normal circumstances, approving my mortgage application should be a no-brainer: High income, no debt, good credit score. The missus also makes a good income, has an almost-perfect credit score and has been working for the same business for 28 years.
> 
> But these are not normal circumstances.
> 
> Let me jump to the end: Yes, we got our mortgage. We put 20 percent down, bought a house that appraised for more than the purchase price and got a 3.25 percent rate on a mortgage that resets after seven years. We moved in last month.
> 
> But the process was surreal. Indeed, it was such a bizarre experience that I started hunting for explanations from people in the industry about why mortgage lending has gone astray.


----------



## ekim68

NTU develops ultra-fast charging batteries that last 20 years



> Scientists at Nanyang Technology University (NTU) have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only two minutes.
> 
> The new generation batteries also have a long lifespan of over 20 years, more than 10 times compared to existing lithium-ion batteries.
> 
> This breakthrough has a wide-ranging impact on all industries, especially for electric vehicles, where consumers are put off by the long recharge times and its limited battery life.


----------



## ekim68

More Cities Are Making It Illegal To Hand Out Food To The Homeless



> If you don't have a place to live, getting enough to eat clearly may be a struggle. And since homelessness in the U.S. isn't going away and is even rising in some cities, more charitable groups and individuals have been stepping up the past few years to share food with these vulnerable folks in their communities.
> 
> But just as more people reach out to help, cities are biting back at those hands feeding the homeless.
> 
> According to a report released Monday by the National Coalition for the Homeless, 21 cities have passed measures aimed at restricting the people who feed the homeless since January 2013. In that same time, similar legislation was introduced in more than 10 cities. Combined, these measures represent a 47 percent increase in the number of cities that have passed or introduced legislation to restrict food sharing since the coalition last counted in 2010.


----------



## ekim68

The Internet Sleeps - in Some Parts of the World 



> Researchers studying how big the Internet is have found that it "sleeps," almost like a living creature.
> 
> The finding will help scientists and policymakers develop better systems to measure and track Internet outages, such as those that struck the New York area after Hurricane Sandy. Understanding how the Internet sleeps will help them avoid confusing a sleeping Internet with an Internet outage.


----------



## ekim68

Porsche, Mercedes building electric cars to challenge Tesla



> According to interviews given to German publication Manager Magazine (Google translate) this week, sources from Porsche, Mercedes, and Audi said that they are all readying electric cars to respond "to the success of the Californian newcomer Tesla with its Model S."


 :up:


----------



## ekim68

This City Came Up With a Simple Solution to Homelessness: Housing



> Salt Lake City's Housing First initiative has reduced chronic homelessness by 72 percent. Now other cities are giving it a try.


----------



## ekim68

You Can Recover From a Snippy Email, But Prepare to Grovel



> With email and texting, we can respond instantaneously, much faster than the rational brain can intervene. Yet written words, unlike spoken words, don't vanish; they can stay on the screen forever.


----------



## ekim68

Uni allows deaf and hearing to communicate naturally



> People who are deaf or hard of hearing are constantly met with the challenge of communicating, since most non-deaf people don't understand sign language. But modern technology is once again offering new solutions for old issues, and this time it comes in the shape of Uni, which uses motion gesture recognition to translate sign language to audio, and spoken word to text, in real time.
> 
> According to Uni's developers, a team of deaf and hard of hearing engineers from Rochester Institute of Technology with design and programming experience in companies such as Nintendo, Microsoft, Railcomm and ZVRS, there are 370 million deaf people in the world, and they interact with another 3.7 billion people. In order to communicate with those who cannot read sign language, deaf people may have to resort to frustrating or inefficient methods like typing out notes on a smartphone or quickly scribbling thoughts with pen and paper.


----------



## ekim68

Has Your Smartphone Made Your Other Gadgets Obsolete? [Survey]



> Smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age. No need to fill your pockets and handbags with cameras, maps and music players-just grab your all-in-one iPhone or Android device on your way out the door.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk tweets about 'record sales' to counter doubts



> Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Motors Inc., tweeted that sales of the electric Model S rose 65 percent in North America last month and reached a "record high" worldwide.
> 
> Tesla's share price climbed Tuesday after sliding Monday on a report in the Wall Street Journal, citing WardsAuto.com, that Tesla sales had declined 26 percent in September, a figure later clarified as referring only to U.S. sales.


----------



## ekim68

Where Deepwater Horizon's Oil Went-and How Researchers Found It



> It's over four years since Deepwater Horizon went belly up-but the whereabouts of two million barrels of oil that burst out from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico has remained a mystery. Now, a team of scientists believe they've found it.
> 
> Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of California, Irvine, have been able to trace the path of the oil that leaked from the well while the spill was being capped (and, err, recapped). In fact, the oil that issued forth now appears to lie in a thin layer at the bottom of the ocean, within 25 miles of the original well.
> 
> To figure out how it got there, the team took 3,000 samples from the Gulf of Mexico at 534 different locations, over the course of 12 different expeditions. Those samples covered a footprint of 1,250 square miles, and reveal that up to 16 percent of the oil that poured out of Deepwater Horizon's Macondo well drilling point during the catastrophe still sit on the ocean floor.


----------



## ekim68

Feathers in flight inspire anti-turbulence technology



> Inspired by nature's own anti-turbulence devices - feathers - researchers have developed an innovative system that could spell the end of turbulence on flights.
> 
> Researchers from the Unmanned Systems Research Team at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have lodged a provisional patent on the system, which mimics the way feathers help birds detect disturbances in the air.
> 
> Research supervisor Professor Simon Watkins, said flight testing on a micro plane showed the system significantly reduced the effects of turbulence.
> 
> "By sensing gusts and disturbances in air flow through their feathers, birds are able to fly gracefully rather than bouncing around in turbulent air," he said.


----------



## ekim68

Cable car planned for world's largest cave



> A Vietnamese resort company has been granted approval to begin surveys to build a 10.6 kilometer (6.6 mi) long cable car in the world's largest cave, the UNESCO-listed Son Doong in north-central Quang Binh province in Vietnam. If completed it would make it the longest cable car ride in the world, ahead of Tianmen Shan in China.


----------



## ekim68

The Plane of the Future Has No Windows



> Hope you're not too attached to looking out the windows when you fly-the designers of tomorrow's airplanes seem intent on getting rid of them. A Paris design firm recently made waves when it released its concept for a sleek, solar paneled, windowless passenger jet. Before that, Airbus proposed eschewing windows and building its cabins out of transparent polymers. Now, the Center for Process Innovation has floated its own windowless plane concept, and it's attracting plenty of attention, too.


----------



## ekim68

While You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Just Happened to Solar 



> Every time fossil fuels get cheaper, people lose interest in solar deployment. That may be about to change.
> 
> After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states -- in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week. That's assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.
> 
> Even if the tax credit drops to 10 percent, solar will soon reach price parity with conventional electricity in well over half the nation: 36 states. Gone are the days when solar panels were an exotic plaything of Earth-loving rich people. Solar is becoming mainstream, and prices will continue to drop as the technology improves and financing becomes more affordable, according to the report.


----------



## ekim68

'Ambulance drone' prototype unveiled in Holland



> The Hague (AFP) - A Dutch-based student on Tuesday unveiled a prototype of an "ambulance drone", a flying defibrillator able to reach heart attack victims within precious life-saving minutes.
> 
> Developed by Belgian engineering graduate Alec Momont, it can fly at speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour (60 miles per hour).
> 
> "Around 800,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest in the European Union every year and only 8.0 percent survive," Momont, 23, said at the TU Delft University.
> 
> "The main reason for this is the relatively long response time of emergency services of around 10 minutes, while brain death and fatalities occur with four to six minutes," he said in a statement.
> 
> "The ambulance drone can get a defibrillator to a patient within a 12 square kilometre (4.6 square miles) zone within a minute, reducing the chance of survival from 8 percent to 80 percent."


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Denmark Plans to Be Coal-Free in 10 Years, Totally Clean-Powered in 35



> Denmark is a small, rich, very industrialized nation-it's home to corporate behemoths like Maersk and Lego-that also happens to an unparalleled pioneer in clean energy.
> 
> Earlier this year, the nation's leadership announced that it planned to run its economy entirely on renewable power by 2050, and would phase out coal by 2030. Months later, the Danish government reported that wind was about to become far cheaper than fossil fuels. This week, it said it'd like to try to do even better, and kill coal in ten years, not fifteen.


----------



## ekim68

Cancer-killing stem cells engineered in lab



> Scientists from Harvard Medical School have discovered a way of turning stem cells into killing machines to fight brain cancer.
> 
> In experiments on mice, the stem cells were genetically engineered to produce and secrete toxins which kill brain tumours, without killing normal cells or themselves.
> 
> Researchers said the next stage was to test the procedure in humans.


----------



## ekim68

Security Companies Team Up, Take Down Chinese Hacking Group



> A coalition of security companies has hit a sophisticated hacking group in China with a heavy blow. The effort is detailed in a report released today by Novetta. The coalition, which calls itself Operation SMN, detected and cleaned up malicious code on 43,000 computers worldwide that were targeted by Axiom, an incredibly sophisticated organization that has been stealing intellectual property for more than six years.
> 
> This effort was led by Novetta and included Bit9, Cisco, FireEye, F-Secure, iSIGHT Partners, Microsoft, Tenable, ThreatConnect Intelligence Research Team (TCIRT), ThreatTrack Security, Volexity, and other unnamed organizations. Operation SMN is working independently of law enforcement or intelligence agencies.


----------



## ekim68

Armored vehicle helps collect civil judgment in small town



> When officials in the tiny Town of Stettin in Marathon County went to collect a civil judgment from 75-year-old Roger Hoeppner this month, they sent 24 armed officers.
> 
> And an armored military vehicle.


----------



## ekim68

Qatar Digital Library is free to use and reuse



> This growing archive covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, available online for the first time.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Armored vehicle helps collect civil judgment in small town


That is a sick way to do something. Plus the attorney should of been able to be there. The Government to day is Lawless.


----------



## ekim68

The TPP may endanger world health, newly leaked chapter shows



> WikiLeaks on Thursday published an updated version of the negotiating texts of a controversial and highly secretive trade agreement between the United States and 11 other member nations.
> 
> Critics warn that the international agreement, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), proposes sweeping changes to intellectual property norms that would stifle freedom of expression online and impose harsh monopoly rights on new drugs, vaccines, and agricultural products.
> 
> While most international trade negotiations involve a good deal of secrecy, controversy enveloped the TPP when hundreds of corporate advisors were given access to the texts, even as the public and members of Congress were being kept in the dark.


----------



## ekim68

Germany 'would accept UK exit from EU' to protect migration rules



> Chancellor Angela Merkel would rather see the UK exit from the European Union than compromise over the principle of free movement of workers, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel.
> 
> Mrs Merkel is alleged to fear that the UK is approaching a "point of no return".


----------



## ekim68

How you and the world have changed since you were born.



> Our planet has been around for 4.5 billion years.
> But how has it changed in your lifetime?


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Pope Francis: 'Caring for the poor does not make you a communist' 



> Pope Francis has once again rejected claims that his concern for the poor and criticisms of capitalism make him a communist, by declaring that he is merely following the Gospel.
> 
> In one his longest speeches as Pope, the Holy See outlined his views on a wide range of issues- from poverty and the injustices of unemployment to the need to protect the environment.


----------



## ekim68

NRA Reminds Gun-Loving Voters to Be Afraid of Everything, Including ISIS, Mexicans, and Obama



> If you've ever wondered where the endless font of gun-nut paranoia comes from, try the National Rifle Association's magazine, America's 1st Freedom. In a special election issue headlined "Chaos at Our Door? A Dangerous World Is Closing In" and illustrated with an Islamic State fighter, NRA chief fearmongerer Wayne LaPierre writes a column warning Americans to "Vote Your Guns in November." Because the end is nigh.


----------



## ekim68

Janet Yellen Mentions Inequality; Conservatives Scandalized



> Earlier this month, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered a careful, fact-laden speech about rising economic inequality. This proved so sufficiently alarming to conservatives that even the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Strain, a moderate, wrote that Yellen is now "in danger of becoming a partisan hack." Strain has kicked off a debate, hosted in the New York Times today, over Yellen's apparently shocking breach of decorum.
> 
> The most striking thing about Yellen's remarks is how cautiously she waded into the subject of inequality. Rather than actually state that rising inequality is a problem in American life, she merely conceded that it is "appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history." Strain concedes that Yellen withheld a personal opinion about whether the rising gap between rich and poor is good or bad - "even by focusing on income inequality," he argues, "she has waded into politically choppy waters."
> 
> It is true that inequality is a - more likely the - question the two parties most bitterly contest. Democrats propose domestic policies that would reduce inequality; Republicans propose policies that increase inequality, often to a *historically unprecedented degree.*


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court Refuses Appeal, 50 Sherlock Holmes Works Officially in Public Domain



> An ongoing copyright case closed on Monday after the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal about Sherlock Holmes stories in the public domain. The Court left intact a ruling from the seventh US circuit court of appeals that 50 Sherlock Holmes stories published before 1923 are no longer protected by copyright. An appeal to that ruling had been filed by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate, but their last-ditch effort to preserve an undoubtedly generous stream of income was denied. The Estate can, however, still collect royalties on the final 10 Holmes stories, which were published between 1923 and 1927 and remain protected by copyright.


----------



## ekim68

Suntory time: Japanese whisky named world's best in sour dram for Scotland 



> Scottish drinkers could be forgiven for crying into their drams after a single malt from Japan was named the best whisky in the world for the first time.
> 
> Whisky expert Jim Murray awarded a record-equalling 97.5 marks out of 100 to Suntory's Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013, hailing it as "near indescribable genius" in his comments in the forthcoming 2015 World Whisky Bible.
> 
> Murray's tasting notes described the whisky, from the company's distillery near Kyoto in western Japan, as possessing "a nose of exquisite boldness" and as "thick, dry, [and] as rounded as a snooker ball".


----------



## ekim68

Tech giant Intel backs schoolboy inventor



> A 13-year-old boy from California has secured funding from Intel to bring a low-cost Braille printer to market.
> 
> Intel has not disclosed the exact sum it is giving to Shubham Banerjee, but the Reuters news agency reported it was "a few hundred thousand dollars".
> 
> The teenager rose to prominence after showing off a prototype version made with Lego kit, at the White House, when he was aged just 12.


----------



## ekim68

Birds found using human musical scales for the first time



> The flutelike songs of the male hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) are some of the most beautiful in the animal kingdom. Now, researchers have found that these melodies employ the same mathematical principles that underlie many Western and non-Western musical scales-the first time this has been seen in any animal outside humans. The scientists analyzed the spectrograms (barcodelike representations of the frequencies in a sound) of 71 songs containing 10 or more notes made by 14 of the birds; the songs were collected across North America over more than 50 years by various individuals.


----------



## ekim68

ADHD-air pollution link: Breathing dirty air during pregnancy raises odds of childhood ADHD-related behavior problems



> Prenatal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH, a component of air pollution, raises the odds of behavior problems associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, at age 9, according to researchers.


----------



## ekim68

World's first solar bike path set to open in the Netherlands



> The world's first solar bike path is set to open in the Netherlands next Wednesday. The SolaRoad will run through Amsterdam's northern suburb of Krommenie and will feature concrete slabs embedded with solar panels to convert energy from the sun into electricity for the grid.


----------



## ekim68

Free Trade Has Failed Because It's Neither Free Nor Fair



> The United States has not had a trade surplus since 1975. Over $8 trillion has been lost through trade deficits between 2000 and 2013 alone. This is caused by "free trade" on our end and protectionism on the other. "Free trade" has essentially led to the most massive wealth transfer in the history of the world.


----------



## ekim68

Does Cracking Your Knuckles Really Give You Arthritis?



> You've heard it before. You're in a quiet room in among a gathering of people, and then-POP!-a little cracking noise rings out, followed by another, and another, and another. For some, cracking knuckles is a habit, while for others that little pop brings relief. And it's not just reserved for tough guys before they beat people up: Between 25 and 54 percent of all people crack their knuckles multiple times a day. But is the old wives' tale true? Are these knuckle-crackers more likely to hurt their hands and gradually develop arthritis as they get older?
> 
> In short, nope!


----------



## ekim68

Long-term study finds zero link between violence in video games and real life



> The first long-term study has been completed on the link between the consumption of violent media and real-life violent acts, and has found... there is none. In fact, the only possible trend that cropped up over the last century was that an increased consumption of violent video games correlated to a decrease in youth violence.


----------



## ekim68

Robot makes people feel like a ghost is nearby



> In 2006, cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Blanke of the University of Geneva in Switzerland was testing a patient's brain functions before her epilepsy surgery when he noticed something strange. Every time he electrically stimulated the region of her brain responsible for integrating different sensory signals from the body, the patient would look back behind her back as if a person was there, even when she knew full well that no one was actually present.
> 
> Now, with the help of robots, Blanke and colleagues have not only found a neurological explanation for this illusion, but also tricked healthy people into sensing "ghosts," they report online today in Current Biology. The study could help explain why schizophrenia patients sometimes hallucinate that aliens control their movements.


----------



## ekim68

Rotating park bench always has a dry seat for you



> Here's a cute idea from designer Sung Woo Park, from Seoul in South Korea. It's a park bench that rotates with the turn of a handle, so if it's been raining, you can rotate it around to sit on the dry side.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Discover a Virus That Subtly Changes the Brain to 'Makes Humans More Stupid'



> Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska have discovered an algae virus that makes us more stupid by infecting our brains.
> 
> The researchers were conducting a completely unrelated study into throat microbes when they realised that DNA in the throats of healthy people matched the DNA of a chlorovirus virus known as ATCV-1.
> 
> ATCV-1 is a virus that infects the green algae found in freshwater lakes and ponds. It had previously been thought to be non-infectious to humans, but the scientists found that it actually affects cognitive functions in the brain by shortening attention span and causing a decrease in spatial awareness.


----------



## DaveBurnett

> Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska have discovered an algae virus that makes us more stupid by infecting our brains.


Ah, that explains a lot. 
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/scientists...hanges-brain-makes-humans-more-stupid-1474010


----------



## poochee

Indeed!


----------



## ekim68

52 Of The World's Most Widespread Myths And Misconceptions, Debunked



> A dropped penny won't kill you, alcohol doesn't keep you warm, and swallowed gum doesn't take seven years to digest. These are just three of the more than fifty rumors debunked in this compendious collection of common myths and misconceptions.


----------



## ekim68

'Too big to fail' bank rules unveiled by global regulators



> New global rules to prevent banks that are "too big to fail" from being bailed out by taxpayers have been proposed.
> 
> The rules, created by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a global regulator, will require big banks to hold much more money against losses.
> 
> Mark Carney, FSB chairman and governor of the Bank of England, said the plans were a "watershed" moment.
> 
> He said it had been "totally unfair" for taxpayers to bail out banks after the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
> 
> "The banks and their shareholders and their creditors got the benefit when things went well," he told the BBC.
> 
> "But when they went wrong the British public and subsequent generations picked up the bill - and that's going to end".


----------



## ekim68

Germans get free heating from the cloud 



> The idea of cloud heating won't go away. Germany now has a company, Cloud&Heat, which offers free hot water from a distributed data center installed in your office.
> 
> Cloud&Heat places servers on remote premises (potentially your office). They process data for Cloud&Heat's data customers, and heat your building with the waste heat. Cloud customers get cheap pay-as-you-go cloud compute, block storage and object storage, based on OpenStack. Heat customers (the people who host the server cabinets) get free heating.


----------



## ekim68

The New Reign of the Top One Thousandth



> Ever since Thomas Piketty's coming out party, debate has raged in America over the implications of inequality of wealth and income. A new research paper shows just how much the extremely rich-the top tenth of the top 1%-have taken control since the 1980s.
> 
> Emmanuel Saez is one of the foremost economists studying the issue of inequality in America. He and Gabriel Zucman have released a new working paper that improves on past attempts to measure the growth of wealth inequality in our country. We knew that inequality has been getting worse since around the time Reagan took office, but this is a more exact measure of how much worse:


----------



## ekim68

Beautiful Polar Photos Tell a Haunting Story About Climate Change



> When Camille Seaman started photographing icebergs and other arctic wonders, she wasn't thinking about climate change. She simply found the frozen landscape and white vistas visually stunning.
> 
> Still, you can't help but associate her images with the ongoing conversation about climate change. Seaman, 45, says she too sees her work as directly connected and aptly titled her new book of pictures from the two poles Melting Away.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The New Reign of the Top One Thousandth


----------



## ekim68

School demonstrates 'active shooter' system



> METHUEN, Mass. (AP) - With students off for the Veterans Day holiday, a simulated school shooting at a Methuen grammar school on Tuesday showed what ''active shooter'' technology could do to help police catch a gunman if the horrible threat ever strikes as it has at other schools across the country.
> 
> In the live demonstration, the ''gunman'' entered the school armed with an assault rifle, opening fire with dummy rounds first in the school library then rampaging through hallways and classrooms. But he had only a few minutes to wreak havoc.
> 
> Smoke alarm-sized sensors installed in classrooms, hallways and other points throughout the building were activated by the sounds of gunfire, and police officers were immediately able to track his movements and quickly subdue him.
> 
> Nearly 100 people, including U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas and regional law enforcement officers, gathered in the school auditorium to observe the demonstration of what the school district bills as the first such system operating in a public school in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

How America's Favorite Baby-Goat Club Is Helping Big Ag Take Over Farming in Africa



> 4-H claims its Africa program benefits village kids. Critics say it's actually just benefiting US companies.


----------



## ekim68

"War on ATMs"



> The story that is being unfolded now in Russia (and Ukraine). Gangs use new tactics to get money from the ATMs - they blow them up terrorizing the population and neighbors with the loud full scale explosions all for just getting to the inner parts of the machines where the valuables are stored.


----------



## ekim68

Never Too Late to Tell Old Iraq Lies



> CBS Face the Nation featured interviews with Barack Obama and George W. Bush this weekend (11/9/14), and part of the latter discussion covered the Iraq War. The show provided one more chance for Bush, with an assist from host Bob Schieffer, to misstate some facts about the decision to invade:


----------



## ekim68

Climate change 'will make lightning strike more'



> Global warming will significantly increase the frequency of lightning strikes, according to US research.
> 
> The research, published in Science, was carried out with the help of data from a US network of lightning detectors.
> 
> The teams says they have calculated how much each extra degree in temperature will raise the frequency of lightning.
> 
> "For every two lightning strikes in 2000, there will be three lightning strikes in 2100," said David Romps, at the University of California, Berkeley.


----------



## ekim68

Genome testing is now easy, fast and pretty



> Genome testing gear doesn't get a lot of love. Like a lot of lab equipment, it tends to be ugly and unwieldy -- it's not designed with the same elegance as the smartphone in your pocket. Mercifully, the crew at Fluidigm appears to have solved those problems in one shot with its Juno genotyping machine. The Yves Behar-designed device is (dare we say it) pretty, and wouldn't look out of place sitting on a desk. It's also more intuitive, relying on a large, simple touchscreen interface instead of keyboards and tiny displays.
> 
> And importantly, it's fast. Juno uses a new circuit that can extract DNA, pre-amplify it (to make the genes readable) and test it all in a single step, saving testers from coming back multiple times to move things along; they can slide in a genetic sample and get results in three hours, instead of the usual five or more.


----------



## ekim68

World is crossing malnutrition red line, report warns



> Most countries in the world are facing a serious public health problem as a result of malnutrition, a report warns.
> 
> The Global Nutrition Report said every nation except China had crossed a "malnutrition red line", suffering from too much or too little nutrition.
> 
> Globally, malnutrition led to "11% of GDP being squandered as a result of lives lost, less learning, less earning and days lost to illness," it added.


----------



## ekim68

Finally a Member of the Oligarchy Is Indicted for Culpability in Worker Deaths: 29 Coal Miners Killed



> A member of the oligarchy is finally being held criminally responsible for worker deaths.
> 
> Don Blankenship, former CEO of Massey Energy (King Coal in West Virginia), was just indicted for putting profits above the lives of his company's employees resulting in a 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.


----------



## ekim68

Miniature Portable Dialysis Machine on Fast Track for FDA Approval



> Dialysis machines are needed by patients with renal (kidney) failure to clean their blood of wastes produced by the body. In 2008, Dr. Victor Gura, an internationally known kidney specialist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, proposed the first miniature portable dialysis machine..


----------



## ekim68

The Unfinished Suburbs of America



> Thousands of acres across the country were partially developed during the housing boom. What should happen to them now?


----------



## ekim68

Mall threatens to fine stores $200 an hour for being closed on Thanksgiving



> So much for being home for the holidays.
> 
> A shopping mall in upstate New York has apparently threatened to fine retailers the insane sum of $200 an hour if they aren't open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
> 
> Walden Galleria, the Buffalo mall in question, has more than 200 stores, and the mall apparently revealed the fine in a meeting of store managers last week. This year marks the first that Walden Galleria is opening in the middle of Thanksgiving, managers told The Huffington Post.


----------



## ekim68

This map shows where we've screwed the oceans most



> We've gotten a lot better at mapping the oceans since the days of "Here There Be Monsters" - thanks, satellite overlords! - and now we have a new map to add to the stack: an up-to-date chart of exactly where the oceans have acidified the most.
> 
> A team of geochemists led by Taro Takahashi at Columbia University just published the research in the journal Marine Chemistry as a series of colorful maps (incidentally, our favorite form for groundbreaking scientific research to take). Takahashi and colleagues spent the past four decades collecting the data, which will serve as a benchmark for future measures of acidification.


----------



## Brigham

I was reading this thread and I thought I know a "sign of the times" that is applied to me. We have a house with a long through lounge. My wife wanted a curtain put up to divide this room. She bought the materials, and I said to her "this will only take me ten minutes to do" When I finished two and a half hours had passed. What I hadn't reckoned with was the passing years. every time I went up the ladder, I had to come down for my glasses. Trying to screw the screws tight enough was impossible with the lack of strength in my hands, so the drill had to be altered to take the screwdriver bits. All this combined with a general malaise made up the time. I think I still thought of myself as I was sixty years ago. To me this was a real sign of the times.


----------



## HOBOcs

Good one Brigham - at least your "Mind" still thinks you're young and energetic


----------



## DaveBurnett

I too get frustrated by things I can no longer do without a lot of effort - if at all.

And I'm turning into a right grumpy old man.........


----------



## Brigham

DaveBurnett said:


> I too get frustrated by things I can no longer do without a lot of effort - if at all.
> 
> And I'm turning into a right grumpy old man.........


I've already turned.


----------



## ekim68

Brigham said:


> I've already turned.


I'm getting ready to turn and I'll consider it a badge of honor.... My youngest Grandchild is graduating from High School this year and off towards adulthood....


----------



## ekim68

Byproduct of drought: Water thieves



> The drought is stoking interest in an usual crime: stealing water.
> 
> Some water rustlers sneak in at night to wrench open fire hydrants, and then truck it away.
> 
> Others, whose job is to deliver water for construction or dust control, take fresh water they're either not paying for, or are not supposed to take.
> 
> Either way, reports of water stealing are up among Bay Area water districts and other urban suppliers in California as the state lurches toward what could be a fourth dry year in a row.


----------



## ekim68

Chocolate: Can Science Save the World's Most Endangered Treat? 



> Because of disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber, demand is expected to outstrip supply by an additional 1 million tons every decade for the foreseeable future.


----------



## ekim68

Typeface Design Contract Saves Beggar from the Streets



> A diesel explosion in 1993 changed Cui Xianren's life forever. In seconds, the blast burned Cui's face beyond recognition and crippled both his hands. Three months of care in the hospital saved his life, but he only regained use of his index fingers and right ring finger.
> 
> After being discharged, Cui chose to leave his home in the Huiqi Manchu Ethnic Town of Wangkui, Heilongjiang province and live as a beggar rather than burden his wife. Armed with only three years of elementary education, he devoted 10 hours each day to teaching himself the art of calligraphy.
> 
> Now 49 years old, Cui's life looks set to change again thanks to his discovery by Founder Type.
> 
> The popular Chinese typeface company announced it had licensed Cui's unique handwriting for its new "Xianren" font last week.
> 
> According to the contract, Beijing Founder Electronics will pay Cui a 50,000 yuan advance to write 1,000 characters during the first phase of development. He will also receive royalties from the font's sale for the next 50 years after it becomes available for purchase.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Could Swallow the Whole Russian Stock Market. Take a Look



> The CHART OF THE DAY shows the total market capitalization of all public companies in the world's largest country slipped below that of the world's most-valued company for the first time on record. The gap, at $121 billion on Nov. 12, is about the price of 143 million contract-free 64-gigabyte iPhones, based on Apple Store prices.
> 
> The value of Russian equities has slumped $234 billion to $531 billion this year, while Apple gained $147 billion to $652 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The technology company's innovation and brand value attract investors, while Russia's political conflicts, sanctions and the threat of economic stagnation next year make them nervous, according to Vadim Bit-Avragim, a portfolio manager who helps oversee about $4 billion at Kapital Asset Management LLC in Moscow.


----------



## ekim68

More guns, more crime: New research debunks a central thesis of the gun rights movement



> "More guns, less crime" - surely you've heard this mantra before? There's even an entire book devoted to it. As Emily Badger noted awhile back, it has become a staple of our national gun control debate: "The idea that more guns lead to less crime appears on gun policy 'fact sheets,' as evidence debunking gun control 'myths,' in congressional committee reports."
> 
> The notion stems from a paper published in 1997 by economists John Lott and David Mustard, who looked at county-level crime data from 1977 to 1992 and concluded that "allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths." Of course, the study of gun crime has advanced significantly since then (no thanks to Congress). Some researchers have gone so far as to call Lott and Mustard's original study "completely discredited."


----------



## ekim68

We're hooked on this map of industrial fishing



> We've written before how the best tools to fight overfishing at sea may be found in the skies - but this past Wednesday, proof-of-concept came in the form of a satellite-tracked map of all the journeys made by 25,000 large vessels between 2012 and 2013. (Three thousand of those could be verified as fishing vessels; the other 22,000 seemed to show fishing behavior, but otherwise played their cards too close to the chest to call.)


----------



## ekim68

Seven big U.S. companies paid CEOs more than Uncle Sam in 2013: study



> (Reuters) - Seven of the 30 largest U.S. corporations paid more money to their chief executive officers last year than they paid in U.S. federal income taxes, according to a study released on Tuesday that was disputed by at least one of the companies.
> 
> Amid talk in Washington about corporate tax reform, the study said the seven companies, which in 2013 reported more than $74 billion in combined U.S. pre-tax profits, came out ahead on their taxes, gaining $1.9 billion more than they owed.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Vows to Run on 100 Percent Renewable Energy



> Apple made the pledge. So did Google and Facebook. But Amazon stayed silent.
> 
> Over the past few years, Apple, Google, and Facebook pledged to run their online empires on renewable energy, and considering how large these empires have become-how many data centers and machines are now required to keep them going-this was a vital thing. But despite pressure from the likes of Greenpeace, the environmental activism organization, the other big internet name, Amazon, didn't budge.
> 
> That all changed on Wednesday. With a post on its website, Amazon's cloud computing division-Amazon Web Services-said it has a "long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint."


----------



## ekim68

Obesity 'costing same as smoking'



> The worldwide cost of obesity is about the same as smoking or armed conflict and greater than both alcoholism and climate change, research has suggested.
> 
> The McKinsey Global Institute said it cost £1.3tn, or 2.8% of annual economic activity - it cost the UK £47bn.
> 
> Some 2.1bn people - about 30% of the world's population - were overweight or obese, the researchers added.
> 
> They said measures that relied less on individual responsibility should be used to tackle the problem.


----------



## ekim68

7 traffic tips to get you to the Thanksgiving table



> Thanksgiving means gearing up for a turkey feast, Thanksgiving Day parades, local Turkey Trots and annual football showdowns. It also means braving some of the worst holiday traffic conditions of the year.


----------



## ekim68

Behind Closed Doors, Ford, UPS, and Visa Push for Net Neutrality



> The corporate battle lines over the new federal rules for the Internet have been well established. Vocal technology startups have been leading the charge for muscular regulations for broadband access, and Internet service providers including Comcast (CMCSA) and Verizon (VZ) have been arguing loudly for more flexibility. Blue chip companies without obvious tech interests have kept a lower profile.
> 
> But a corporate alliance with subtle interests in this fight has been quietly pushing the Federal Communications Commission for strict broadband rules. In a series of meetings this year attended by representatives from Ford Motor (F), Visa (V), United Parcel Service (UPS), and Bank of America (BAC), participants urged FCC commissioners to reclassify broadband service under Title II, according to documents filed with the FCC.
> 
> That places some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies firmly on one side of the net neutrality debate, advocating for Internet access to be regulated like public utilities. It's a position President Obama came out in support of this week.


----------



## ekim68

Rooftop solar electricity on pace to beat coal, oil



> The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in just two years -- and the technology to produce it will only get cheaper.
> 
> The prediction, made by Deutsche Bank's leading solar industry analyst, Vishal Shah, is part of a report on Vivint Solar, the nation's second-biggest solar panel installer. Shah believes Vivint Solar is doing so well that it will double its sales each year for the next two years.
> 
> The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Nice independent report from an unbiased source there Mike


----------



## ekim68

The predictions are by Deutsche Bank and I'm not sure what their bias is, but I'm glad of all the new technology in photovoltaics and the increase of manufacturing. Anything to start replacing the burning of fossil fuels that foul the air...:up:
I'm never going back down to Los Angeles because at my age I choose what air to breathe...


----------



## DaveBurnett

I'm not arguing the sentiment at all.
I'm just not sure that some of the so called 'green' solutions are actually any greener when the total life cycle of them is taken into account.

There is a company not far from me that has recently been in the news as a manufacturer of Wind turbines.
They admitted that the energy wasted in making them was far greater than the energy they would ever put back into the system.


----------



## ekim68

Banking Culture Primes People to Cheat



> A study of investment managers and traders at a major international bank suggests that the financial industry's culture encourages dishonest behavior, but that the individuals themselves are not inherently dishonest.
> 
> The reputation of the financial sector has taken a bashing in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, and after scandals involving the manipulation of interest rates, fraudulent deals and rogue traders losing billions of dollars. Now, a team of economists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland has found that when bankers think about their jobs, they are more likely to lie - evidence that banking culture encourages dishonest behaviour.


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> There is a company not far from me that has recently been in the news as a manufacturer of Wind turbines.
> They admitted that the energy wasted in making them was far greater than the energy they would ever put back into the system.


I liked to read their stats on that... How far are they projecting into the future?


----------



## DaveBurnett

Wind turbines have a life of 15 years at maximum.
You won't find many real figures on the web.


----------



## ekim68

The world's longest train journey now begins in China



> On Nov. 18, an 82-container freight train left the eastern Chinese industrial city of Yiwu. It was embarking on a landmark journey that is supposed to end 21 days later, in December, in Madrid. The distance the train covers - more than 6,200 miles - marks the longest route taken by a freight train, longer still than Russia's famed Trans-Siberian Railway.


----------



## ekim68

Countries with the most enslaved people



> While many believe slavery is an issue of the past, it remains a real, yet largely hidden, problem. An estimated 35.8 million people are enslaved worldwide, according to a recent report by the Walk Free Foundation, a human rights organization.
> 
> Modern-day slavery differs from traditional slavery. In traditional slavery, which is illegal in each of the 167 countries reviewed in the 2014 Global Slavery Index, people were considered legal property. However, modern slavery, which is defined as possession or control of a person that deprives them of their rights with the intention of exploiting them, exists in each of the 167 nations.


----------



## ekim68

Killings by Utah police outpacing gang, drug, child-abuse homicides



> In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members.
> 
> Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.
> 
> And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives - 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan - than has violence between spouses and dating partners.
> 
> As the tally of fatal police shootings rises, law enforcement watchdogs say it is time to treat deadly force as a potentially serious public safety problem.


----------



## ekim68

Workers in Maine Buy Out Their Jobs, Set an Example for the Nation



> On remote Deer Isle, Maine, the movement for a more just and democratic economy won a major victory this summer. More than 60 employees of three retail businesses*-Burnt Cove Market, V&S Variety and Pharmacy, and The Galley-banded together to buy the stores and create the largest worker cooperative in Maine and the second largest in New England.


----------



## ekim68

The Worst Spots on an Airplane If You Want to Avoid Catching a Cold



> If you're flying over the holidays, you might be concerned about catching something from your fellow passengers. Planes do tend to have plenty of germ hot spots, but you can protect yourself with some basic health tactics.


----------



## ekim68

'Monster' Fracking Wells Guzzle Water in Drought-Stricken Regions



> The fracking industry likes to minimize the sector's bottomless thirst for often-scarce water resources, saying it takes about 2-4 million gallons of water to frack the average well, an amount the American Petroleum Institute describes as "the equivalent of three to six Olympic swimming pools." That's close to the figure cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well.
> 
> But a new report released by Environmental Working Group (EWG) located 261 "monster" wells that consumed between 10 and 25 million gallons of water to drill each well. Among the conclusions EWG teased out of data reported by the industry itself and posted at fracfocus.org is that between April 2010 and December 2013, these 261 wells consumed 3.3 billions of water between them, a average of 12.7 million gallons each. And 14 of the wells topped 20 million gallons each.
> 
> "It's far more relevant to compare those figures to basic human needs for water, rather than to swimming pools or golf courses," said EWG's report. *"The 3.3 billion gallons consumed by the monster wells was almost twice as much water as is needed each year by the people of Atascosa County, Texas, in the heart of the Eagle Ford shale formation, one of the most intensively drilled gas and oil fields in the country."*


----------



## ekim68

The World's Tiniest Countries and the Eccentrics Who Rule Them



> Never heard of the Imperial Kingdom of Calsahara? The Conch Republic? The Principality of Sealand? You're not alone.​ Léo Delafontaine hadn't either until 2012, when he visited the Republic of Saugeais, a self-proclaimed micronation in eastern France. He's since become fascinated with "countries" unrecognized by world governments and organizations. His book Micronations​ documents independent states that are just as varied and interesting as their official counterparts.


----------



## ekim68

This Is What Astronauts Will Eat For Thanksgiving



> Irradiated smoked turkey? Check. Thermo-stabilized candied yams? Present. Freeze-dried cornbread dressing? Of course! This is what the American astronauts aboard the ISS will be feasting on today.


----------



## ekim68

World Bank to ditch coal for clean energy



> The World Bank will invest heavily in clean energy and only fund coal projects in "circumstances of extreme need" because climate change will undermine efforts to eliminate extreme poverty, says its President Jim Yong Kim.
> 
> Talking ahead of a U.N. climate summit in Peru next month, Kim said he was alarmed by World Bank-commissioned research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which said that as a result of past greenhouse gas emissions the world is condemned to unprecedented weather events.


----------



## ekim68

A Slew of Coal Plants Get New Lease on Life-With Gas



> Old U.S. coal-fired power plants, the target of new anti-pollution rules, aren't necessarily shutting down. Many are getting a second life as they're "repowered" with natural gas.


----------



## ekim68

Blu-ray discs could help make better solar cells



> Blu-ray discs have proven themselves superior to DVDs as storage media in light of their high capacity, high definition, and higher transfer rate. Now researchers claim that Blu-ray discs have one more advantage over DVDs: they also have the ability to help markedly improve the efficiency of solar cells, when their etched information patterns are repurposed for use as light concentrators.
> 
> According to new research from a team at Northwestern University, Illinois, it has been discovered that the scattering effect on light shone through the arrangement of data etched on a Blu-ray disc improves energy absorption across the spectrum of light used by solar cells.


----------



## ekim68

Seven biggest health problems Americans face



> So, what are the actual biggest health problems that Americans face? One way to answer this question is to look at what drugs are prescribed the most. Here are the seven top health problems based on the most-prescribed drugs in the U.S., according to Medscape's analysis of data provided by IMS Health.


----------



## ekim68

The Program Big Oil's PR Firm Uses to 'Convert Average Citizens'



> The ​CEO of the world's largest PR firm has a policy when it comes to campaigns that focus on the environment. "We do not work with astroturf groups and we have never created a website for a client with the intent to deny climate change," Richard Edelman wrote in a blog post in August. That may actually turn out to be true. Technically.
> 
> Edelman may not work with astroturf groups. Instead, it appears to prefer to build them itself, from the ground up, using sophisticated proprietary software platform designed to "convert" advocates and then "track" their behavior.


----------



## ekim68

Breath test to detect pot is being developed at WSU



> A team at Washington State University is working to develop a breath test that could quickly determine whether a driver is under the influence of marijuana.
> 
> Law enforcement officers already use preliminary breath tests in the field to estimate drivers' blood alcohol content. But no similar portable tool exists to test for marijuana impairment via a breath sample.


----------



## ekim68

Web Thieves Using Lingo Of Wall St. 



> SAN FRANCISCO - For more than a year, a group of cybercriminals has been pilfering email correspondence from more than 100 organizations - most of them publicly traded health care or pharmaceutical companies - apparently in pursuit of information significant enough to affect global financial markets.
> 
> The group's activities, detailed in a report released Monday morning by FireEye, a Silicon Valley security company, shed light on a new breed of criminals intent on using their hacking skills to gain a market edge in the pharmaceutical industry, where news of clinical trials, regulatory decisions or safety or legal issues can significantly affect a company's stock price.


----------



## ekim68

Same Votes, Different Districts Would Change Results



> Researchers at Duke University have developed a mathematical model that shows how changes in North Carolina's congressional voting districts could affect election outcomes.
> 
> Focusing on the last election, the researchers varied the state's congressional districts to calculate what the outcome of the 2012 U.S. House of Representatives elections might have been had the state's districts been drawn to emphasize nonpartisan boundaries. The team re-ran the election 100 times -- using the same votes as in 2012 and tweaking the voting map with only the legal requirements of a redistricting plan in mind. Not once did they get the split of Democratic and Republican seats seen in the actual election.
> 
> The researchers hope the study will bolster calls for redistricting reform in the 2016 election season.


----------



## ekim68

Most Popular How-To Guides of 2014


----------



## ekim68

Feds dig up law from 1789 to demand Apple, Google decrypt smartphones, slabs



> The FBI has made it no secret that it hates Apple and Google's efforts to encrypt files in your smartphones and tablets.
> 
> Now court documents have emerged showing just how far the Feds are willing to go to decrypt citizens' data.
> 
> The paperwork has shown two cases where federal prosecutors have cited the All Writs Act - which was enacted in 1789 as part of the Judiciary Act - to force companies to decrypt information on gadgets.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street is Taking Over America's Pension Plans



> Coverage of the midterm elections has, understandably, focused on the shift in political power from Democrats toward Republicans. But behind the scenes, another major story has been playing out. Wall Street spent upwards of $300M to influence the election results. And a key part of its agenda has been a plan to move more and more of the $3 trillion dollars in unguarded government pension funds into privately managed, high-fee investments - a shift that may well constitute the biggest financial story of our generation that you've never heard of.


----------



## ekim68

PayPal Reports Record-Breaking Number Of Black Friday Shoppers And Sales On Mobile



> The move to offer online shoppers earlier access to Black Friday deals - beginning as early as Thanksgiving Day this year - resulted in record-breaking numbers of consumers shopping on mobile, reports PayPal. Based on its online commerce data, the company reports having seen a 47% increase in PayPal global mobile payment volume on Thanksgiving compared with Thanksgiving 2013, and a 62% increase for Black Friday 2014 over last year. Meanwhile, the company also saw a 43% increase in the number of customers shopping through PayPal mobile this Thanksgiving, and a 51% increase across the same metric on Black Friday.


----------



## ekim68

Is Chernobyl still dangerous or was 60 Minutes pushing propaganda?



> On November 23, 2014, 60 minutes, the venerable CBS News Sunday evening program that has been on the air since its launch in 1968, aired a segment titled Chernobyl: The Catastrophe That Never Ended. The show is full of fascinating contrasts between what the cameras show to the audience and what the narrator tells the audience that they should believe.
> 
> Watched with the sound off, viewers see a landscape that has been largely abandoned by humans and taken over by lush greenery. There are a few people living and working in the area who seem quite content. They gesture to interesting icons, statues, empty buildings, and the relics of an old amusement park. There are camera wielding tourists casually walking around and putting themselves in a variety of position seeking an unusual photo or camera angle.


----------



## ekim68

New Bluetooth devices will connect directly to the internet



> For all the talk of an Internet of Things, many Bluetooth devices aren't very internet-savvy; they usually have to rely on WiFi (or another gadget entirely) to hop online. That's going to change very shortly with the advent of Bluetooth's new 4.2 spec. If a sensor, smart light bulb or other low-power device supports the new technology, it can connect directly to the internet (through a router or other access point, at least) without needing a go-between. That's potentially huge for home automation -- you could control all your appliances and light fixture from anywhere in the world without requiring special hubs.


----------



## ekim68

Real world contradicts right-wing tax theories



> Ever since economist Arthur Laffer drew his namesake curve on a napkin for two officials in President Richard Nixon's administration four decades ago, we have been told that cutting tax rates spurs jobs and higher pay, while hiking taxes does the opposite.
> 
> Now, thanks to recent tax cuts in Kansas and tax hikes in California, we have real-world tests of this idea. So far, the results do not support Laffer's insistence that lower tax rates always result in more and better-paying jobs. In fact, Kansas' tax cuts produced much slower job and wage growth than in California.


----------



## ekim68

50 Years Ago, the Very First Star Trek Pilot Started Filming



> The official 50th anniversary of Star Trek is in 2016, which will be fifty years from the first airing of Star Trek on television. The Original Series' "The Man Trap" aired on September 8, 1966. But, as memorialized by Leonard Nimoy, the unaired pilot "The Cage" began filming on December 3, 1964.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T hates telcoms regulations, except when it insists on them



> The company that says that the gubmint should stay out of its business and let it destroy Net Neutrality also says the government should clobber Kansas towns with no broadband who have the audacity to run their own networks.


----------



## ekim68

Tea Partiers and traditional Republicans are split on science



> It is very common these days to hear references to Republicans having conflicts with science. Most recently, Politico reported last week that the "next battle in the war on science" will involve efforts by congressional Republicans to control funding for (or even seek to defund) a variety of types of government supported research, including climate research and social science.
> 
> But if a new study just out in the journal Environmental Politics is correct, the conflict between "Republicans" and the scientific community may really boil down to a conflict between scientists and today's so-called Tea Party. The paper suggests that on a large array of scientific topics, members of the Tea Party diverge markedly from more traditional members of the GOP.


----------



## ekim68

Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests 



> PUNGESTI, Romania - Vlasa Mircia, the mayor of this destitute village in eastern Romania, thought he had struck it rich when the American energy giant Chevron showed up here last year and leased a plot of land he owned for exploratory shale gas drilling.
> 
> But the encounter between big business and rural Romania quickly turned into a nightmare. The village became a magnet for activists from across the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Violent clashes broke out between the police and protesters. The mayor, one of the few locals who sided openly with Chevron, was run out of town, reviled as a corrupt sellout in what activists presented as a David versus Goliath struggle between impoverished farmers and corporate America.
> 
> "I was really shocked," recalled the mayor, who is now back at his office on Pungesti's main, in fact only, street. "We never had protesters here and suddenly they were everywhere."
> 
> Pointing to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protest, Romanian officials including the prime minister say that the struggle over fracking in Europe does feature a Goliath, but it is the Russian company Gazprom, not the American Chevron.


----------



## ekim68

Yet Another Study Proclaims U.S. Broadband Awesome If You Intentionally Ignore All The Warts



> To be clear, the United States is indisputably mediocre when it comes to broadband. It doesn't really matter if you look at data from FCC, the the OECD, OOkla's Net Index or walk next door and ask your neighbor. We're average or worse on metrics like speed (three quarters of the country has no competitive option at speeds faster than 25 Mbps), penetration, price and adoption, and we're among the worst anywhere when it comes to customer service. In fact U.S. broadband customer service is so bad, people rank the IRS, banking industry, insurance companies and the airlines higher.


----------



## ekim68

UNASUR Moves toward Continental Freedom of Movement, Venezuela Makes "Equality" Call



> The 12 member Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has taken a step toward creating South American citizenship and freedom of movement. Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro also called for strategies to promote continental economic development, social equality and defence sovereignty.
> 
> The new proposals for South American integration were made during a UNASUR summit in Guayaquil, Ecuador yesterday. Today regional leaders are meeting in the Ecuadorian capital Quito for the opening of the organisation's new permanent headquarters.


----------



## ekim68

Corporate Greed



> Now that we have celebrated Thanksgiving, I was struck by the news that Congress is considering legislation that would grant large tax breaks to corporate citizens and actually remove tax breaks for the poor and the middle class.
> 
> ' "This Congress seems willing to give huge tax cuts to big businesses-who are already doing better than ever-but somehow can't prevent tax increases on 50 million working Americans that will occur when expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit expire," Harry Stein, the Associate Director for Fiscal Policy at American Progress Action Fund, told ThinkProgress. "This is a great deal for CEOs and a terrible deal for struggling families.


----------



## ekim68

Obese lose up to eight years of life



> Being severely obese can knock up to eight years off your life and cause decades of ill health, a report says.
> 
> The analysis showed being obese at a young age was more damaging to health and life expectancy.
> 
> The team, at McGill University in Canada, said heart problems and type 2 diabetes were major sources of disability and death.
> 
> Experts said people were frequently "ignorant" of the consequences of obesity.


----------



## ekim68

Left-Handed? Prepare to Earn Less



> When our son was born two years ago, my right-handed wife prayed he would be a lefty, because she believed lefties were disproportionately talented. It seems that he is left-handed, as am I and my older son, but new research suggests that may not carry the benefit my wife thought it would.
> 
> About 12 percent of people globally are southpaws. You're more likely to be one if you're male than female and if your mother was left-handed. Lefties' brain structure and use appear to differ from righties. For example, the neural fibers connecting the left and right sides of the brain (the corpus callosum) are larger in lefties. And lefties differ in how the brain responds to language.


----------



## ekim68

Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General



> The letter to the Environmental Protection Agency from Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma carried a blunt accusation: Federal regulators were grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution caused by energy companies drilling new natural gas wells in his state.
> 
> But Mr. Pruitt left out one critical point. The three-page letter was written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma's biggest oil and gas companies, and was delivered to him by Devon's chief of lobbying.


----------



## ekim68

Congress gives Native American lands to foreign mining company with new NDAA



> Congress is poised to give a foreign mining company 2,400 acres of national forest in Arizona that is cherished ancestral homeland to Apache natives. Controversially, the measure is attached to annual legislation that funds the US Defense Department.
> 
> This week, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees quietly attached a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would mandate the handover of a large tract of Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of the Australian-English mining company Rio Tinto, which co-owns with Iran a uranium mine in Africa and which is 10-percent-owned by China.


----------



## ekim68

UNSW researchers set world record in solar energy efficiency



> Solar researchers working at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claim to have produced a system that converts over 40 percent of incoming sunlight into electricity, thereby taking the title of highest solar efficiency for a photovoltaic system ever reported.
> 
> The researchers first achieved their record efficiency in indoor tests in a facility in Sydney, Australia, and then had these achievements duplicated and ratified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) using an outdoor test facility in the United States.


----------



## ekim68

The 10 Most Important Excerpts From the CIA Torture Report 



> While some have worried that the Senate's CIA torture report would lead to trouble abroad, it's already causing outrage at home.
> 
> It's not just the graphic descriptions of torture that are being passed around, but the misinformation and lack of accountability within the CIA that is being discussed. The top social media results on torture focus on instances of the CIA spreading false information to try to sway public opinion and government decisions, and failing to discipline officers for, among other things, causing the deaths of detainees. The CIA did not vet those who oversaw the torturing, and allowed individuals who'd reportedly admitted to sexual assault to conduct interrogations.


----------



## ekim68

There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> There Has Been a Fatal School Shooting Every 5 Weeks Since Sandy Hook


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Left-Handed? Prepare to Earn Less


I have always wondered about this left and right handedness. I have always been right handed, but when I started to play football(soccer) I was naturally left footed. In fact in training I used to work hard the get my right foot as good as my left one. I got better with it but never as good.


----------



## ekim68

As an aside, my Wife is left handed and we've always joked about having a left handed spatula. Now I know there are stores that cater to Southpaws, but we've never checked them and so far haven't found one in the stores we shop...


----------



## ekim68

10 Bizarre Buildings and Their Fascinating Histories



> Iconic buildings such as the Flatiron Building and the Empire State Building are revered for their historical and cultural significance. However, few people are aware of the equally important structures scattered around the world-structures that have survived time, nature, and the wrecking ball.


----------



## ekim68

More good news....:up:

U.S. utilities face up to $48B revenue loss from solar, efficiency



> Energy utilities face losing between $18 billion and $48 billion a year in the U.S and up to €61 billion a year in Europe by 2025 as solar power and energy conservation initiatives grow, according to Accenture.
> 
> The Accenture analysis, based on extensive modeling and a survey of global utilities executives, estimates that energy demand could be reduced by more than 15% due to new energy technologies by 2025.


----------



## ekim68

The Shame of America's Rotting Roads



> The assumption was that the system's maintenance and improvements would be paid for by users: Those who drove on the roads and highways. The fairest way to assess that was through a gasoline tax. Drive more or bigger vehicles, you pay more. Seems rather logical.
> 
> Fast-forward a half-century.
> 
> The gas tax has been stuck in a time warp. It was last raised in 1993, to 18.4 cents a gallon. Despite the passage of more than 20 years, with both ensuing inflation and an aging system that needs ever-more maintenance, there it has stayed. The Highway Trust Fund has been starved of cash, and is the process of going broke.


----------



## ekim68

Plastic Pollution in the World's Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea 



> Plastic pollution is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment, yet estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics have lacked data, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and remote regions. Here we report an estimate of the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world's oceans from 24 expeditions (2007-2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, costal Australia, Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean Sea conducting surface net tows (N = 680) and visual survey transects of large plastic debris (N = 891).


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft tells US: The world's servers are not yours for the taking



> Redmond says the US would be aghast if a foreign government behaved as it does.


----------



## ekim68

Noah's Ark theme park loses tax breaks because of religious hiring policy



> Kentucky has withdrawn its offer of tax breaks for a religious-themed park that would feature a 500ft-long wooden ark because its organisers plan to screen park employees based on religion.


----------



## ekim68

The real CIA scandal isn't (just) the torture, it's the lying to America.



> "Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers." Know who wrote that? The CIA, in a CIA manual.


----------



## ekim68

9 of the Year's Best Photographs of Buildings


----------



## ekim68

Bouncy Gait Improves Mood



> A good mood may put a spring in your step. But the opposite can work too: purposefully putting a spring in your step can improve your mood. That's the finding from a study in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.


----------



## ekim68

Majority of Children in Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo Live in Poverty



> Detroit, whose economic struggles are well documented, has the highest rate of child poverty in the United States: 59%, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP). The majority of children in two other major cities also live in poverty: Cleveland (54%) and Buffalo (51%).


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Majority of Children in Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo Live in Poverty


----------



## ekim68

The Joy of Growth



> No, this isn't going to be a victory lap about the National Retail Federation and its always-wrong forecasts about holiday retail sales (that annual chest-pounding comes in January). Rather, this is about the recent U.S. economic acceleration and what it might mean for the stock market, the Federal Reserve and bonds.
> 
> The combination of falling oil prices, increasing job availability and rising wages bodes well for retail sales. Perhaps more significantly, the economy is now showing unmistakable signs of acceleration. Following several years of subpar job creation, jobs are now being added at a robust pace. As we noted last week, the U.S. is adding an average of 241,000 jobs a month. That's almost a 25 percent increase from 2013's monthly average of 194,000.


----------



## ekim68

Campaign Finance Reform Is Going Backwards



> If America ever wants to shed our cynical, accurate view of our political system being solely a game for the rich, we must-must!-reform the way we finance political campaigns. This week, Congress is determined to take a big step in the wrong direction.


----------



## ekim68

French Cabbies Say They're Going To Block Paris Roads On Monday Over Uber



> Paris (AFP) - Parisian taxi drivers have vowed to block roads leading into the French capital on Monday to protest a court's refusal to ban urban ridesharing service UberPOP.
> 
> Like their counterparts in large cities across the globe, Parisian taxi drivers are fed up with what they see as unfair competition from Uber's popular smartphone taxi service.
> 
> UberPOP, which uses non-professional drivers using their own cars to take on passengers at budget rates, has 160,000 users in France, according to the company.


----------



## ekim68

New Evidence: US Government Intentionally Lied Us Into Iraq War



> Alleged Meeting Between 9/11 Hijacker and Iraqi Official Was Debunked by U.S. Intelligence Agencies Before It Was Trumpeted As War Justification … U.S. Pressured Czech Government to Lie.


----------



## ekim68

The Power of Stampede



> Stampede is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. But, what does this mean and why is it important?
> 
> Supercomputers complement scientific theory and observation by modeling and analyzing anything that is too large (planets), too small (drug molecules), or too expensive or dangerous (crash tests for cars) to test in the laboratory. Determining where and when earthquakes will strike; exploring which nanomaterials will convert sunlight into energy; and understanding how fast brain tumors grow - these important and complex societal problems require powerful computers like Stampede, which provides a peak performance of nearly 10 petaflops (PF), or nearly 10 quadrillion math operations per second.


----------



## ekim68

Denmark claims North Pole - but will have to fight it out with Canada and Russia



> With just 10 days to go before Christmas, Denmark has declared a daring claim to ownership of the North Pole.
> 
> But this isn't the plot for a Boxing Day movie - and could put the small Scandinavian nation in conflict with Russia and Canada over the resource-rich Arctic region.
> 
> A scientific study has found that Greenland is actually connected to the area beneath the polar ice where the North Pole lies - thanks to a huge stretch of continental crust known as the Lomonosov Ridge.
> 
> Since Greenland is a Danish territory, that gives the country the right to put its hat in the ring for ownership of the stretch of land, Denmark's foreign minister said.


----------



## ekim68

Death on the Internet: The Rise of Livestreaming Funerals



> As family members live farther apart, more people are saying goodbye via webcam.


----------



## ekim68

Antonin Scalia's Case for Torture



> Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia weighed in on the debate surrounding the Senate torture report on Wednesday. "I don't know what article of the Constitution that would contravene," the AP quoted him telling a Swiss university audience in reference to torture.
> 
> It's a surprising statement for a justice to make. After all, the Supreme Court has held torture to be unconstitutional since its ruling in Wilkerson v. Utah in 1878. In that case, the justices wondered what part of the Constitution would forbid such a cruel and unusual punishment:


----------



## ekim68

One group dominates the second round of net neutrality comments



> A letter-writing campaign that appears to have been organized by a shadowy organization with ties to the Koch Brothers inundated the Federal Communications Commission with missives opposed to net neutrality (NN), an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation reveals.


----------



## ekim68

'One of those moments that we live for in science': UBC researchers may have stumbled upon the secret to youthful skin



> Scientists at the University of B.C. searching for ways to slow the deterioration of blood vessels may have stumbled on to the key to youthful skin.
> 
> While exploring the effects of the protein-degrading enzyme Granzyme B on blood vessels during heart attacks, professor David Granville couldn't help noticing that mice engineered to lack the enzyme had beautiful skin at the end of the experiment, while normal mice showed signs of age.


----------



## ekim68

New York plans to prohibit fracking



> New York's health and environmental commissioners Wednesday rejected the prospect for "high-volume hydraulic fracturing" in New York -- better known as "fracking" -- saying that health risks, the potential of local bans and limited available land would outweigh the benefits of the controversial drilling technique.


----------



## ekim68

Editorial: Remove 'philosophical' exemption from vaccine requirements for school entry



> Nearly half of the state's population lives in counties with kindergarten vaccination rates below the level needed for "herd immunity," the public health concept that when at least 93 percent of people are vaccinated, their immunity protects the vulnerable and prevents the most contagious diseases from spreading.
> 
> There are more than 800 schools in Michigan with waiver rates so high that they've lost their herd immunity, making those schools prime targets for disease outbreaks such as the recent whooping cough outbreak and measles cases near Traverse City.
> 
> Those who choose not to be vaccinated and who choose not to vaccinate their children allow a breeding ground for diseases to grow and spread to others. They put healthy, vaccinated adults at risk because no vaccine is 100 percent effective.


----------



## ekim68

Milwaukee 'Naughtiest' City in U.S., Report Says



> Milwaukee can expect a lump of coal in its Christmas stocking this year. The Wisconsin city tops the country's 10 Naughtiest Cities list, according to a RealtyTrac report.
> 
> But, Texas can expect lots of goodies in its Christmas stocking, because the state boasts 6 of the top 10 Nicest Cities, according to the real estate data company.
> 
> The report looked at number of sex offenders, unemployment, foreclosures, crime and elementary school scores to determine the naughty and nice cities in the U.S. with populations more than 100,000 and for which there was sufficient data available.


----------



## ekim68

A Copper Bedrail Could Cut Back On Infections For Hospital Patients



> Hospital bed safety railings are a major source of these infections. That's what Constanza Correa, 33, and her colleagues have found in their research in Santiago, Chile. They've taken on the problem by replacing them, since 2013, with railings made of copper, an anti-microbial element.
> 
> Copper definitely wipes out microbes. "Bacteria, yeasts and viruses are rapidly killed on metallic copper surfaces, and the term "contact killing" has been coined for this process," wrote the authors of an article on copper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. That knowledge has been around a very long time. The journal article cites an Egyptian medical text, written around 2600-2000 B.C., that cites the use of copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water.


----------



## ekim68

To save itself, Greece must exit the euro



> A Syriza election victory threatens default and disorderly exit from the euro for Greece. This would be a disaster for all. But done properly, the reintroduction of sovereign currencies within the eurozone would provide a bright new beginning .


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> To save itself, Greece must exit the euro


It is not just Greece. Britain has the best growth in the EU and this is because we didn't join the eurozone. Spain, Portugal, and Italy all would benefit from going back to their original currencies. Of course, the exchange rates would have to be set without interference from the EU. That is difficult to envisage.


----------



## ekim68

After 38 years of glory, the long run of Dr. Dobb's has come to an end.



> This year, our website will deliver almost 10.3 million page views, which is an unprecedented number for Dr. Dobb's. It's up from 9 million last year and 8 million three years ago. That kind of growth is somewhat unusual for a site that has not changed its look or its mission, nor indulged in tawdry tricks like click-bait headlines or slideshows promising 9 quick tips for choosing a coding style. The numbers confirm that there is a deep thirst in the programmer community for long-form technical content featuring algorithms and code, as well as strong demand for explanations of new developer technologies and reliable reviews of books and tools.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street prepares Dodd-Frank assault



> Banks and financial institutions are planning an aggressive push to dismantle parts of the Wall Street reform law when Republicans take control of Congress in January.
> 
> Fresh off a victory in the government funding debate that liberals decried as a giveaway to Wall Street, advocates for the financial sector aim to pursue additional changes to Dodd-Frank that they say would lighten burdens created by the 2010 law. Among the top items on the wish list: easing new requirements on mortgages, loosening restrictions on financial derivatives and overhauling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.


----------



## ekim68

RFID-blocking blazer and jeans could stop wireless identity theft



> A pair of trousers and blazer have been developed by San Francisco-based clothing company Betabrand and anti-virus group Norton that are able to prevent identity theft by blocking wireless signals.
> 
> The READY Active Jeans and the Work-It Blazer contain RFID-blocking fabric within the pockets' lining designed to prevent hacking through radio frequency identification (RFID) signals emitted from e-passports and contactless payment card chips.


----------



## ekim68

Where Can Tesla Legally Sell Cars Directly To You? State-By-State Map



> Every month, and often more frequently, a new story appears about the state-by-state battle between Tesla Motors and auto-dealer lobbyists.
> 
> In some states, Tesla is permitted to sell its electric cars online, deliver them to customers, and open as many Tesla Store showrooms as it wants.
> 
> In others, many or all of those activities have been forbidden under state laws newly altered to make it illegal for car companies to sell cars to retail buyers, requiring all vehicles to be purchased through a third-party dealership.


----------



## ekim68

Lost memories might be able to be restored, new UCLA study indicates



> New UCLA research indicates that lost memories can be restored. The findings offer some hope for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
> 
> For decades, most neuroscientists have believed that memories are stored at the synapses -- the connections between brain cells, or neurons -- which are destroyed by Alzheimer's disease. The new study provides evidence contradicting the idea that long-term memory is stored at synapses.


----------



## ekim68

Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush, Cheney Committed War Crimes



> Richard Clarke, the nation's top counterterrorism official under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, accused Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney of committing war crimes in their 2003 invasion of Iraq during an interview Tuesday with Democracy Now! that will air next week.
> 
> "I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have," said Clarke, who resigned in 2003 after the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. "But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried."
> 
> In the first-ever judgment of its kind, Bush and seven other top members of his administration were convicted in absentia of war crimes in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2012 for the unlawful invasion of Iraq.


----------



## ekim68

The Odyssée desalinator: Using the power of the ocean to cleanse its own salty waters



> Watching on as the waves crashed against the cliffs of South Corsica, France, mechanical engineer Dragan Tutić knew some were already drawing on power from the ocean to generate electricity. But a possible use for all that motion in the ocean that had been largely unexplored, as far as he knew, was turning its salty seawater into the fresh, drinkable variety on the spot. In the following two and a half years, Tutić and his team designed and tested a prototype for a wave-powered desalinator, and now hold hopes of deploying the system in regions where water scarcity threatens the survival of coastal communities.


----------



## ekim68

Snow and ice sculpture in Harbin



> The temperature in Harbin, China reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and centigrade, and stays below freezing nearly half the year.
> The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away.
> So what does one do here every winter?
> Hold an outdoor festival, of course!


----------



## ekim68

The 10 dying U.S. industries



> As businesses continue to innovate and new technologies continue to be developed and rolled-out, new opportunities to grow emerge. At the same time, what can constitute an opportunity for one industry may be a threat to another.


----------



## ekim68

Nicaragua breaks ground on canal project



> Nicaragua has announced the start of work on a $50bn shipping canal, an infrastructure project backed by China, aiming to rival Panama's waterway and revitalise the economy of the second-poorest country in the Americas.
> 
> The groundbreaking for the project took place on Monday and was largely symbolic.
> 
> The event marked the start of some ancillary projects in Brito, a city about 5km from Nicaragua's Pacific coast where the first port in the scope of the project will be built.
> 
> Nicaragua's government says the proposed 278km canal would raise annual economic growth to more than 10 percent.
> 
> The canal might also give China a major foothold in Central America, a region long dominated by the US, which completed the Panama Canal a century ago.


----------



## steppenwolf

https://www.facebook.com/SOTT.NET

intersting stuff there


----------



## ekim68

The Craziest Stuff People Tried to Sneak Onto Airplanes This Year



> We may shake our heads at the TSA's antics from time to time, but the men and women holding you up at airport security are actually dealing with some pretty scary prospects. Like loaded firearms. And grenades. And daggers. And for whatever reason, a hell of a lot of sword canes. Here are some of the craziest things people have tried to sneak past airport security in 2014.


----------



## ekim68

GOP Quietly Admits There's No IRS Scandal Involving The White House



> In a pre-Christmas document dump, Darrell Issa's committee admitted there was no wrongdoing by the White House with regard to the IRS non-scandal.


----------



## ekim68

The World Is Not Falling Apart



> As troubling as the recent headlines have been, these lamentations need a second look. It's hard to believe we are in greater danger today than we were during the two world wars, or during other perils such as the periodic nuclear confrontations during the Cold War, the numerous conflicts in Africa and Asia that each claimed millions of lives, or the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that threatened to choke the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf and cripple the world's economy.


----------



## ekim68

Study: E-readers, tablets can disrupt sleep



> Science may have confirmed what parents of gadget-loving children have long suspected: Using light-emitting gadgets just before bedtime can interfere with sleep.
> 
> Using an electronic book reader or another portable electronic light-generating device prior to going to sleep can disrupt regular sleeping habits, researchers at Pennsylvania State University have found.


----------



## ekim68

Santa's real workshop: the town in China that makes the world's Christmas decorations



> There's red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks like the artist Anish Kapoor has been let loose with his wax cannon again. But this, in fact, is what the making of Christmas looks like; this is the very heart of the real Santa's workshop - thousands of miles from the North Pole, in the Chinese city of Yiwu.
> 
> Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin somewhere in the Arctic Circle. But it's not. The likelihood is that most of those baubles, tinsel and flashing LED lights you've draped liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 300km south of Shanghai - where there's not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight.
> 
> Christened "China's Christmas village", Yiwu is home to 600 factories that collectively churn out over 60% of all the world's Christmas decorations and accessories, from glowing fibre-optic trees to felt Santa hats.


----------



## ekim68

First scientific report shows police body-worn-cameras can prevent unacceptable use-of-force



> As President Obama pledges investment in body-worn-camera technology for police officers, researchers say cameras induce 'self-awareness' that can prevent unacceptable uses-of-force seen to have tragic consequences in the US over the past year-from New York to Ferguson-but warn that cameras have implications for prosecution and data storage.
> 
> Researchers from the University of Cambridge's Institute of Criminology (IoC) have now published the first full scientific study of the landmark crime experiment they conducted on policing with body-worn-cameras in Rialto, California in 2012-the results of which have been cited by police departments around the world as justification for rolling out this technology.
> 
> The experiment showed that evidence capture is just one output of body-worn video, and the technology is perhaps most effective at actually preventing escalation during police-public interactions: whether that's abusive behaviour towards police or unnecessary use-of-force by police.


----------



## ekim68

Pfizer threatens pharmacists, doctors if they take its name in vain



> Pfizer's patent on pregabalin -- an anti-epilepsy med -- expires this year, but there's another patent on using the public domain drug to treat neuropathic pain; in a shocking letter to UK doctors, the pharma giant warns of dire consequences should medical professionals dare to prescribe the generic for the patented use.
> 
> This is a weird circumstance: Pfizer's secondary patent is on a specific use of a drug that's in the public domain. They want doctors writing neuropathic pain scrips to specify that the patient must take Lyrica, their name-brand version of pregabalin, even though it costs much more than generic pregabalin, and even though the two drugs are identical.
> 
> Weirder still is that Pfizer wants to make their stupid problem into everyone else's stupid problem. The fact that it's hard to enforce this kind of secondary patent is Pfizer's business, not doctors'. Doctors' duty is to science and health, not Pfizer's profit-margins.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Detractors Take Their Fight to the States



> They have lobbied state attorneys general. They have hired former state attorneys general. They have even helped draft a menacing letter for one state attorney general.
> 
> And they have given the target - Google - a code name: Goliath.
> 
> Google's detractors complain about the search giant to everyone they can, from raising concerns about the company's dominance with regulators in Brussels to antitrust officials in Washington. Now, they are taking the fight into states, often to push Google to censor illegal content and sites from search results.


----------



## ekim68

This gives a new meaning to the word 'Cybersecurity'.....

Romanian version of EU cybersecurity directive allows warrantless access to data



> More than a dozen Romanian non-governmental organizations are protesting new cybersecurity legislation passed by the parliament last week that would force businesses to provide the country's national intelligence agencies with access to their data without a court warrant.
> 
> The law could also impact businesses from Europe and beyond, as Romania is a hub for IT outsourcing and software development. Many multinational corporations including Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe Systems, Siemens and Intel have research and development centers in the country.


----------



## ekim68

Jeb Bush Counts on Short Memories



> So not that very long ago, Jeb Bush's aggressive and controversial business tactics, mostly focused on the politically perilous area of private equity management in conjunction with shadowy foreign partners, especially in China, convinced some observers he sure wasn't acting like somebody planning a presidential campaign. Now there are signs that what Bush has been engaged in lately is the tail-end of a financial fattening-up period before the long hard winter of a campaign. Here's how the L.A. Times' Joseph Tanfani puts it:


----------



## ekim68

Science took a step back in 2014



> In 2012, scientists finally cornered the elusive Higgs particle, essential to explaining the most fundamental forces of nature. In 2013, we learned the Voyager spacecraft had reached the space between stars. As for 2014 - well, some years are best forgotten.
> 
> The year now winding down has seen its share of trailblazing scientific developments. But it has also had more than its fair share of disappointments and goofs, led by the retraction of two ballyhooed stem-cell papers from the top journal Nature and backtracking on a spectacular astrophysics finding announced at a press conference in March.


----------



## ekim68

Ignition locks proposed to curb state's drunken drivers



> People convicted of drunken driving in California soon may have to blow in a tube to prove they're sober before their vehicle will start.
> 
> State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, wants to expand a program already in place in four California counties, including Alameda, and 24 other states. Under the proposed state law Hill will introduce Monday, anyone convicted of driving under the influence would be required to install an ignition interlock device in their car for six months on a first offense and a year on a second conviction.
> 
> Drunken drivers kill 1,000 people in California each year and injure 20,000, Hill said, and research shows people convicted of drunken driving are rarely doing it for the first time: Repeat offenders account for one-third of annual convictions in the state.


----------



## ekim68

Weekend Diversion: The Simplest Solution to Rising CO2



> It won't solve everything, but there's something we can all do to help sequester carbon. It's as easy as planting a tree.


----------



## ekim68

Bank Of England To Monitor Social Networks



> What you search for on Google and post on Facebook could soon influence what happens to interest rates.
> 
> The Bank of England has set up a special taskforce to monitor the internet and social networks for early signs of Britain's economic ups and downs.


----------



## ekim68

Delaware-size gas plume over West illustrates the cost of leaking methane



> CUBA, N.M. - The methane that leaks from 40,000 gas wells near this desert trading post may be colorless and odorless, but it's not invisible. It can be seen from space.
> 
> Satellites that sweep over energy-rich northern New Mexico can spot the gas as it escapes from drilling rigs, compressors and miles of pipeline snaking across the badlands. In the air it forms a giant plume: a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago. "We couldn't be sure that the signal was real," said NASA researcher Christian Frankenberg.


----------



## ekim68

2014 was stuffed with good food news that you never heard about



> The food movement has done a great job winning the hearts and minds of eaters, but not such a great job moving the economic and political levers that shape our food system. For that reason, it can seem as if nothing ever changes. If you're watching the high-profile debates (cough, GMOs), that's true: The same people make the same arguments over and over, resulting in a robust stalemate.
> 
> But there is real change happening in areas that I contend are even more important than the most popular and highly covered food fights. Here's my year-end list of ways the food system changed for the better (mostly) in 2014, along with some predictions for next year.


----------



## ekim68

Environment Agency: 7,000 properties to be lost to sea



> An estimated 7,000 properties around England and Wales will be sacrificed to rising seas over the next century, according to the Environment Agency.
> 
> Analysis by the Agency, based on current funding levels, projects that more than 800 will be lost over the next 20 years as coastlines erode.
> 
> The cost of protecting these properties is considered to be too high.


----------



## ekim68

Acoustic Zoom could save dolphins' hearing while aiding geologists



> If you've ever been asleep on a yacht in harbor when a submarine tests its sonar, you know that underwater sound is anything but trivial - one ping can send you out of your bunk and across the room. Small wonder that the major navies spend a fortune studying the impact of naval and civilian sonar systems on sea animals such as whales and dolphins, who live in a world of sound. Scientists at the University of Bath have developed a more cetacean-friendly sonar system called Acoustic Zoom that is not only less disruptive to marine life, but also improves resolution beyond that of current methods.


----------



## ekim68

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?
Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1958



> Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author's death, and corporate "works-for-hire" are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years-an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be "free as the air to common use." Under current copyright law, we'll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different-thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.


----------



## ekim68

Driving Range for the Model S Family



> As the Model S family has expanded over time it has become more relevant to compare range from one variant to another with a consistent set of assumptions so our customers can know what to expect and make the best decision to fit their needs. This can be a bit difficult since the background test methodology and standards from the US EPA are evolving over time. There are also many customer vehicle configuration choices, both before and after purchase, that can affect range as much as or more than the vehicle platform choice itself. The most important example of this secondary configuration is the wheel and tire selection. This short paper will hopefully help to compare amongst all of the Model S family and understand how tire choices impact range as well.


----------



## ekim68

Panasonic's new technology purifies water with sunlight and photocatalysts



> Drinking clean water is something that many people in the world can't take for granted, as they rely on polluted sources and often have no access to purification systems. In response to that problem, Panasonic is developing a new technology that looks to the sun to clean water extracted from the ground. The company recently presented a system that uses sunlight and photocatalysts to purify polluted water at a high reaction rate, to improve access to clean water where it's needed.


----------



## ekim68

Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet - And There's No Easy Fix



> When the latest international Climate Conference wrapped up in Lima, Peru, last month, delegates boarded their flights home without much official discussion of how the planes that shuttled them to the meeting had altered the climate.
> 
> Aircraft currently contribute about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. That might not seem like much, but if the aviation industry were a country, it would be one of the world's top 10 emitters of CO2. And its emissions are projected to grow between two and four times by 2050 without policy interventions.


----------



## ekim68

Vinyl's revival is now a phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic



> Vinyl album sales smashed records on both sides of the Atlantic in 2014, as a format that recently seemed on its last legs hit astonishing new heights.


----------



## ekim68

The next big step for Wikidata-forming a hub for researchers



> Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. The proposal, supported by more than 25 volunteers and half a dozen European institutions as project partners, aims to create a virtual research environment (VRE) that will enhance the project's capacity for freely sharing scientific data.


----------



## ekim68

Adult science nights in Regina combine education with bar service



> REGINA - Giggling and enthusiastic conversations emanate from the bubble exhibit at the Saskatchewan Science Centre, suggesting that the centre has been successfully transformed into a playground for adults.
> 
> Setting down their wine glasses, two visitors bathe large circular rings in soap and strategically move them through the air to create massive bubbles. It's a far cry from the bubble-blowing reminiscent of kindergarten.
> 
> On another day, the exhibit might be swarmed with children on a school field trip, but on adult science night, visitors aged 19 and older are the ones to boast a look of wide-eyed amazement.


----------



## ekim68

What the World Will Speak in 2115



> A century from now, expect fewer but simpler languages on every continent.


----------



## ekim68

Single Hull Oil Tankers Barred From U.S. Waters



> WASHINGTON, DC, January 2, 2015 (ENS) - As of January 1, 2015 single-hull oil tankers are no longer allowed in U.S. waters.
> 
> The Oil Pollution Act of 1990, passed after the disastrous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, required that all new tankers and tank-barges be built with double hulls to prevent similar oil spills.
> 
> For the first 25 years after the law was passed, single-hull tankers were still allowed to operate, but now those tankers are at the end of their operational lives and can no longer carry oil as cargo in U.S. waters.


----------



## ekim68

How extreme isolation warps the mind



> Sarah Shourd's mind began to slip after about two months into her incarceration. She heard phantom footsteps and flashing lights, and spent most of her day crouched on all fours, listening through a gap in the door.
> 
> That summer, the 32-year-old had been hiking with two friends in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan when they were arrested by Iranian troops after straying onto the border with Iran. Accused of spying, they were kept in solitary confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, each in their own tiny cell. She endured almost 10,000 hours with little human contact before she was freed. One of the most disturbing effects was the hallucinations.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I get hallucinations most nights?


----------



## ekim68

Me too, except I call them dreams....


----------



## ekim68

Perth heat melts the internet



> Extreme hot weather in Perth sent the internet into meltdown on Monday night.
> 
> Thousands of iiNet customers across Australia found themselves offline for about six-and-a-half hours after the company shut down some of its systems at its Perth data centre at about 4.30pm AEDST because of high temperatures, topping 44.4C.
> 
> "Due to record breaking temperatures, iiNet Toolbox, Email and our corporate websites are unavailable. Apologies for any inconvenience caused," iiNet tweeted.
> 
> Customers trying to re-authenticate after disconnecting from the internet were also unable to reconnect.


----------



## ekim68

Finding Genghis Khan's Tomb from Space



> Genghis Khan really, really didn't want anyone to know where he was buried. The soldiers escorting his body to its final resting place killed everyone they passed, killed the people who built the tomb, and then were killed themselves. Some say Mongol troops grazed herds of horses over the site or even diverted a river over it to keep it hidden. The area where many suspect Genghis Khan is buried is one of Mongolia's most sacred heritage sites-it's name, Ikh Khorig, actually translates to "The Great Taboo." For 800 years-until 1989-archeologists weren't allowed in, and even then the first expedition was met with public protest.


----------



## ekim68

10 Ways Human Rights and Democracy Won in 2014 (Yeah, You Heard That Right)



> Let's be honest: It was a brutal year for human rights. But we still have victories worth celebrating.


----------



## ekim68

Low Gas Prices Smooth Path for Carbon Add-On in California



> California's landmark cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions just got bigger. Effective Jan. 1 it expanded to wrap in gasoline and diesel, a move oil companies have warned would trigger higher pump prices.
> 
> Fuel distributors now must buy and submit permits covering greenhouse gas pollution tied to the fuels they sell. For the entire Golden State, that means 17 million gallons annually. Oil-related businesses and their allies for the past year sought to stop the move, but failed to persuade the Legislature or Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to intervene.
> 
> Meanwhile, gas prices-the cornerstone of the debate-have tumbled.


----------



## ekim68

'Glowing' new nanotechnology guides cancer surgery, also kills remaining malignant cells



> CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a new way to selectively insert compounds into cancer cells - a system that will help surgeons identify malignant tissues and then, in combination with phototherapy, kill any remaining cancer cells after a tumor is removed.
> 
> It's about as simple as, "If it glows, cut it out." And if a few malignant cells remain, they'll soon die.
> 
> The findings, published in the journal Nanoscale, have shown remarkable success in laboratory animals. The concept should allow more accurate surgical removal of solid tumors at the same time it eradicates any remaining cancer cells. In laboratory tests, it completely prevented cancer recurrence after phototherapy.


----------



## ekim68

Don't panic! Fukushima radiation just hit the West Coast



> Nuclear energy gives plenty of people the heebie-jeebies: Like horror-movie ghosts and ancestral curses, you can't see or feel or smell it, but it can still kill you. So when Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant was damaged in March 2011, releasing a flood of radioactive cesium-tinged water into the Pacific, nervous nancies the world over took note. And that note, typically, was: PANIC!!!!!1!!11!
> 
> First of all: No. Don't. While some wafting fallout hit the U.S. in the first months after the disaster (results: TBD), ocean-borne radiation took the long way around to get to us. Specifically, 2.1 years, according to an analysis published last month in PNAS.





> To reiterate: Don't panic. By the time it made it to this side of the Pacific, that radiation was 10 million times weaker than it was when it left Japan, and 1,000 times below the safe threshold for drinking water (for nerds: We're talking under 2 Becquerels per cubic meter [260 gallons]). In fact, that's even lower than the background radiation levels in the ocean, where residual cesium 137 still lurks from atmospheric nuclear testing in the past 50 years. According to WHOI scientist Thomas Buesseler as cited by Quartz, you could swim in that water for six hours a day, every day, and still absorb less radiation than you would from a single dental x-ray.


----------



## ekim68

Harbin Ice Festival Kicks Off



> The worlds largest ice festival, in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, starts January 5 and last until February 25.


----------



## ekim68

House Rule Could Hurt Vulnerable Disability Beneficiaries



> Buried in the new rules that the House Republican majority plans to adopt for the 114th Congress is a provision that could threaten Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries - a group of severely impaired and vulnerable Americans - with a sudden, one-fifth cut in their benefits by late 2016. The provision bars the House from replenishing the DI trust fund simply by shifting some payroll tax revenues from Social Security's retirement trust fund.
> 
> Its drafters state that the rule "would protect the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund from diversion of its funds to finance a broken Disability Insurance system." But DI - a vital part of Social Security - isn't broken. Its recent growth stems primarily from well-understood demographic and program factors, chiefly the aging of the baby boom into their 50s and 60s, the growth of women's role in the labor market and hence their eligibility for DI, and the rise in Social Security's full retirement age.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists find antibiotic that kills bugs without resistance



> Scientists have discovered a new antibiotic, teixobactin, that can kill serious infections in mice without encountering any detectable resistance, offering a potential new way to get ahead of dangerous evolving superbugs.
> 
> Researchers said the antibiotic, which has yet to be trialled in humans, could one day be used to treat drug-resistant infections caused by the superbug MSRA, as well as tuberculosis, which normally requires a combination of drugs that can have adverse side effects.


----------



## ekim68

How the 'Beast Quake' is helping scientists track real earthquakes



> It's not just the football players who have spent a year training. University of Washington seismologists will again be monitoring the ground-shaking cheers of Seahawks fans, this year with a bigger team, better technology and faster response times.
> 
> Scientists with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network will install instruments this Thursday to provide real-time monitoring of the stadium's movement during the 2015 NFL playoffs.
> 
> This year, the UW researchers have also upped their game. A new QuickShake tool will provide a faster connection between the sensors and the website. This Saturday will be the first test of the software that displays vibrations within three seconds - five to 10 times faster and more reliably than readings from the same sensors installed last year.


----------



## ekim68

Revolutionary implant enables broken spinal cord to function again



> What is presented in the Science paper is a soft and stretchable implant which can be directly placed beneath the dura mater, the nervous system's protective casing, and onto the spinal cord for months at a time, a length of time which would result in significant tissue damage with all previous surface implants. The e-dura is also designed to carry electrical impulses and chemicals. Under experimental conditions, walking was restored in paralysed rats after implanting followed by two weeks of training using a robotic postural interface also developed as part of NCCR Robotics.


----------



## ekim68

15 per cent of business cloud users have been hacked, research finds



> Recent research has identified that only one in ten cloud apps are secure enough for enterprise use. According to a report from cloud experts Netskope, organisations are employing an average of over 600 business cloud apps, despite the majority of software posing a high risk of data leak.
> 
> The company showed that 15 per cent of logins for business apps used by organisations had been breached by hackers.
> 
> Over 20 per cent of businesses in the Netskope cloud actively used more than 1,000 cloud apps, and over eight per cent of files in corporate-sanctioned cloud storage apps were in violation of DLP policies, source code, and other policies surrounding confidential and sensitive data.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I've always said the the whole idea of cloud computing is EXTREMELY risky for any company.

I did evaluations for several major companies in the UK way back in the 90's who wanted to switch to distributed processing as it was called back then. 

None did, and none regretted it.


----------



## ekim68

Man-made 'breathing' leaf is an oxygen factory for space travel



> One of the persistent challenges of manned space exploration is that pesky lack of oxygen throughout much of the universe. Here on Earth, trees and other plant life do us a real solid by taking in our bad breath and changing it back to clean, sweet O2.
> 
> So what if we could take those biological oxygen factories into space with us, but without all the land, sun, water, soil, and gravity that forests tend to require? This is the point where NASA and Elon Musk should probably start paying attention.
> 
> Royal College of Art graduate Julian Melchiorri has created the first man-made, biologically functional leaf that takes in carbon dioxide, water, and light and releases oxygen. The leaf consists of chloroplasts -- the part of a plant cell where photosynthesis happens -- suspended in body made of silk protein.


----------



## ekim68

Optimistic people have healthier hearts, study finds



> CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- People who have upbeat outlooks on life have significantly better cardiovascular health, suggests a new study that examined associations between optimism and heart health in more than 5,100 adults.


----------



## ekim68

3D cameras are about to go mainstream. Here's why that's a big deal.



> We're used to our gadgets being passive objects. They respond to typed or tapped commands, but we don't expect them to be aware of their surroundings.
> 
> Announcements and demonstrations at this week's Computer Electronics Show make it clear that that's going to change, and soon. As our devices have more and better sensors, they're going to be increasingly aware of the world around them, and will interact with the world and with us in more sophisticated ways.
> 
> Tablets and smartphones won't just take pictures, they'll be able to identify objects in a shot and judge their size and distance. Computers won't just respond to taps on a keyboard or touchscreen, they'll respond to gestures, voice commands, and the motion of people around a room.


----------



## ekim68

Pope Francis's edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches



> He has been called the "superman pope", and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?
> 
> It looks as if he will give it a go. In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world's main religions.
> 
> The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is the pope's wish to directly influence next year's crucial UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.


----------



## ekim68

We can fix the Gulf dead zone - for $2.7 billion a year



> Every year, millions of tons of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers wash down the Mississippi River and out into the Gulf of Mexico. There, instead of fertilizing corn, they fertilize the growth of algae, which blooms extravagantly and, in turn, creates a massive boom in microorganisms. There are so many aquatic microorganisms reproducing, eating algae and respiring at once, that they literally use up all the oxygen in the water. Anything else that needs to breathe oxygen - all the other marine life - dies.


----------



## ekim68

Introducing AMBER Alerts on Facebook



> Today, we are announcing a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to send AMBER Alerts to the Facebook community to help find missing children.
> 
> The new initiative will deliver AMBER Alerts to people's News Feeds in targeted search areas after a child has been abducted and the National Center has issued an alert.


----------



## poochee

:up::up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

Indeed! That needs implementing World Wide


----------



## ekim68

Researchers can profile Facebook users to a 'T' with just their likes



> Remember the time you liked a beer pong video on Facebook and thought nothing more of it? That may have said more about you than your friends and family ever knew, according to researchers at Cambridge and Stanford. They created a computer program that sifted through the Facebook likes of over 85,000 users to see if a person's preferences could rat out their true persona. The team used certain associations that seem fairly obvious; for instance, liking tattoos means you're more likely to drink alcohol. Others were more bizarre: apparently, people who like curly fries tend to be intelligent. Who knew?


----------



## ekim68

Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?



> SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They've suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own.
> 
> You can read all of these proposed final solutions in Matteo Bittanti's How to Get Rid of Homelessness, "a 600-page epic split in two volumes documenting the so-called 'homeless scandal' that affected 2013's SimCity."


----------



## ekim68

Lawmakers in charge of NASA and the environment don't understand science



> Well, this is more than a little depressing: The politician who tried reducing NASA funding (and successfully shut it down for over two weeks) is now in charge of the senate subcommittee that effectively controls NASA. More than that, one of the most vocal climate-change detractors is now in charge of the United States Senate's Environmental committee. Let's let that sink in for a minute, shall we? Despite all the progress we've made so far with things like unmanned, deep-space space-flight and our efforts toward limiting the negative effects that humans have had on the environment, any future plans are now up in the air. Any major scientific progress is now at the mercy of Republican senators Ted Cruz and James Inhofe. *With their actions and words over the recent years, the pair have proved just how little they understand about each area they're now controlling.*


----------



## poochee

Yep!


----------



## ekim68

Yosemite free-climbers reach top of El Capitan



> Two climbers made it to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, the first ever to scale the 3,000-foot granite wall using only their hands and feet and safety rope.
> 
> For 19 days, Kevin Jorgeson, 30, of Santa Rosa, Calif., and Tommy Caldwell, 36, of Colorado, attempted what many considered impossible on one of the world's most difficult climbs: Being the first to "free climb" the sheer face of El Capitan's Dawn Wall. They used safety ropes and harnesses to prevent deadly falls, but did not using ropes or climbing aids to reach the top. The two climbed the wall in 32 rope-length sections that climbers call pitches, and they reached the summit around 3:30 p.m. PT.


----------



## ekim68

108 Giant Chinese Infrastructure Projects That Are Reshaping The World



> There's an old Chinese saying that goes: "If you want to be rich, you must first build roads."
> 
> And, boy, have they built some roads: In the past year, we've seen the world's longest sea bridge, the world's longest gas pipeline and a high-speed railway that's left everyone else in the dust - literally.
> 
> The resultant infrastructure push is incredible. A list of 108 super projects is floating around Chinese message boards and we picked out the 45 coolest ones to showcase here.


----------



## ekim68

Here's What Happens When You Install the Top 10 Download.com Apps



> We installed the top 10 apps from Download.com, and you'll never believe what happened! Well… I guess maybe you might have a good guess. Awful things. Awful things are what happens. Join us for the fun!


----------



## ekim68

Smart shoe devices generate power from walking



> German researchers have built shoe-sized devices that harvest power from the act of walking.
> 
> The technology could be used to power wearable electronic sensors without the need for batteries.
> 
> There are two separate devices: a "shock harvester" that generates power when the heel strikes the ground and a "swing harvester" that produces power when the foot is swinging.


----------



## ekim68

Democracy is drowning in a sea of dark money



> The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United five years ago left the nation's campaign finance system in shambles and our constitutional system of representative government dangerously undermined.
> 
> Citizens United threw out a century of national policy and overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to strike down the prohibition on corporate expenditures in federal elections. This set the stage for the creation of Super PACs and the return to federal elections of unlimited individual contributions, corporate funds and secret money.
> 
> These kinds of funds were at the heart of the Watergate corruption scandals of the 1970s - the worst campaign-finance malfeasance of the last century.


----------



## ekim68

How Medicaid for Children Partly Pays for Itself



> When advocates talk about the advantages of government health care, they often talk about a moral obligation to ensure equal access. Or they describe the immediate health and economic rewards of giving people a way to pay for their care.
> 
> Now a novel study presents another argument for the medical safety net, at least for children: Giving them health coverage may boost their future earnings for decades. And the taxes they pay on those higher incomes may help pay the government back for some of its investment.


----------



## ekim68

How 4 Mexican Immigrant Kids and Their Cheap Robot Beat MIT



> Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It's a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.


----------



## ekim68

States with the most people on food stamps



> With grocery bills priced as high as $1,300 per month as of late, some American workers simply cannot afford all of their groceries on top of everything else they already have to buy. This is why the government offers food stamps.


----------



## ekim68

Gohmert Says US Leaders Should Emulate Egypt's Killer Dictator



> Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) called on American leaders to emulate Egypt's military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi-a man who orchestrated a coup d'etat and has presided over the killing of more than a thousand dissidents.


----------



## ekim68

5 Charts That Explain 2014's Record-Smashing Heat



> 2014 was the hottest year since record-keeping began way back in the nineteenth century, according to reports released Friday by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to NASA, the Earth has now warmed roughly 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, and most of that increase is the result of greenhouse gases released by humans. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000.
> 
> NASA and NOAA both conducted their own independent analyses of the data. But as you can see in the chart below, their results were nearly identical (all images below are from NASA and NOAA's joint presentation):


----------



## ekim68

States with the most people on food stamps



> With grocery bills priced as high as $1,300 per month as of late, some American workers simply cannot afford all of their groceries on top of everything else they already have to buy. This is why the government offers food stamps.
> 
> The USDA Food and Nutrition Service reports that as of September 2014, there were around 46.5 million individual food stamp recipients (22.7 million households) receiving an average benefit of $123.74 each (around $257 per household).


----------



## ekim68

Where Cellular Networks Don't Exist, People Are Building Their Own



> The tower-which Hernández, Yaee's blacksmith, welded together out of scrap metal just a few hours earlier-is the backbone of Yaee's first cellular network. The 90,000 pesos come in the form of two antennas and an open-source base station from a Canadian company called NuRAN. Once Hernández and company get the tower installed and the network online, Yaee's 500 citizens will, for the first time, be able to make cell phone calls from home, and for cheaper rates than almost anywhere else in Mexico.


----------



## ekim68

Bloomberg News Taking Cues From Fox On Climate Change 



> Bloomberg News gave a platform for a fossil-fuel funded climate misinformer to advance groundless allegations against scientists -- the second time this year it has drawn a false equivalence between top climate scientists and climate deniers.
> 
> In an article on the recently leaked draft of a climate change report authored by the world's top scientists, Bloomberg News quoted Marc Morano, who runs the industry-funded blog Climate Depot that Bloomberg described as "skeptical of climate change" (New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin has called it "divisive and toxic"). Morano has no scientific background, yet Bloomberg gave him space to baselessly assert that the report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is based on "predetermined science" and will "add very little to the scientific debate."


----------



## ekim68

The solar industry is adding jobs 20 times faster than the overall U.S. economy



> National Solar Jobs Census of 2014, from The Solar Foundation, claims the solar industry is adding jobs 20 times faster than the overall economy in the U.S.
> 
> The report states there are over 170,000 workers in the solar industry, which represents a 21.8 percent increase from the previous year. That means there are twice as many solar workers as there are coal miners in the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Hibernating hints at dementia therapy



> Neurodegenerative diseases have been halted by harnessing the regenerative power of hibernation, scientists say.
> 
> Bears, hedgehogs and mice destroy brain connections as they enter hibernation, and repair them as they wake up.
> 
> A UK team discovered "cold-shock chemicals" that trigger the process. They used these to prevent brain cells dying in animals, and say that restoring lost memories may eventually be possible.


----------



## ekim68

Iran Just Cancelled Its Space Program



> _Yes, Iran had a space program_





> After six years of massive expenditures and lurid propaganda, on Jan. 9 Tehran shut down its troubled space program. The unceremonious cancellation occurred without notice in the Iranian press.
> 
> Authorities are spreading the space agency's manpower and assets across four ministries including the telecoms ministry and the ministry of defense.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon doesn't want to destroy movie theaters, it just wants films released faster online



> Amazon Studios might be better known for TV shows, but Amazon revealed firm plans today to enter the cinema realm by producing and acquiring "original movies for theatrical release and early window distribution on Amazon Prime Instant Video," the company said in a press release.
> 
> This is a big move from Amazon, as it seeks to narrow the theatrical release window to between four and eight weeks. It can often take up to a year for films to land on subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video, however they do typically land on DVD/Blu-ray within around four months.


----------



## ekim68

California Zooms Past Russia, Italy and Soon Brazil in Economic Might



> California is overtaking Brazil as the world's seventh-largest economy, bolstered by rising employment, home values and personal and corporate income, a year after the most-populous state surpassed Russia and Italy.


----------



## DaveBurnett

But that is of no significance if the cost of living is also the highest ....??


----------



## ekim68

Faced With Land Seizures, Defiant Nebraskans Vow to Halt Keystone XL



> As Canadian energy company TransCanada filed eminent domain claims against Nebraska landowners on Tuesday for the construction of the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, families whose properties are on the verge of forced seizure say they will do whatever is necessary to shut down the project.
> 
> Landowners from Nebraska's York and Holt counties last week filed suit against TransCanada to stall or even stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline through their state.


----------



## ekim68

The Deep South Is Being Hit Hard by HIV/AIDS



> The Deep South has the highest death rate of newly diagnosed AIDS cases in the country, according to new research which analyzes the growing epidemic in the region and seeks to articulate its causes, which include social stigma, rural geography, and poverty.
> 
> Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the Centers for Disease Control worked together to analyze the diagnosis and death rates of HIV and AIDS patients in nine "target" states in the Deep South, including: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Implant treats obesity by blocking hunger signals



> EnteroMedics' Maestro System has become the first obesity device to be approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in ten years. The device, which the company compares to a pacemaker, is designed to block signals in the nervous system to reduce feelings of hunger.
> 
> Obesity is, excuse the phrasing, a growing problem across the world. It is estimated that one third of Americans are clinically obese. While eating less is may present the simplest and most obvious solution for many, combating obesity or stimulating weight loss, especially in the morbidly obese, is not a linear problem.


----------



## ekim68

High-speed electric car chargers to link San Diego, SF, Portland



> Despite their rising popularity, most electric cars aren't considered road-trip material.
> 
> Their limited battery range means that long-distance travel must be carefully planned, with charging stations along the route mapped out in advance. Wing it, and risk running out of juice in the middle of nowhere. And most charging stations aren't all that fast, meaning long trips contain lots of downtime.
> 
> Now BMW, Volkswagen and a Bay Area electric vehicle charging company want to change that.
> 
> The two German automakers have teamed with ChargePoint of Campbell to install networks of high-speed chargers along two interstate corridors. One will link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland. The other will stretch from Washington to Boston.


----------



## ekim68

No Vacancy: Abandoned Hotels Photo Series by Dietmar Eckell



> In his photo series "No Vacancy," German photographer Dietmar Eckell traveled around the world to document abandoned hotels in the middle of nowhere. Once, these hotels were luxury retreats, pleasure domes or wellness sanctuaries - but for one reason or another, they have all been abandoned for nature to reclaim.


----------



## ekim68

TetragRer, are you AI spam?


----------



## ekim68

Catapult and Pew Charitable Trusts launch pioneering technology to help end illegal fishing



> The Satellite Applications Catapult, an independent technology and innovation company, and The Pew Charitable Trusts, today launched their ground-breaking near real-time technology that will help authorities monitor, detect and respond to illegal fishing activity across the world's oceans.
> 
> The live satellite monitoring system, Project Eyes on the Seas, has been developed by the Catapult for Pew and will initially be launched in the waters of Chile, Palau, and the UK Overseas Territories. It is the latest significant stage in a long-term effort by Pew to dramatically reduce illegal or "pirate" fishing around the world, which is valued at $23.5bn annually.


----------



## ekim68

The disappearance would mark the scouring of a disease from the face of the earth



> The Guinea worm is inching ever closer to extinction, but unlike just about every other endangered species, no one is going to try to save it, least of all scientists. On the contrary, the worm's disappearance would mark the scouring of a disease from the face of the earth-a feat humanity's only been able to celebrate twice before, with the end of smallpox in 1980 and of the cattle disease rinderpest in 2011. (Polio, despite the fact that a vaccine's been around for more than half a century, has managed to hang on by its microscopic threads.)


----------



## ekim68

The Untold Story Of The Invention Of The Game Cartridge



> How a forgotten company's 1970s technical breakthrough launched a billion-dollar business and helped spawn a new creative medium.


----------



## ekim68

Three minutes and counting



> In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.


----------



## ekim68

Disposable employees may be tech industry's greatest achievement



> A Bloomberg story about layoffs rising at tech companies has been making the rounds. It seems so counter-intuitive: How can job cuts be soaring when tech is booming?
> 
> Everyone seems surprised, but they shouldn't be. Tech, more than any other industry, has succeeded in convincing us over the past two decades that workers are entirely disposable.
> 
> We throw out smartphones after two years. Replace our PCs every few years when they get slow. Why can't we do the same with people?
> 
> Turns out, we can. Or, at least, we can try.


----------



## ekim68

This Week In Techdirt History: January 18th - 24th



> Five Years Ago
> 
> This week in 2010 was the beginning of the NY times paywall, sparking off huge amounts of discussion online. We weren't convinced. Ultimately, the paywall didn't seem to hurt the newspaper, but it didn't seem to bring much benefit either (or at least not enough for many other publications to follow in its footsteps).


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> The disappearance would mark the scouring of a disease from the face of the earth


huh....hadn't heard of this.......

Didn't we hear about something about this recently in Russia?

ah, yes.....


> "If it is true that these viruses survive in the same way those amoeba viruses survive, then smallpox is not eradicated from the planet - only the surface," he said.
> 
> "By going deeper we may reactivate the possibility that smallpox could become again a disease of humans in modern times."


Obviously it is a stretch, but one that, IMO, bears keeping a close eye on. But then again I'm a well-known climate change proponent....


----------



## ekim68

Actually, I believe that Bill and Melinda had a strong impact on this...:up:


----------



## valis

Gates, Im assuming?


----------



## ekim68

Yep. :up:


----------



## ekim68

How America's Wealthy Stole the American Dream and Cashed It at an Offshore Bank



> America is the most unequal country in the developed world. We also pay the lowest taxes among all developed nations. Is there a connection?
> 
> Runaway inequality and declining taxes are linked together through a set of economic policies called the "Better Business Climate" model which came to America around 1980. (By then Margaret Thatcher had already put her version to work in England.)
> 
> After the turbulent 1970s, which featured oil boycotts, high unemployment and even higher inflation rates, the policy establishment was hungry for a new simple plan that promised renewed prosperity. The Better Business Climate model had two key components: cutting taxes on corporations and the super-rich, and reducing regulations, especially on Wall Street. This potent combination was to encourage the rich to invest, which in turn would lead to more jobs and increasing incomes for all. A massive boom would then ensue to make all boats rise. But as we painfully learned, tax cuts and the unleashing of Wall Street led to luxurious yachts for the few and leaky rowboats for the rest of us.


----------



## ekim68

Take the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire



> Can happiness be measured? The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire attempts to do just that. Developed by Michael Argyle and Peter Hills of Oxford Brookes University, and originally published in 2002 in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, it's one several measures of "subjective wellbeing" (aka happiness) constructed by scientific research psychologists.


----------



## valis

Hmmmm.....shall we post the results, is my question?


----------



## poochee

My score:

*Between four and five *

Rather happy; pretty happy. Check other score ranges for suggestions and information.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast ghostwrote pro-merger letters that politicians sent to FCC



> Comcast has been supported by many politicians in its bid to acquire Time Warner Cable, but the testimonials from elected officials aren't quite as organic as the cable company would have you believe.
> 
> A report today by The Verge, based on documents obtained through public records requests, shows that in August three politicians sent letters to the Federal Communications Commission that were ghostwritten by Comcast. We reported several months ago that letters from politicians closely mimicked Comcast talking points and re-used Comcast's own statements without attribution, and the documents revealed today show just how Comcast was able to get politicians on board.


----------



## ekim68

Bill and Melinda Gates plan to end hunger in Africa in 15 years



> In their latest annual letter, Bill and Melinda Gates make some audacious predictions. Their main bet: "The lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history. And their lives will improve more than anyone else's."
> 
> They are making bets for the next 15 years because it's the 15-year anniversary of the Gates Foundation. And it seems the Gates are doubling down. This matters because the predictions made by the Gates are backed by tremendous resources - the things they say tend to make changes happen.


----------



## poochee

:up:


----------



## ekim68

Latest round of science education bills hits the state legislatures



> Each year, January brings a new legislative calendar and, with it, a new round of bills that attempt to interfere with science education. Typically, these bills target evolution and/or climate change and are based on boilerplate text, but each year brings some intriguing variations on the theme. This year's haul is impressive with several states already active.


----------



## ekim68

As inequality soars, the nervous super rich are already planning their escapes



> With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Ultra-Fast Internet Is Coming to 4 More Big Cities



> Google has announced that 18 more cities across four metropolitan areas will receive its super-high-speed fiber optic internet service: Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and Nashville, Tennessee.
> 
> The tech giant hasn't said when the new services will be available. But after announcing in 2013 that would be available in Austin, Texas, the company needed nearly two years to begin offering service in select Austin neighborhoods.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Just Had The Most Profitable Quarter Of Any Company Ever



> Apple had a pretty good quarter.
> 
> And by "pretty good," I mean it was the biggest quarter in history. And not just for Apple. For any company. Ever.
> 
> This page charts the past record holders. Until today, Russia's Gazprom (the largest natural gas extractor in the world) held the record at $16.2 billion in a quarter.
> 
> Apple now holds the record: $18.04 billion in profit, fiscal Q1 of 2015.


----------



## ekim68

Video.....

Rachel Maddow: Another Day, Another Pipeline Explosion


----------



## ekim68

France Seeks to Sanction Web Companies for Posts Pushing Terror



> The French government is stepping up the pressure on Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. to help in the struggle against terrorist groups.
> 
> President Francois Hollande said Tuesday in Paris the government will present a draft law next month that makes Internet operators "accomplices" of hate-speech offenses if they host extremist messages. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he will travel to the U.S. to seek help from the heads of Twitter Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as well as Google and Facebook. Spokesmen for the companies did not immediately return requests for comment.


----------



## ekim68

This Guy Found a Way to Block Robocalls When Phone Companies Wouldn't



> Aaron Foss won a $25,000 cash prize from the Federal Trade Commission for figuring out how eliminate all those annoying robocalls that dial into your phone from a world of sleazy marketers.
> 
> The year was 2013. Using a little telephone hackery, Foss found a way of blocking spammers while still allowing the emergency alert service and other legitimate entities to call in bulk. Basically, he re-routed all calls through a service that would check them against a whitelist of legitimate operations and a blacklist of spammers, and this little trick was so effective, he soon parlayed it into a modest business.
> 
> Last year, his service, called Nomorobo, blocked 15.1 million robocalls.


----------



## poochee

:up:


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon Tells Congress to Stop Buying Equipment it Doesn't Need



> Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., told the chiefs he wanted to know how to prevent the Defense Department's acquisition and procurement system from wasting money on equipment the services don't need.
> 
> "There has got to be a more effective and efficient method of procurement," he said. "When [President] Eisenhower said 'beware of the military industrial complex,' man he knew what he was talking about ... We force stuff on you all that we know you don't want."
> 
> Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno agreed with Manchin.


----------



## ekim68

New study reveals 10 cars most likely to kill you



> The vehicles with the highest death rates also happened to be among the cheapest, entry-level models, but IIHS spokesman Russ Rader says that cost wasn't a big factor.
> 
> "The highest death rates are in the smallest, lightest vehicles," he says, once again showing that the greater mass makes a difference in the physics of a crash. "It's Packaging 101: If the occupant compartment stays intact, the seat belts and air bags can do their jobs."


----------



## ekim68

Spire plans to use tiny satellites for more accurate weather forecasts



> Weather forecasting is a notoriously inexact science. According to San Francisco-based tech startup Spire, this is partially because there are currently less than 20 satellites responsible for gathering all of the world's weather data - what's more, some of the older ones are using outdated technology. Spire's solution? Establish a linked network of over 100 shoebox-sized CubeSats, that will use GPS technology to gather 100 times the amount of weather data than is currently possible. The first 20 of those satellites are scheduled to launch later this year.


----------



## ekim68

There's A Gap Between What The Public Thinks And What Scientists Know 



> Scientists lament that public opinion on scientific issues is often shaped by fear and ignorance about science. A new pair of surveys, published Thursday in the journal Science, shows that there is, indeed, a large gap between public opinion and that of scientists on a wide range of scientific topics.


----------



## ekim68

Balloon crew nearing North America surpasses duration record



> ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - The pilots of a helium-filled balloon flying across the Pacific Ocean surpassed a duration record Friday by spending more than 138 hours in the air, marking a historic day for the team that already has eclipsed a distance milestone as they approach North America.
> 
> Pilots Troy Bradley of Albuquerque and Leonid Tiukhtyaev (too-kh-TY'-yev) of Russia were headed south along the California coast when they surpassed the duration record of 137 hours, 5 minutes and 50 seconds aloft in a traditional gas balloon.


----------



## ekim68

Koch brothers set $889 million budget for 2016



> Top officials in the Koch brothers' political organization Monday released a staggering $889 million budget to fund the activities of the billionaires' sprawling network ahead of the 2016 presidential contest.


----------



## ekim68

Antibiotics resistance: Drug firms 'to blame'



> Drug companies are partly to blame for the rise of antibiotic resistance, which threatens to make even what was once the mildest of infections deadly, one industry chief executive claims.


----------



## ekim68

A Floating Artificial Reef Would Let You Walk Down Into the Ocean Deep



> This month, a grim study in the journal Science reported what we've feared for decades: That the ocean may "be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event," in the words of one author. There's a colossal amount of work to be done if we want to turn it around-including reclaiming habitats, which is the goal of this ambitious proposal by three young architects.


----------



## ekim68

Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time



> On December 4, 1974, a hapless pizza restaurant worker answered the phone and heard a strange, robotic voice. "I'd like to order a pizza," the voice said. "A large pizza, please. Pepperoni and mushrooms." The worker asked for the address, but then hung-up when the voice took too long to respond.
> 
> The caller on the other end was Donald Sherman. But it wasn't his voice. He had a rare disorder called Möbius syndrome, which results in facial paralysis and makes speech difficult. Sherman was calling from the Michigan State University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was using one of the very first text-to-speech systems to try to order a pizza.


----------



## ekim68

Qantas to offer first-class travelers a virtual reality experience



> Australian airline Qantas has teamed up with Samsung to give travelers a virtual reality experience both on the ground and in the air. Qantas will be providing the passenger lounges and planes, while Samsung will be providing the VR headsets.


----------



## ekim68

Telomere-lengthening procedure turns clock back years in human cells



> Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a new procedure to increase the length of human telomeres. This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger. This not only has useful applications for laboratory work, but may point the way to treating various age-related disorders - or even muscular dystrophy.


----------



## ekim68

Customized Soap Bubbles Set to Transform Drug and Vaccine Delivery



> When University of Maryland Professors Philip DeShong and Daniel Stein began tagging soap bubbles with biomolecules, they had no idea this technology would one day be poised to change the way drugs and vaccines fight against bacteria, viruses and cancer.
> 
> More than a decade later, the researchers are covering soap bubbles with biomaterials that act as a disguise, tricking the body's cells into mistaking the capsule for a bacterium, a cancer cell or almost any other disease-causing cell. Because the technology is flexible, cost effective and highly efficient, it is drawing a lot of attention from both public and private funders for drug delivery and vaccine production.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I don't think I want to be injected with bubbles, especially intravenously.


----------



## ekim68

3D Printed 'Cool Bricks' Can Cool an Entire Room Using Water



> Using 3D printing technology, Emerging Objects has come up with a solution which may be able to greatly reduce the use of air conditioning systems in these hot dry climates. The device, which is called the "Cool Brick" has the ability to cool off an entire room simply by using the most abundant compound found on Earth - water.
> 
> In actuality, the Cool Brick is not a new invention, as it is based on a system that many believe dates back over 3,300 years. However, using 3D printing, Emerging Objects was able to perfect the system, and improve upon earlier designs.


----------



## ekim68

Iceland to build first temple to Norse gods since Viking age



> A modern version of Norse paganism has been gaining popularity in recent years as followers see the stories as metaphors for life not worship of the gods.


----------



## poochee

Feb 3, 12:04 PM EST

*UK House of Commons OKs making babies from DNA of 3 people *
By MARIA CHENG 
AP Medical Writer
Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless contributed to this report.



> LONDON (AP) -- Britain's House of Commons gave preliminary approval Tuesday to permitting scientists to create babies from the DNA of three people, a technique that could protect some children from inheriting potentially fatal diseases from their mothers.
> 
> The bill must still needs approval by the House of Lords - and a further Commons vote on any amendments - before becoming law. If so, it would make Britain the first nation to allow embryos to be genetically modified.


 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-02-03-12-04-11


----------



## ekim68

How Much Sleep Do We Really Need?



> Humans, like all animals, need sleep, along with food, water and oxygen, to survive. For humans sleep is a vital indicator of overall health and well-being. We spend up to one-third of our lives asleep, and the overall state of our " sleep health " remains an essential question throughout our lifespan.
> 
> Most of us know that getting a good night's sleep is important, but too few of us actually make those eight or so hours between the sheets a priority. For many of us with sleep debt , we've forgotten what "being really, truly rested" feels like.


----------



## ekim68

Google, Amazon 'n' pals fork out for AdBlock Plus 'unblock' - report



> Internet giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola have reportedly paid AdBlock Plus to allow their ads to pass through its filter software.
> 
> The confidential deals were confirmed by the Financial Times, the paper reported today.
> 
> Eyeo GmbH, the German startup behind Adblock Plus, said it did not wish to comment.


----------



## ekim68

New technique uses most abundant gas on Earth to help create bioethanol



> Zymomonas mobilis bacterium might be tricky to say, but this bioethanol-producing microbe could become a household name if Indiana University (IU) biologists have their way. The biologists claim to have found a quicker, cheaper, cleaner way to increase bioethanol production in this microorganism by using the most abundant element in the Earth's atmosphere: nitrogen gas (N2). By replacing chemical fertilizers with N2, production costs could be slashed and cellulose ethanol derived from wood pulp made much more economically viable - so much so that the researchers believe it may compete with corn ethanol and gasoline on price.


----------



## ekim68

Adventures in Banking: Responsibility & Blame



> Morgan Housel makes the delightful if infuriating observation that bank execs take credit - along with fat paychecks and even fatter bonuses - on the way up.
> 
> On the way down, its always seems to be someone else's fault:
> 
> Robert Rubin, a former Treasury Secretary, joined Citigroup in 1999 as chairman of the executive committee. He was paid $126 million over the next eight years for his experience and wisdom to guide the bank's management toward success.
> 
> When the bank nearly collapsed in 2008, Rubin pled ignorance. After writing a 2003 memoir largely devoted to explaining how extreme circumstances ruin banks, Rubin explained in 2009 that he "did not recognize the serious possibility of the extreme circumstances that the financial system faces today."
> 
> Nine-figure pay on the way up; a fluke and someone else's problem on the way down.


----------



## ekim68

An entire city is going to be wiped off the map in Egypt



> CAIRO, Egypt - The city of Rafah, which has been a part of Egypt since the pharaonic period, is to be removed from the map; its residents relocated to the imaginatively named, yet-to-be-built city of New Rafah.
> 
> Rafah is located in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt's northeast, straddling the border with the Gaza Strip. It is home to thousands of families, all of whom will be forcibly relocated under plans to create a "buffer zone" on the border.
> 
> Egyptian authorities hope the no-go zone will disrupt smuggling and militant operations in the troubled Sinai - but the scale and lack of prior notice, adequate compensation or provision of alternate housing for displaced families has prompted concern from rights groups.


----------



## ekim68

Incredible Photos from the Construction Site of the New Bay Bridge



> You've got to envy Joseph Blum. At age 73, the San Francisco photographer is venturing to places that would cause the younger urban-exploration crowd to soak the floor in uncontrollable salivation.
> 
> Exhibit A is his gorgeous, exhaustive documentation of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Blum began the series on land when soil samples were being taken in 1998. But after a chance meeting with a barge crew driving test piles into the Bay mud, he slowly made the necessary contacts to meet the span's project manager and talk his way onto the above-water construction site.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Incredible Photos from the Construction Site of the New Bay Bridge


----------



## ekim68

Vast majority of those who fought Iraq, Afghan wars won't get pensions



> The current military retirement system, like a lot of the military personnel system, is a relic of the draft era that has gone largely unchanged for more than 100 years.
> 
> It's unfair to our veterans, doesn't give the Pentagon the flexibility it needs to manage the volunteer armed forces and is increasingly unaffordable. Congress' Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission last week laid out a detailed plan to modernize the system and address these problems.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Vast majority of those who fought Iraq, Afghan wars wont get pensions


:down:


----------



## ekim68

$375 billion wasted on billing and health insurance-related paperwork annually: study



> Medical billing paperwork and insurance-related red tape cost the U.S. economy approximately $471 billion in 2012, 80 percent of which is waste due to the inefficiency of the nation's complex, multi-payer way of financing care, a group of researchers say.


----------



## ekim68

I wonder how much of that is in Administrative Costs..?


----------



## ekim68

You have to remember that the Administrative Costs for Private Healthcare Corporations are between 20 to 30 percent whereas Social Security and Medicare's are between Two and Four percent...You can gauge which is more Effective for you as an individual ...


----------



## ekim68

Airlines Aren't Living Up to the Wi-Fi Promise



> Taking to the friendly skies has never been more productive. More and more planes are being outfitted with Wi-Fi routers, affording passengers the option to surf the Web from their laptops, tablets and smartphones.
> 
> I've checked email, gone online shopping and even edited articles at 40,000 feet. It's merely a coincidence that SkyMall just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, but options on a plane that offers Wi-Fi are no longer limited to leafing through a magazine as a reclining seat in front of you cramps up your living space.
> 
> Airborne connectivity is here. The problem is that it's not cheap, and more often than not, it's also not perfect.


----------



## ekim68

'Missing Oil' from 2010 BP Spill Found on Gulf Seafloor



> Up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening wildlife and marine ecosystems, according to a new study.
> 
> The finding helps solve the mystery of where the "missing" oil from the spill landed. Its location had eluded both the U.S. government and BP cleanup crews after the April 2010 disaster that caused about 200 million gallons (757 million liters) of crude oil to leak into the Gulf.
> 
> "This is going to affect the Gulf for years to come," Jeff Chanton, the study's lead researcher and a professor of chemical oceanography at Florida State University, said in a statement. "Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It's a conduit for contamination into the food web."


----------



## ekim68

New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers



> The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two days, Dave's tractor lies fallow. And so do his fields.
> 
> Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave's sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor's highly proprietary computer system-the tractor's engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast.
> 
> One hour later, I hopped back out of the cab of the tractor. Defeated. I was unable to breach the wall of proprietary defenses that protected the tECU like a fortress. I couldn't even connect to the computer. Because John Deere says I can't.


----------



## ekim68

Test for HIV in just 15 minutes with this $34 smartphone dongle



> A dongle created by Columbia University researchers can turn any smartphone (whether iPhones or Android devices) into an HIV and syphilis tester. Even better, it only takes 15 minutes and a tiny drop of blood to get a result -- the device doesn't even need a battery to work. According to the paper the researchers published in Science Translational Medicine, the dongle performs enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection. Labs don't currently offer the three tests needed to detect those in a single format.


----------



## ekim68

The powerful cheat for themselves, the powerless cheat for others



> Research has previously shown that upper-class individuals are more likely to behave unethically than lower-class people. But, says David Dubois, lead researcher of a new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it's not that simple: both groups behave unethically in different contexts.
> 
> Dubois' research group found that people with higher socioeconomic status (SES) were more likely to behave unethically when the behavior benefitted themselves, while lower-SES people were more likely to be unethical to benefit other individuals.


----------



## ekim68

More railguns and lasers, less gunpowder -- the Navy's future high-tech weaponry



> US Navy war ships and gunpowder have gone together like peanut butter and jelly throughout history but that relationship may change in the not too distant future.
> 
> Speaking before nearly 3,000 attendees at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology (S&T) EXPO in Washington, D.C, Admiral Jonathan Greenert Chief of Naval Operations charged his audience to reduce reliance on gunpowder in a wide-ranging speech on the future technogical needs of the Navy.
> 
> "Number one, you've got to get us off gunpowder," said Greenert, noting that Office of Naval Research-supported weapon programs like Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and the electromagnetic railgun are vital to the future force. "Probably the biggest vulnerability of a ship is its magazine-because that's where all the explosives are."


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> 'Missing Oil' from 2010 BP Spill Found on Gulf Seafloor


and we all know, 'missing' was totally denied by the, well, OP, as in BP. How that company survived is a fantastic indicator of when the corporations became too poweful to kill.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I'd like to bet that there is a lot of "oil" sitting on the bottom of most of the waters around the world where wells have been drilled.


----------



## valis

Yup. No doubt about that. 

My question is, will whatever replaces us take better care and use of our fossils?


----------



## ekim68

Massive Utah cyberattacks - up to 300 million per day - may be aimed at NSA facility



> Five years ago, Utah government computer systems faced 25,000 to 30,000 attempted cyberattacks every day.
> 
> At the time, Utah Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires thought that was massive. "But this last year we have had spikes of over 300 million attacks against the state databases" each day: a 10,000-fold increase.
> 
> Why? Squires says it is probably because Utah is home to the new, secretive National Security Agency computer center, and hackers believe they can somehow get to it through state computer systems.


----------



## ekim68

The Inflatable Suit That's Protecting Ski Racers in 90 MPH Crashes



> When ski racers glide away from the start house on the Birds of Prey Downhill World Cup at Beaver Creek, Colorado, they launch up to 200 feet off jumps and reach speeds close to 90 mph, all with just an open-face helmet, goggles and a semi-rigid back protector for safety.
> 
> But at this week's World Alpine Ski Championships, held on the same course, the pro racers competing for podium spots may get a little more help: a wearable airbag from motorsports company Dainese that inflates automatically in a crash.
> 
> The system, called the D-air Ski, is based on an existing airbag system Dainese developed for motorcycle racing. Ski racing's governing body, the International Ski Federation, approached Dainese in 2012 about adapting the suit for ski racing. The ski version covers a racer's torso and shoulders and uses an array of sensors to monitor velocity and position; it fully inflates in 100 milliseconds if it senses a crash.


----------



## ekim68

Bibi Netanyahu -- aka 'The Republican Senator From Israel' -- May Have Made A Fatal Political Mistake



> Set aside, for the moment, the diplomatic row being sparked by Speaker of the House John Boehner as he seeks to create two conflicting foreign policies for the United States-one pursued by the President and the other pursued by the Congress.
> 
> Boehner's hubris, in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's desire to interfere with American policy while seeking to bolster his re-election campaign, may turn out to be the very political screw-up that will allow the joint ticket forged by the Labor-Hatnuah political parties to bring an end to Netanyahu's long reign atop the Israeli government.


----------



## ekim68

The Man Squatting on Millions of Dollars Worth of Domain Names



> So, for the last 21 years, Gary Millin and his colleagues at ​World Accelerator have been slowly accumulating a veritable treasure trove of seemingly premium "generic" domain names. For instance, Millin owns, has sold, or has bartered away world.com, usa.com, doctor.com, lawyer.com, comic.com, email.com, cyberservices.com, and more than 1,000 other d​omain names that can be yours (including yours.com, which he owns), as long as you've got the startup idea to back it up.


----------



## ekim68

Lawmakers want US Congress to be able to (finally) deliberate online



> Two Congressmen want the nation's top legislative body to explore how it might better use the Internet to conduct its business.
> 
> More specifically, two representatives from California and New Mexico introduced House Resolution 83 earlier this week that could eventually allow for considerable savings in time and money.
> 
> The bill as currently written notes that "there are recent advances in technology that would make a virtual Congress possible, such as: electronic voting, video conferencing, secure telephones and Internet connections, and biometric cyber security."
> 
> The proposal is not without precedent. For 15 years, the Estonian parliament has allowed its cabinet-level ministers to vote on proposed measures online, using their chip-enabled national ID cards in its "e-Cabinet" system.
> 
> The Estonian government claims that implementing this system resulted in considerable time savings:


----------



## ekim68

Community-Owned Energy: How Nebraska Became the Only State to Bring Everyone Power From a Public Grid 



> In the United States, there is one state, and only one state, where every single resident and business receives electricity from a community-owned institution rather than a for-profit corporation. It is not a famously liberal state like Vermont or Massachusetts. Rather, it is conservative Nebraska, with its two Republican Senators and two (out of three) Republican members of Congress, that has embraced the complete socialization of energy distribution.
> 
> In Nebraska, 121 publicly owned utilities, ten cooperatives, and 30 public power districts provide electricity to a population of around 1.8 million people. Public and cooperative ownership keeps costs low for the state's consumers. Nebraskans pay one of the lowest rates for electricity in the nation and revenues are reinvested in infrastructure to ensure reliable and cheap service for years to come.


----------



## ekim68

World's largest solar plant opens in California desert



> The Southern California desert is now home to the world's largest solar power plant.
> 
> U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell joined state officials on Monday to open the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight solar project in the town of Desert Center, Calif., near Joshua Tree National Park. Built by First Solar, the project generates enough electricity to power 160,000 average California homes.





> Conservative lawmakers have derided the loan guarantee program, arguing that it's wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Critics have pointed to the program's $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, a Fremont-based solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011.
> 
> But the Department of Energy reported last year that it expects to make a profit of $5 billion to $6 billion from the program. The department funded five traditional, large-scale solar farms, and Desert Sunlight marks the last of those projects to go online.


----------



## ekim68

World's biggest sovereign wealth fund dumps dozens of coal companies



> The world's richest sovereign wealth fund removed 32 coal mining companies from its portfolio in 2014, citing the risk they face from regulatory action on climate change.
> 
> Norway's Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), worth $850bn (£556bn) and founded on the nation's oil and gas wealth, revealed a total of 114 companies had been dumped on environmental and climate grounds in its first report on responsible investing, released on Thursday. The companies divested also include tar sands producers, cement makers and gold miners.
> 
> As part of a fast-growing campaign, over $50bn in fossil fuel company stocks have been divested by 180 organisations on the basis that their business models are incompatible with the pledge by the world's governments to tackle global warming. But the GPFG is the highest profile institution to divest to date.


----------



## ekim68

Tim Cook: New solar farm will be Apple's 'biggest and boldest project ever'



> "We're not focused on the numbers. We're focused on the things that produce the numbers," asserted Apple CEO Tim Cook on successes and failures under his tenure since 2011.


----------



## ekim68

Catalogue of malpractice endorsed by bankers laid bare in HSBC files 



> Swiss operation actively abetted clients in keeping accounts secret from tax authorities, at its height hiding $120bn in assets.


----------



## ekim68

All Hail the Daily Show!



> Last night, Jon Stewart announced he would not be renewing his contract for The Daily Show. It immediately set off a scramble - who is going to replace him? What might this mean for intelligent, hard-hitting media criticism? And what is Jon going to do in the future?





> TDS may have been the first major media source to pushback against the jingoistic run up to the Iraq war (for those of you too young to recall, that was the country that did not attack us on 9/11). While the New York Times - the paper of record, mind you - ran front page WMD articles under the byline of the now discredited Judith Miller, TDS revealed what nonsensical propaganda it was. Some of the more hypocritical aspects of political jockeying, elections, business received their finest skewering on the show. They constantly questioned the self-righteous, the foolhardy, the pontificating politicos. Did anything else from the Financial Crisis come remotely close to the moment of catharsis when Jim Cramer essentially laid down to receive his punishment (and that of all financial media) on the show?
> 
> That's before we get to the relentless stream of foolishness that is Fox News, the network that actually makes its viewers less informed than watching nothing at all.


----------



## ekim68

How Hackers Could Take Over Your Car



> From GPS navigation system to satellite radio to wireless locks, cars today are connected to more networks than ever. But all that connectivity has a downside: Cars are also more hackable than ever. That's according to a new report issued today (Feb. 9) by the office of Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, entitled "Tracking & Hacking: Security & Privacy Gaps Put American Drivers at Risk."
> 
> It's not news to security researchers that connected cars can be hacked. Anything that communicates with remote networks is potentially vulnerable, and weak or nonexistent data security only makes a network more promising to would-be attackers.


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## hewee

Wow never got a page like this because I block script with NoScript, AdBlock Plus etc.

Note the added part of the link from & and after it.

Wonder how many people would freak out as if they have something on there computer when they should just say "require JavaScript" to work.



> http://www.tomsguide.com/distil_r_c...4-9BC8-DB2101398F03&distil_TID=20150212013041
> Suspicious Activity Detected
> 
> Due to suspicious activity from your computer, we have blocked your access to http://www.tomsguide.com. After completing the CAPTCHA below, you will immediately regain access unless further suspicious behavior is detected.
> 
> Note: This website may require JavaScript. If you have JavaScript disabled, please enable it before attempting to return to http://www.tomsguide.com.
> 
> reCAPTCHA challenge image
> 
> Privacy & Terms
> Get a new challenge
> Get an audio challenge
> Help
> 
> You reached this page when attempting to access http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/545--13-paranoid-security-privacy-tips.html from 73.41.187.71 on 2015-02-12 01:31:46 GMT.
> Trace: E8402270-B256-11E4-9E2C-DB45BCF8F086 via a0b2b4fa-2c79-4916-bf92-8a9a10ea5c08


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## ekim68

I didn't get that from my link, but I did through yours...


----------



## ekim68

Smartphone 'kill switches' are reducing thefts in big cities



> See that shiny flagship phone dangling from the stranger's back pocket? You should think twice about trying to grab it, not only because it's a terrible thing to do, but also because it probably won't do you any good. By the time you've hot-footed it to the pawn shop to hawk your ill-gotten wares, it's increasingly likely that the phone will have been deactivated by a smartphone kill switch. The campaign, launched by San Francisco's George Gascón and Eric Schneiderman way back in 2013 appears to have been a success, helping to remove the perils of tweeting on dark city streets.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook rolls out feature for users when they die



> Facebook has added a new setting that gives users the option of having their account permanently deleted when they die.
> 
> Or, if they wish, they can choose to appoint a friend or family member to take control of some aspects of the account after their death.
> 
> These features were among the most requested by users who gave feedback on its memorial page policies.
> 
> Facebook's legacy contact feature will initially only be available in the US.


----------



## ekim68

Koch-Supporting Texas Billionaires Explain What Richest Americans Are After



> This is rich. Some of the wealthiest Texans who attended the Koch brothers' political donor conference last month-where participants set a goal of raising $889 million for the 2016 elections-are saying that all the Kochs really want is to end "special interests" influence in Washington.
> 
> "We attended that meeting - and we have an answer," wrote Doug and Holly Deason of Dallas, in a Dallas Morning News column co-signed by eight other wealthy Texans. "We want Washington to do what it hasn't done for years: work for, not against, the American people."
> 
> Um, nice try. But if you are as wealthy and powerful as some of these Koch attendees, you are not exactly representative of the American people, whose median income was $51,939 in 2013, according to the U.S. Census.


----------



## ekim68

Ultrasound technique shown to reverse Alzheimer's symptoms in mice



> Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-guided ultrasound, a technology that involves highly-targeted ultrasound beams and monitoring their effects through imaging, has shown to help treat symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in mice. The treatment was found to improve brain performance in the animals and has the researchers hopeful that the technique may prove effective in improving cognitive behavior in humans.


----------



## ekim68

As gay marriage bans fall, LGBT rights come under fire from state legislatures



> As the US supreme court's deliberation of same-sex marriage draws closer, lawmakers in several states are attempting to reign in other civil rights recently granted to the LGBT community.
> 
> Conservative lawmakers from Kansas to Florida are working to repeal anti-discrimination laws, stop new ones from being enacted and expand laws on religious freedom.
> 
> On Thursday in Oklahoma, the state House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly for a bill which would protect members of the clergy who refuse to perform same-sex marriages. The bill now passes to the state Senate.


----------



## ekim68

Magnitude of plastic waste going into the ocean calculated: 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans per year



> How much mismanaged plastic waste is making its way from land to ocean has been a decades-long guessing game. Now scientists have put a number on the global problem. Their study found between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2010 from people living within 50 kilometers of the coastline.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Magnitude of plastic waste going into the ocean calculated: 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans per year


----------



## ekim68

Brazil Amazon: Drone to scan for ancient Amazonia



> Scientists are to scan the Amazon forest in Brazil to look for evidence of occupation by ancient civilisations.
> 
> A drone will be sent up with a laser instrument to peer through the canopy for earthworks that were constructed thousands of years ago.
> 
> The UK-led project is trying to determine how big these communities were, and to what degree they altered the landscape.
> 
> The data is likely to inform policies on sustainable forest use today.


----------



## ekim68

The Six Weirdest Tax Loopholes



> Tucked away in the U.S. tax code's 4 million words are countless contradictions and write-offs. We asked accountants, tax lawyers, and professors to identify some of the strangest sections.


----------



## ekim68

Can online classrooms help the developing world catch up?



> In 2012, a 15-year-old named Battushig Myanganbayar aced a circuits and electronics course designed for sophomores at MIT - from his school in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Myanganbayar had watched lectures in English, a second language, and worked through the course material online with the help of a visiting Stanford Ph.D. candidate, Tony Kim. "If Battushig, at the age of 15, were a student at MIT, he would be one of the top students - if not the top," Kim told The New York Times. In fact, Myanganbayar went on to MIT a year later - crediting the online course as a "watershed" moment.
> 
> Myanganbayar's success is a testament to the power of online educational programs: thanks to revolutionary technology, a prodigious student has access to the education of his dreams.


----------



## ekim68

How to Watch Live TV Online



> You can't beat watching something as it happens on live TV. The thrill of the last-second shot in basketball. The moment they announce the winner of "American Idol." Seeing the season premiere of "NCIS" without fear of spoilers.
> 
> Whether you're a cord cutter who's ditched cable or are just away from home, there are bound to be moments when you want to watch live TV online. Depending on the kind of content you like, the Internet may have you covered. You can get some options for free, but for the best selection and quality, you'll probably have to pay a little.
> 
> Here are seven ways to tune in when you log on.


----------



## ekim68

Gold nanotubes launch a three-pronged attack on cancer cells



> Scientists have shown that gold nanotubes have many applications in fighting cancer: internal nanoprobes for high-resolution imaging; drug delivery vehicles; and agents for destroying cancer cells.
> The study, published today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, details the first successful demonstration of the biomedical use of gold nanotubes in a mouse model of human cancer.
> 
> Study lead author Dr Sunjie Ye, who is based in both the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Leeds Institute for Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at the University of Leeds, said: "High recurrence rates of tumours after surgical removal remain a formidable challenge in cancer therapy. Chemo- or radiotherapy is often given following surgery to prevent this, but these treatments cause serious side effects.
> 
> Gold nanotubes - that is, gold nanoparticles with tubular structures that resemble tiny drinking straws - have the potential to enhance the efficacy of these conventional treatments by integrating diagnosis and therapy in one single system."


----------



## ekim68

Big Telecom tried to kill net neutrality before it was even a concept



> The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission announced recently he would seek to reclassify broadband Internet as a common carrier service so the government could enforce net neutrality rules, something that President Obama supports. Some telecom executives and Republicans in Congress are calling this an "extreme" and "backwards" proposal, and they're investigating the President's role in pushing for it.
> 
> But we've only reached this pivotal moment in the net neutrality debate because of past efforts by corporate lobbyists and their political allies to weaken the government's ability to protect the open Internet. Without the telecommunications industry's massive power to design policies in its favor, the government would most likely already have the authority it needs to ensure net neutrality.


----------



## ekim68

New map shows America's quietest places



> Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic.


----------



## ekim68

How "omnipotent" hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years-and were found at last



> CANCUN, Mexico - In 2009, one or more prestigious researchers received a CD by mail that contained pictures and other materials from a recent scientific conference they attended in Houston. The scientists didn't know it then, but the disc also delivered a malicious payload developed by a highly advanced hacking operation that had been active since at least 2001. The CD, it seems, was tampered with on its way through the mail.
> 
> It wasn't the first time the operators-dubbed the "Equation Group" by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab-had secretly intercepted a package in transit, booby-trapped its contents, and sent it to its intended destination. In 2002 or 2003, Equation Group members did something similar with an Oracle database installation CD in order to infect a different target with malware from the group's extensive library. (Kaspersky settled on the name Equation Group because of members' strong affinity for encryption algorithms, advanced obfuscation methods, and sophisticated techniques.)


----------



## ekim68

Why Is No One Talking About the GOP's Plan to Send Millions of Disabled Americans Into Poverty?



> Despite their virtues, many conservative Republicans have an unfortunate habit of picking on the weak and disadvantaged, slandering the people least able to fight back. We saw a glimpse of this callousness in Mitt Romney's disparagement of the "47 percent" who are "takers" living off the hard-working "makers." The newly empowered GOP majority in Congress is going down the same road-targeting the millions of sick or injured Americans who receive Social Security disability payments.


----------



## ekim68

Alec Falkenham, Dalhousie student, develops tattoo removal cream 



> Valentine's Day may prompt some people to consider etching their loved one's name permanently on their bodies, but what happens if you break up?
> 
> A researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax may not have a magic potion to repair the relationship, but he might be able to help get rid of that tattoo.
> 
> Alec Falkenham, a 27-year-old PhD student in the university's pathology department, is developing a topical cream that he says will make tattoo ink eventually fade away.


----------



## ekim68

These Fantastic Buildings Are Like Wedding Rings For Giants



> When a giant wants to put a ring on it, what can he or she do? Maybe reach for one of these beautiful marvels of architecture. Some of them are ring-shaped, some are other open shapes  but they all achieve an incredible marvel of negative space.


----------



## ekim68

Portland to generate electricity within its own water pipes



> There's a lot of water constantly moving through the municipal pipelines of most major cities. While the water itself is already destined for various uses, why not harness its flow to produce hydroelectric power? Well, that's exactly what Lucid Energy's LucidPipe Power System does, and Portland, Oregon has just become the latest city to adopt it.
> 
> LucidPipe simply replaces a stretch of existing gravity-fed conventional pipeline, that's used for transporting potable water. As the water flows through, it spins four 42-inch (107-cm) turbines, each one of which is hooked up to a generator on the outside of the pipe. The presence of the turbines reportedly doesn't slow the water's flow rate significantly, so there's virtually no impact on pipeline efficiency.


----------



## ekim68

Another reason to cut back on soda



> The amount of soda you sip not only boosts your sugar intake and packs on pounds-it might also increase your risk for cancer.
> 
> The culprit? A chemical called 4-methylimidazole (4-MeI). This potential carcinogen is found in some types of caramel color, the artificial ingredient used to turn colas and other soft drinks brown. Every day, more than half of Americans between the ages of 6 and 64 typically drink soda in amounts that could expose them to enough 4-MeI to increase their cancer risk, according to a new analysis of national soda consumption conducted by scientists at Consumer Reports and the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study was published today in the scientific online journal PLOS ONE.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Oil Trains Threaten 25 Million Americans, Iconic Rivers, Wildlife



> PORTLAND, Ore.- As officials probe the two latest explosive oil train derailments in Ontario and West Virginia, the Center for Biological Diversity released a report today offering striking new details on the broad range of unchecked risks to people and the environment posed by the largely unregulated escalation in U.S. rail transport of oil.
> 
> The report, "Runaway Risks: Oil Trains and the Government's Failure to Protect People, Wildlife and the Environment," reveals that:
> 
> An estimated 25 million Americans live within the one-mile evacuation zone recommended by the U.S. Department of Transportation;
> 
> Oil trains routinely pass within a quarter-mile of 3,600 miles of streams and more than 73,000 square miles of lakes, wetlands and reservoirs, including the Hudson, Mississippi and Columbia rivers, the Puget Sound, Lake Champlain and Lake Michigan;
> 
> Oil trains also go through 34 national wildlife refuges and within a quarter-mile of critical habitat for 57 threatened or endangered species, including the California tiger salamander, California red-legged frog, piping plover, bull trout and several imperiled species of salmon, steelhead and sturgeon.


----------



## ekim68

As CEOs seek tax cuts, senator slams corporate tax haven use



> Senator Bernie Sanders lashed out on Wednesday at widespread use of offshore tax havens by U.S. companies, and the liberal independent targeted a group that represents CEOs of big corporations and wants corporate taxes lowered.
> 
> Sanders, top opposition member on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, released a report decrying what he called "legalized tax fraud." *It showed that 111 of the 201 member companies of the Business Roundtable are sheltering more than $1 trillion in profits overseas, where they are not subject to U.S. taxes.*


----------



## ekim68

10 Insane Things We Believe On Wall Street



> To outsiders, Wall Street is a manic, dangerous and ridiculous republic unto itself - a sort of bizarro world where nothing adds up and common sense is virtually inapplicable.
> 
> Consider the following insane things that we believe on Wall Street, that make no sense whatsoever in the real world:


----------



## ekim68

If We Put an End to Corporate Welfare, College Tuition Could Be Free



> Since 2008, 48 states have cut funding from public colleges--some by as much as 40%. State lawmakers couch their decisions as the unavoidable consequence of the Great Recession and budget deficits. What they fail to mention is that while they're gutting higher education, they're giving corporations tens of billions in tax breaks and incentives.
> 
> State, local, and county governments provide corporations with $80 billion in tax breaks annually, or $9 million/hour, according to an investigation by the New York Times. To put that number into perspective, total tuition at public colleges in 2012 was just under $60 billion, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.


----------



## ekim68

A long but good read on another country's traditions....:up:

What bees taught me about Cambodia



> I come from a family of beekeepers, so I had to check out a tour of traditional techniques. But I got more than I expected, and learned a lot about life in rural Cambodia.


----------



## ekim68

Stand aside for the smartphone generation



> Something seems to have changed on the streets of Britain - or at least London - in recent years, and as far as I can tell, it has evolved out of 'distracted walking' with smartphones - though what I have observed is a separate, or ancillary behaviour.
> 
> The phenomenon of phone-fixated pedestrians walking into traffic accidents, each other and lamp-posts, and being unable to notice clowns on unicycles any longer is well-documented. The environmental safety department at Stanford university notes [PDF] a 300% increase between 2004-2010 involving phone-distracted pedestrians in the United States. Pedestrian injuries in the US have risen by 35% since 2010. In a conciliatory piece of legislation, New York State has lowered speed limits in the city to accommodate the phone-fixated walking dead, whereas states such as Utah are issuing fines for mobile inattention. In 2012 Philadelphia staged a publicity stunt wherein it marked off mobile 'e-lanes' on sidewalks, to draw attention to the issue, only to find that Philadelphians thought it was a great idea. Chongqing city in China actually implemented the idea.


----------



## ekim68

Cradle 'n Swing allows parents to phone in the baby-rocking



> Rocking a fussing baby back to sleep is certainly a crucial part of the bonding process, but there are times when doing so just isn't convenient ... right? Well, regardless of your feelings about it, Fisher Price's new Smart Connect Cradle 'n Swing is on its way. It's a motorized rocking cradle that parents control via their smartphone.


----------



## ekim68

The Rise of the Oligarchs



> Wealth inequality has risen to stratospheric heights. The statistics, the real statistics, sound like fragments spun off from a madman's dream.
> 
> Eighty-five people have as much money as three and a half billion other people. Look at it like this: 85 people = 3,500,000,000 people.


----------



## ekim68

Looking up Symptoms Online? These Companies are Tracking You



> It's 2015-when we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns-confidentially, we assume-are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores. It's happening for profit, for an "improved user experience," and because developers have flocked to "free" plugins and tools provided by data-vacuuming companies.


----------



## ekim68

Coping with Earthquakes Induced by Fluid Injection



> A paper published today in Science provides a case for increasing transparency and data collection to enable strategies for mitigating the effects of human-induced earthquakes caused by wastewater injection associated with oil and gas production in the United States. The paper is the result of a series of workshops led by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey in collaboration with the University of Colorado, Oklahoma Geological Survey and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, suggests that it is possible to reduce the hazard of induced seismicity through management of injection activities.
> 
> Large areas of the United States that used to experience few or no earthquakes have, in recent years, experienced a remarkable increase in earthquake activity that has caused considerable public concern as well as damage to structures. This rise in seismic activity, especially in the central United States, is not the result of natural processes.


----------



## ekim68

Common Myth Conceptions



> World's Most Contagious Falsehoods


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Common Myth Conceptions


Interesting.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial intelligence bests humans at classic arcade games



> The dream of an artificially intelligent computer that can study a problem and gain expertise all on its own is now reality. A system debuted today by a team of Google researchers is not clever enough to perform surgery or drive a car safely, but it did master several dozen classic arcade games, in many cases surpassing the best human players without ever observing how they play.


----------



## ekim68

Ah Capitalism....

How to Develop New Antibiotics 



> Every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least two million people are infected with bacteria that can't be wiped out with antibiotics, and as a result, 23,000 people die. Direct health care costs from these illnesses are estimated to be as high as $20 billion annually.
> 
> Just last week, the U.C.L.A. Health System announced that nearly 180 patients may have been exposed to the CRE superbug that was linked to two deaths in one of its hospitals. Today, 30 percent of severe strep pneumonia infections are resistant to multiple drugs and 30 percent of gonorrhea infections are resistant to all antibiotics. And drug-resistant enterobacteriaceae, enterococcus, acinetobacter and a slew of other unpronounceable bacteria pose serious threats.
> 
> The development of antibiotics has been glacial. We need a completely new approach.


----------



## DaveBurnett

> Artificial intelligence bests humans at classic arcade games


Well since most classic arcade games are point and shoot and based on speed of reaction, I don't find this at all surprising.


----------



## ekim68

An Ingenious Invention That Turns Beehives Into Flowing Honey Taps



> Harvesting honey has been a sticky, messy job that's changed very little from the earliest days of beekeeping. But it's about to get a whole lot cleaner with the Flow Hive, an ingenious re-engineering of one of nature's most perfect creations that makes getting that golden nectar as easy as turning on a tap.


----------



## ekim68

Space technology cools Paris commute



> The Paris Metro is one of the world's great underground railways and not the sort of place you'd expect to find cutting edge satellite technology at work. But for the last year and a half a cooling system developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its satellites has been making Trains on Metro Line One more comfortable. The new cooling system works without moving parts and frees up more space to be enjoyed by passengers while saving costs.


----------



## ekim68

New York doctor who survived Ebola speaks out



> After months of silence, Craig Spencer, the New York City doctor who survived Ebola, is speaking out about his experience, saying that both the media and politicians exploited his illness for their own gain.
> 
> In an editorial in today's The New England Journal of Medicine, Spencer says cable news shows and public officials stoked fear at a time when the country needed facts.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> An Ingenious Invention That Turns Beehives Into Flowing Honey Taps


This is great. I want one. 
You know I would really love to get what I know is great Honey from the hive that I could say really is raw honey. Plus look at the work you save doing it this way.


----------



## ekim68

Bill would reveal what drives $1,000 pill's price



> The fight over the high cost of specialty prescription drugs is headed to the state Capitol as San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu will introduce a bill Monday to require companies to disclose what is driving up costs.
> 
> At the center of the debate over prescription prices is the $1,000-per-pill drugs to treat Hepatitis C. One treatment regimen can cost upwards of $85,000. However, Chiu's bill would also cover cancer, HIV and other high-priced drugs where the annual treatment costs exceed $10,000.
> 
> Chiu said AB463 doesn't require drug companies to lower their prices, but instead would have them reveal how much is spent on research and development, salaries, marketing and how much government funding was used in developing the drug.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla gearing up for release of batteries for the home



> The same lithium-ion battery technology that powers Tesla's electric vehicles will be used to develop a battery for the home, according to a statement by CEO Elon Musk during a recent conference call with analysts. The batteries would be used by homes and businesses to store excess energy generated from solar panels during the day, and drawn from at night when panels sit idle.


----------



## ekim68

Antibiotic crisis grows while drug companies make lifestyle meds



> Antibiotics for acute infections are a pillar of medicine, but doctors say the pillar is crumbling as pharmaceutical companies neglect antibiotic development and instead chase massive profits from chronic illnesses and lifestyle diseases.


----------



## ekim68

It's official: NSA spying is hurting the US tech economy



> China is backing away from US tech brands for state purchases as NSA revelations continue to make headlines in newspapers all around the world.


----------



## ekim68

Climate change: irreversible but not unstoppable



> When scientific experts moved the hands of the Bulletin's Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight last month, calling current efforts to prevent catastrophic global warming "entirely insufficient," some people responded that climate change is a far less disastrous threat than nuclear war because it is reversible. *This is a common misconception.*


----------



## ekim68

SanDisk crams 200 GB into the world's highest capacity microSD card



> With all the high quality snaps, audio and video that we fill our mobile devices with these days, it doesn't take much to for the onboard storage to hit capacity. But SanDisk has just introduced a new microSD card designed to provide a little more storage breathing room. The SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card, Premium Edition, packs a whopping 200 GB of storage capacity, while retaining the same diminutive microSD form factor.


----------



## ekim68

Tech demo lets you visit the International Space Station in VR



> Wondrous as today's technology is, there remains no feasible way to put ordinary people in space. Except, it seems, through virtual reality. Australian multimedia company Opaque Multimedia has combined an Oculus Rift headset with Microsoft Kinect 2 motion tracking to make it possible for every Tom, Dick, and Sally on the planet to get a first-hand (virtual) taste of life on - or rather just outside - the International Space Station.


----------



## ekim68

Why Boehner's invite to Netanyahu is unconstitutional



> House Speaker John Boehner's annoyance with President Barack Obama is turning into a grudge match against the Constitution.
> 
> His decision to invite a foreign head of government to address Congress without first consulting the sitting president has no precedent in American history. And for a simple reason. It's unconstitutional.
> 
> Boehner (R-Ohio) fully admits that his failure to communicate with the White House was not an oversight. Like a schoolboy passing notes when the teacher turns to the blackboard, he sneaked behind Obama's back to set the date for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech with his country's ambassador to the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Genetic Data Tools Reveal How Pop Music Evolved In The US



> The history of pop music is rich in details, anecdotes, folk lore. And controversy. There is no shortage of debate over questions about the origin and influence of particular bands and musical styles.
> 
> But despite the keen interest in the evolution of pop music, there is little to back up most claims in the form of hard analytical evidence.
> 
> Today that changes thanks to the work of Matthias Mauch at Queen Mary University of London and a few pals who have used the number crunching techniques developed to understand genomic data to study the evolution of American pop music





> The results make for fascinating reading. They found that the frequency of style 4 (jazz, blues etc) declined from 1960 onwards. Styles 5 and 13, which relate to rock music, fluctuate throughout this time. And style 2 (rap) is rare before 1980 but expands rapidly after that and becomes the dominant genre for the next 30 years before declining in the late 2000s.


----------



## ekim68

Protein shown to slow progress of Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis



> Researchers have identified a promising new target in the battle against certain neurological diseases. A protein known as TREM2 has been proven effective in clearing away unwanted debris in the brain, the unchecked buildup of which can lead to both Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis (MS).
> 
> Earlier research has suggested that variants of the TREM2 protein are related to neurological diseases, such as dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Located in brain cells called microglia, the protein carries out the task of maintaining and repairing the body' central nervous system, leading researchers to think it could function as a trigger in treating such conditions.


----------



## ekim68

World's first lagoon power plants unveiled in UK



> Plans to generate electricity from the world's first series of tidal lagoons have been unveiled in the UK.
> 
> The six lagoons - four in Wales and one each in Somerset and Cumbria - will capture incoming and outgoing tides behind giant sea walls, and use the weight of the water to power turbines.
> 
> A £1bn Swansea scheme, said to be able to produce energy for 155,000 homes, is already in the planning system.


----------



## ekim68

This community is taking on the Koch brothers' pollution - and they're winning



> It's not easy to take on a wealthy, multi-national corporation and win. Especially for residents of Chicago's struggling Southeast Side.
> 
> But that's exactly what's happening on the banks of the Calumet River, where the steel plants that used to give residents of a mostly Hispanic neighborhood access to a middle-class lifestyle were replaced, nearly two years ago, with black dust called petroleum coke ("petcoke") piled five or six stories tall.
> 
> The piles of petcoke - a byproduct of the oil refining process - belong to KCBX Terminals, owned by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers. The piles have been roiling area residents ever since the black dust of mostly carbon and sulfur began blowing into the backyards, playgrounds, and neighborhood parks. It blackens skies and leaves behind a sticky residue, raising concerns about aggravated asthma and other health issues.
> 
> A small but energetic coalition of residents have stepped up to fight the blight, holding protests and marches, educating their neighbors about the issue and pressuring elected officials. They've made incredible progress in a relatively short time.


----------



## ekim68

High-performance flow battery could rival lithium-ions for EVs and grid storage



> A new redox flow battery designed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) more than doubles the amount of energy that this type of cell can pack in a given volume, approaching the numbers of lithium-ion batteries. If the device reaches mass production, it could find use in fast-charging transportation, portable electronics and grid storage.
> 
> A flow battery is formed by two liquids with opposite charge (electrolytes) which turn chemical energy into electricity by exchanging ions through a membrane. The electrolytes are stored in two external tanks and this makes the system easy to scale up, potentially very quick to charge (the electrolytes can simply be replaced) and resistant to extreme temperatures.


----------



## ekim68

FTC Announces New Robocall Contests to Combat Illegal Automated Calls



> The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it is launching two new robocall contests challenging the public to develop a crowd-source honeypot and better analyze data from an existing honeypot. A honeypot is an information system that may be used by government, private and academic partners to lure and analyze robocalls. The challenges are part of the FTC's long-term multi-pronged effort to combat illegal robocallers and contestants of one of the challenges will compete for $25,000 in a top prize.


----------



## ekim68

Science proves GOP wrong on climate change and national security



> At last week's Conservative Political Action Conference, GOP chair Reince Priebus had some strong words about how President Barack Obama prioritizes threats to national security.
> 
> "Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security," he said. "Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren't beheading Christians in the Middle East."
> 
> The comment came after the president, in a lengthy interview with Vox, said that the media often overplays the danger of terrorism relative to climate change. It's not the first time Obama has made a point along those lines. In his State of the Union address in January, he said that "no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations" than climate change. A few weeks later, in his 2015 national security strategy, the president referred to global warming as an "urgent and growing threat" to national security.
> 
> *But while Priebus' jab earned him a hearty round of applause at CPAC, new research indicates that his iceberg comment doesn't hold water.*


----------



## ekim68

Ubisoft has new video game designed to treat lazy eye



> The Montreal-based gaming company Ubisoft has developed a video game it says could be used to treat amblyopia, also known as lazy eye.
> 
> Amblyopia is a condition in children where vision in one eye does not develop properly. If not treated early, the vision problems in the eye can become permanent. Correcting the eye later in life does not restore the lost vision.
> 
> Ubisoft developed the game Dig Rush over two years. The company says it's the first video game based on a patented method for the treatment of amblyopia.


----------



## ekim68

'Building AI is like launching a rocket': Meet the man fighting to stop artificial intelligence destroying humanity



> With artificial intelligence, the fast pace of research and the scale of its potential benefits mean that tech companies are increasingly moving full-steam ahead without considering the risks.
> 
> At the beginning of this year, Elon Musk, the creator of Tesla and SpaceX, donated $10m to the Future of Life Institute to fund a global research program aimed at making sure AI benefits the human race. The institute is a volunteer-run research and outreach organization co-founded in March last year by Jaan Tallinn, one of the most well-known Estonian tech entrepreneurs for his role as the founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa.


----------



## ekim68

This Throwable Computer Teaches Kids How To Code



> Coding is a great skill for kids to learn but it can be a lonely, sedentary endeavor. Hackaball, a new toy created from a partnership between the design agencies MAP and Made By Many, promises to get kids off their butts and playing outside-all while teaching basic coding skills and empowering kids to invent their own kind of play.
> 
> It's a lot to ask from one product which is why Hackaball had to be meticulously designed. The ball is bigger than a baseball but smaller than a soccer ball, and it comes with several simple parts that can be put together using basic instructions, so kids understand what's inside, and get the chance to start creating from the get-go. Once it's put together, the toy can glow different colors, make noises, and even vibrate. As for how to use it? The kids get to decide.


----------



## ekim68

World's Largest Solar Plant Looks Like Someone Playing Tetris From Space



> The Topaz Solar Farm in San Luis Obispo County, California is the largest photovoltaic power station on the planet. In this image, it looks like someone aboard the International Space Station decided to power up a game of Tetris on planet Earth.
> 
> Covering 9.5 square miles, the facility is about a third of the size of Manhattan, or the equivalent of 4,600 football fields. Construction started in 2011, and the plant was turned on and began to generate electricity in November 2014. The 550-megawatt plant produces enough electricity to power about 180,000 homes. According to plant operator BHE Renewable estimates, that is enough to displace about 407,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year-the equivalent of taking 77,000 cars off the road.


----------



## ekim68

Tech Time Warp of the Week: The 1972 Digital Watch That Cost More Than a Car



> On Monday Apple is expected to announce more details about the Apple Watch. It could be the product that finally brings wearable computing into the mainstream. But as far as high-tech watches go, it's hardly the most ambitious.
> 
> In 1972, the Hamilton Watch Company announced the Pulsar Time Computer, billed as the first digital watch. In the video above you can see-and hear-how grand the company's vision for the future of timekeeping was.


----------



## ekim68

Robocops being used as traffic police in Democratic Republic of Congo



> Solar-powered aluminium robots direct traffic and are equipped with surveillance cameras in a project which authorities hope will reduce road deaths.


----------



## ekim68

Solar Impulse 2 begins historic round-the-world, sun-powered flight



> A pair of Swiss explorers have begun a mission to circumnavigate the globe via air and sun. A take-off twelve years in the making, the experimental Solar Impulse 2 plane left Abu Dhabi at 7:12 a.m. local time, bound for Muscat, Oman, on the first leg in a journey that will require 25 days in the air spread over a period of roughly 5 months.


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> Solar Impulse 2 begins historic round-the-world, sun-powered flight


been following this one........nobody said they were going to break any _speed_ records.


----------



## ekim68

We live in fascinating times...:up: That collective groan you hear is from the oil/gas industry....


----------



## ekim68

In Florida, officials ban term 'climate change' 



> The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state's beaches over the next 85 years.
> 
> But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.
> 
> DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term "climate change" or "global warming" in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.


----------



## ekim68

At Anthem: Where There's Fire, There's Smoke



> After losing 80 million patient records, Anthem Healthcare is refusing to have its network scanned for vulnerabilities by a federal auditor, raising questions about the health insurer's internal practices.


----------



## ekim68

Dr. Zarif`s Response to the Letter of US Senators



> Asked about the open letter of 47 US Senators to Iranian leaders, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Dr. Javad Zarif, responded that "in our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy. It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history. This indicates that like Netanyahu, who considers peace as an existential threat, some are opposed to any agreement, regardless of its content.


----------



## ekim68

How much do you need to make to buy a home in your city?



> Here's definitive proof that San Francisco's real estate market is insane. Hsh.com, a mortgage research site, has estimated how much salary you need to earn to afford the principal, interest, taxes and insurance payments on a median-priced home in 27 metro areas.


----------



## ekim68

Solar Is Growing Faster Than Non-Renewable Energy in the US



> We've noted here before the many ways in which solar power is blowing up in the United States: Adding tons of jobs, driving progressive policies, and attracting millions of dollars in investment from major corporations. It's not slowing down anytime soon: New data from market analysis firm GTM Research finds that 2014 was solar's biggest year ever, with 30 percent more photovoltaic installations installed than in 2013.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Solar Impulse 2 begins historic round-the-world, sun-powered flight


More on this:

Solar Impulse Just Broke A World Record For Solar-Powered Flight



> The Solar Impulse plane took off on its mission to fly around the world without using any fuel on Monday morning, and it's already breaking records. As part of the journey from Oman to India, it flew the longest ever distance for a solar powered plane going point-to-point.





> The plane took off from Muscat, Oman at 0235, landing in Ahmedabad 13 hours and 20 minutes later. That's a journey of 912 miles, which pilot Bertrand Piccard (son of another famous explorer, but no, not that Picard) flew at about 115 mph for the majority of the flight, cruising at around 28,000 feet.


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> More on this:
> 
> Solar Impulse Just Broke A World Record For Solar-Powered Flight


rock on!


----------



## ekim68

Welfare with an Ocean View



> In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the federal government pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to pump more sand onto beaches in New Jersey and New York devastated by the storm. It was not exactly a new idea, write Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper in their new book, The Last Beach. The federal government has been pouring money into keeping the nation's beaches stocked with sand since the 1960s, and the tab has grown substantial. Since 1970, Pilkey and Cooper point out, the U.S. has pumped more than 370 million cubic yards of sand onto beaches around the country, at a cost of more than $3.7 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Swatch Co-Inventor Predicts Apple Watch Will Bring 'Ice Age' To Swiss Watch Industry



> It seems that these days everything Apple touches turns to gold, hence why the company was able to post an $18 billion profit for its fiscal first quarter of 2015. Be that as it may, can Apple popularize the smartwatch market as others have been unable to do so far? Not only is that the expectation, but according to Swatch watch co-inventor Elmar Mock, Apple is going to bring about an "Ice Age" to the Swiss watch market.


----------



## ekim68

These Hi-Tech Faucets Prove That The Future Is Coming To Our Bathrooms



> Faucets already seem a bit like magic - you turn them on and the water flows right out. But these faucet designs add a bit more pizazz to conventional plumbing technology, letting us better control the flow and temperature of water.


----------



## ekim68

Petition to prosecute 47 GOP senators over open Iran letter reaches goal



> WASHINGTON, March 12 (UPI) -- A petition asking to prosecute the 47 U.S. Republican senators, who sent a heavily criticized open letter to Iran's leadership, has reached the goal to require a White House response.
> 
> The petition was published on March 9 and reached more than 200,000 signatures in three days, well above the requirement of 100,000, which requires the White House to respond.
> 
> The petition cited the 1799 Logan Act, which can carry an imprisonment sentence for up to three years.


----------



## ekim68

In Japan, It Soon May Be Illegal Not To Take Vacation



> Wake up at 7:30, commute to work, spend 13 hours in the office, run for the last train home, eat, and crash into to bed. The next day, rinse and repeat. Welcome to the insane working hours of a Japanese "salaryman" during crunch times at work. It's a schedule that sometimes leads to what the Japanese call karoshi-death by overwork. Now, in an attempt to help, the Japanese government is considering a plan to force workers to take five vacation days a year.


----------



## ekim68

The Shocking Tax Loophole for Corporations that Commit Crimes



> What's going on here is a game of winkin' 'n' noddin', in which corporate criminals know that those headline-grabbing assessments for damages they've caused have a secret escape hatch built into them. Congress has generously written the law so corporations can deduct much of their punitive payments from their income taxes! As Sen. Pat Leahy points out, "This tax loophole allows corporations to wreak havoc and then write it off as a cost of doing business."
> For example, oil giant BP certainly wreaked havoc with its careless oil rig explosion in 2010, killing 11 workers, deeply contaminating the Gulf of Mexico and devastating the livelihoods of millions of people along the Gulf coast. So, BP was socked with a punishing payout topping $42 billion. But -- shhhh -- 80 percent of that was eligible for a tax deduction, a little fact that's been effectively covered up by the bosses and politicians.


----------



## ekim68

New solar installs beat wind and coal two years in a row



> New installations of solar power capacity surpassed those of wind and coal for the second year in a row last year, accounting for 32% of all new electrical capacity, according to a report released today from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)
> 
> The report claims solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity for 2014 reached a record 6.2 gigawatts (GW), a 30% year-over year growth rate.


:up:


----------



## ekim68

US Wind Power Is Expected to Double in the Next Five Years



> The US Department of Energy anticipates that the amount of electricity generated by wind power will more than double over the next five years. Right now, wind provides the nation with about 4.5 percent of its power, but an in-depth DOE report released today forecasts that will rise to 10 percent by 2020.
> 
> The agency's Wind Vision outlines the potential the renewable energy source has to grow not just over the next few years, but in coming decades. It charts a course for powering the US with 10 percent wind in 2020, 20 percent in 2030, and 35 percent in 2050. The DOE believes that the US could be running on over one-third wind power in less than 40 years.


----------



## ekim68

How to Win Friends and Bamboozle People about Climate Change



> What is the difference between a magician and a man who obscures the truth about global warming for the fossil-fuel industry? Magicians are "moral liars," according to the illuminating new documentary Merchants of Doubt, by director Robert Kenner. That's because their magic acts use expertise in the art of deception and misdirection to entertain. Shills for the fossil fuel-industry, such as Steve Milloy, Marc Morano and others examined and accused in this film, use their expertise to fool people about matters of life and death.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I've just realised what Elmer Fudd is all about. !!


----------



## ekim68

Oldest dot-com address sits sadly underused 30 years after its historic registration



> Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet's first dot-com address: Symbolics.com.
> 
> Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration.


----------



## ekim68

Never escape the boss again: Salesforce tracks down your best people any time, any place



> Salesforce is adding new "intelligent" software to its CRM system that hunts down the right sales or support staffer for a particular task no matter where they are.
> 
> "The Service Cloud Intelligence Engine harnesses the power of data science to improve workflows, business processes and deliver seamless customer service across any channel," said Mike Milburn, GM of Service Cloud for Salesforce. "Now companies are prepared to exceed their customer's increasingly high expectations for smarter service."
> 
> The software, due out later this year, routes sales and support work to the agent best capable of handling the job, for example routing certain high-value customers or those with specific technical needs to the right staff.


----------



## ekim68

We're finding out what's in fracking wastewater, and it ain't pretty



> Petroleum chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive elements, plus high levels of dissolved solids, are among the pollutants found in fracking wastewater samples tested under the new disclosure program.They include benzene, chromium-6, lead and arsenic - all listed under California's Proposition 65 as causes of cancer or reproductive harm. Nearly every one of the 293 samples tested contained benzene at levels ranging from twice to more than 7,000 times the state drinking water standard. The wastewater also carried, on average, thousands of times more radioactive radium than the state's public health goals consider safe, as well as elevated levels of potentially harmful ions such as nitrate and chloride.


----------



## ekim68

Climate change: UN backs fossil fuel divestment campaign



> The UN organisation in charge of global climate change negotiations is backing the fast-growing campaign persuading investors to sell off their fossil fuel assets. It said it was lending its "moral authority" to the divestment campaign because it shared the ambition to get a strong deal to tackle global warming at a crunch UN summit in Paris in December.
> 
> "We support divestment as it sends a signal to companies, especially coal companies, that the age of 'burn what you like, when you like' cannot continue," said Nick Nuttall, the spokesman for the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC).


----------



## ekim68

Cuba approves first public wi-fi hub in Havana



> Cuba's state telecom agency Etecsa has granted approval to the artist Kcho to open the country's first public wireless hub at his cultural centre.
> 
> Kcho, who has close ties to the Cuban government, is operating the hub using his own, government-approved internet connection, and paying approximately $900 (£600) per month to run it.
> 
> Only an estimated 5% - 25% of Cubans have any type of internet service.


----------



## ekim68

Driving Range for the Model S Family



> As the Model S family has expanded over time it has become more relevant to compare range from one variant to another with a consistent set of assumptions so our customers can know what to expect and make the best decision to fit their needs. This can be a bit difficult since the background test methodology and standards from the US EPA are evolving over time. There are also many customer vehicle configuration choices, both before and after purchase, that can affect range as much as or more than the vehicle platform choice itself. The most important example of this secondary configuration is the wheel and tire selection. This short paper will hopefully help to compare amongst all of the Model S family and understand how tire choices impact range as well.


----------



## ekim68

There Is No 'Proper English'



> It's a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can't express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. A few weeks ago, pundits and columnists lauded a Wikipedia editor in San Jose, Calif., who had rooted out and changed no fewer than 47,000 instances where contributors to the online encyclopedia had written "comprised of" rather than "composed of." Does anyone doubt that our mother tongue is in deep decline?
> 
> Well, for one, I do. It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books.


----------



## ekim68

Lawsuit over quarter horse's clone may redefine animal breeding



> Lynx Melody Too, a clone of a renowned quarter horse, is at the center of a lawsuit that could change the world of animal breeding and competition.
> 
> Texas horse breeder Jason Abraham and veterinarian Gregg Veneklasen sued the American Quarter Horse Assn., claiming that Lynx Melody Too should be allowed to register as an official quarter horse.
> 
> A Texas jury decided in their favor in 2013, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in January, saying there was "insufficient" evidence of wrongdoing by the association.
> 
> Abraham and Veneklasen are now seeking a rehearing before the full 15-judge circuit panel.
> 
> The suit is among the first to deal with the status of clones in breeding and competition, and its outcome could impact a number of fields, including thoroughbred horse racing and dog breeding.


----------



## ekim68

Solar in California's urban areas could provide 5 times the power the state needs



> The amount of energy that could be produced through solar equipment constructed on or around existing infrastructure in California would easily exceed the state's demands, according to a new study.
> 
> Currently, solar energy deployments are complicated by the need to find space for equipment without significantly altering the surrounding area.
> 
> The study, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the amount of energy that could be generated from solar installations on and around existing infrastructure in California would exceed the state's demand three to five times over.


----------



## ekim68

Florida and the Science Who Must Not Be Named



> The oceans are slowly overtaking Florida. Ancient reefs of mollusk and coral off the present-day coasts are dying. Annual extremes in hot and cold, wet and dry, are becoming more pronounced. Women and men of science have investigated, and a great majority agree upon a culprit. In the outside world, this culprit has a name, but within the borders of Florida, it does not. According to a Miami Herald investigation, the state Department of Environmental Protection has since 2010 had an unwritten policy prohibiting the use of some well-understood phrases for the meteorological phenomena slowly drowning America's weirdest-shaped state. It's … that thing where burning too much fossil fuel puts certain molecules into a certain atmosphere, disrupting a certain planetary ecosystem. You know what we're talking about. We know you know. They know we know you know. But are we allowed to talk about … you know? No. Not in Florida. It must not be spoken of. Ever.


----------



## ekim68

California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?



> Given the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California's winter was as well.
> 
> As our "wet" season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.
> 
> Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins - that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined - was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir.


----------



## hewee

Yea it's bad here.


----------



## ekim68

Internet TV's Big Chance to Oust Cable Is Almost Here



> Internet television's turning point-the time when we can finally cut the cable cord-is almost here.
> 
> On Wednesday, in three American cities, Sony launched an internet television service that streams more than 50 channels into homes via its PlayStation game consoles. And little more than a day earlier, word arrived that Apple is building a similar service for use with its Apple TV set-top boxes. These big-name tech companies are following several others in the push to stream television over the net-without requiring ties to traditional cable TV services-and together, they're approaching a new peak.
> 
> Sony's service, you see, offers all but one of the big sports broadcasters. CBS, Fox, and NBC are all on board. Apple is pushing towards its own sports-happy deals. And sports is really all that cable has left.


----------



## ekim68

Icelandic Pirate Party's rapid rise may result in citizenship for Snowden



> Nearly two years after the Icelandic Pirate Party won three seats in the island nation's parliament in 2013, a new poll shows that the young party has the highest level of support of any party in the country. According to Visir.is, an Icelandic news site, the party's support has reached 23.9 percent.
> 
> If the Píratar can translate that level of current support into actual votes in the next election (currently scheduled for 2017), it could lead to a higher likelihood that the country would grant asylum for Edward Snowden, possibly granting him citizenship as well.


----------



## ekim68

I came across this yummy recipe site....

twistedtastes


----------



## ekim68

US Navy's Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System launches first fighter jet



> For more than 50 years, the on-ramp to the highway to the danger zone was a steam catapult that launched fighter jets from an aircraft carrier, but it looks like that could soon be set to change. The U.S. Navy just announced yesterday that its Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, has passed a key test by launching a manned F/A-18E Super Hornet for the first time (several more successful launches then followed).


----------



## ekim68

A new test could possibly help predict Alzheimer's disease



> A new test may help predict who is at risk for Alzheimer's disease.
> 
> ABC explains, "It measures a patient's risk of mental impairment based on several factors, including how quickly the patient can walk a short distance."
> 
> What's especially promising about this new test is that most physicians can do it at their offices -- which is a big deal, considering the testing methods today are often more involved.


----------



## ekim68

A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked



> While you've likely never heard of companies like Yeswear, Bananatag, and Streak, they almost certainly know a good deal about you. Specifically, they know when you've opened an email sent by one of their clients, where you are, what sort of device you're on, and whether you've clicked a link, all without your awareness or consent.
> 
> That sort of email tracking is more common than you might think. A Chrome extension called Ugly Mail shows you who's guilty of doing it to your inbox.


----------



## ekim68

Paris hit by air pollution spike, halves cars on roads



> PARIS (AP) - Paris will cut the number of cars on the road in half beginning Monday and is making public transit free to combat a spike in pollution that has obscured even the Eiffel Tower under a smoggy haze.
> 
> The mayor's office announced Saturday that only cars with odd-numbered plates will be permitted to drive Monday, as well as any electric or hybrid vehicles and any vehicles with more than three people.


----------



## ekim68

Utilities wage campaign against rooftop solar



> Three years ago, the nation's top utility executives gathered at a Colorado resort to hear warnings about a grave new threat to operators of America's electric grid: not superstorms or cyberattacks, but rooftop solar panels.
> 
> If demand for residential solar continued to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from "declining retail sales" and a "loss of customers" to "potential obsolescence," according to a presentation prepared for the group. "Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges," it said.


----------



## ekim68

Ebola-Proof Tablet Developed By Google Set For Deployment In Sierra Leone



> Decidedly in the "Don't be Evil" column (and giving all new meaning to the term "hot hardware"), Google has developed a tablet device for use by workers battling Ebola in Sierra Leone. The Sony Xperia tablet comes with an extra protective shell, can withstand chlorine dousing as well as exposure to the high humidity and storms that are typical of life in West Africa. And it can even be used by workers wearing protective gloves.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Toughbook comes to mind! as well as other ruggedised laptops/tablets.


----------



## ekim68

Electric vehicles could cut home air conditioner use



> Those who question the environmental benefits of electric vehicles over their gas-guzzling brethren often point out that the electricity powering EVs usually comes from fossil fuel-burning power plants. But a study conducted by researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) and Hunan University in China has revealed some hidden benefits of EVs, regardless of where the electricity originates.
> 
> Most people will have witnessed the heat haze above a line of traffic stuck on a freeway in summer. These vehicles are contributing to the urban heat island effect. This in turn results in city dwellers cranking up the office and home air conditioning, which in turn further adds to the outdoor heat and sends electricity usage northwards.


----------



## ekim68

The drying of the West



> THE first rule for staying alive in a desert is not to pour the contents of your water flask into the sand. Yet that, bizarrely, is what the government has encouraged farmers to do in the drought-afflicted south-west. Agriculture accounts for 80% of water consumption in California, for example, but only 2% of economic activity. Farmers flood the land to grow rice, alfalfa and other thirsty crops. By one account, over the years they have paid just 15% of the capital costs of the federal system that delivers much of their irrigation water. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that they would waste far less of it, and the effects of California's drought-its worst in recorded history-would not be so severe.


----------



## ekim68

Chevron's Lobbyist Now Runs the Congressional Science Committee



> For Chevron, the second largest oil company in the country with $26.2 billion in annual profits, it helps to have friends in high places. With little fanfare, one of Chevron's top lobbyists, Stephen Sayle, has become a senior staff member of the House Committee on Science, the standing congressional committee charged with "maintaining our scientific and technical leadership in the world."
> 
> Throughout much of 2013, Sayle was the chief executive officer of Dow Lohnes Government Strategies, a lobbying firm retained by Chevron to influence Congress. For fees that total $320,000 a year, Sayle and his team lobbied on a range of energy-related issues, including implementation of EPA rules under the Clean Air Act, regulation of ozone standards, as well as "Congressional and agency oversight related to offshore oil, natural gas development and oil spills."
> 
> Sayle's ethics disclosure, obtained by Republic Report, shows that he was paid $500,000 by Chevron's lobbying firm before taking his current gig atop the Science Committee.


----------



## ekim68

William Smith: Seminal geology map rediscovered



> A first edition copy of one of the most significant maps in the history of science has been rediscovered in time for an important anniversary.
> 
> William Smith's 1815 depiction of the geology of England, Wales and part of Scotland is a seminal piece of work.
> 
> The first map of its kind produced anywhere in the world, only about 70 copies are thought to exist today.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Israel Spied on US Talks with Iran



> The Wall Street Journal reports that White House officials learned last year that Israel was spying on closed-door talks with Iran, which wouldn't have been a problem but for the fact that the Israelis shared what they'd learned with lawmakers.
> 
> "It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other," a senior US official briefed on the matter told the Journal. "It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy."


----------



## ekim68

SolarCity to build its own power grids



> Seeing a complete reliance on the utilities' grids as increasingly troublesome, rooftop solar distributor SolarCity has decided to begin selling its own power distribution systems.
> 
> The microgrids, as SolarCity is calling them, are small, independent power grids that can be set by cities, corporate campuses, military bases, or in remote locations such as islands.
> 
> "The first decade of the 21st century saw 3,496 natural disasters, nearly a fivefold increase over the 1970s," SolarCity states in its marketing material. "Severe weather events can cause prolonged power outages that cut off access to critical public resources."


----------



## ekim68

UN warns world could have 40 percent water shortfall by 2030



> The world could suffer a 40 percent shortfall in water in just 15 years unless countries dramatically change their use of the resource, a U.N. report warned Friday.
> 
> Many underground water reserves are already running low, while rainfall patterns are predicted to become more erratic with climate change. As the world's population grows to an expected 9 billion by 2050, more groundwater will be needed for farming, industry and personal consumption.
> 
> The report predicts global water demand will increase 55 percent by 2050, while reserves dwindle. If current usage trends don't change, the world will have only 60 percent of the water it needs in 2030, it said.


----------



## ekim68

This Amazingly Limber Bionic Arm Connects To Your Smartphone



> A Japanese company called Exiii has created a sub-$300 bionic arm that connects to your cellphone in order to perform some surprisingly limber maneuvers. The arm uses 3D printed parts to make it easy to build and assembled and it can be repaired or reprinted in multiple colors.


----------



## ekim68

If Republicans Did Get Intel From Israeli Spies, They Could Be Charged Under Espionage Act



> Congressional Republicans had to know they were playing a dangerous game. In their quest to undermine Obama and derail any chance for negotiations between the United States (and it's allies) and Iran, the GOP had pushed the envelope right up to the edge of the table. It's becoming clear that it may have finally toppled over.


----------



## ekim68

Where are the worst states for retirement?



> You should be choosy in your golden years. If you want to relocate, make sure to find a place where your dollar can stretch a little further. Look for a strong health care system and a place where residents are safe and feel good about their surroundings. The weather is also very important.
> 
> Bankrate found that some parts of the country are blessed with many of these qualities, while others are tougher on retirees.


----------



## ekim68

Could this spell the end for speeding tickets?



> Breaking the speed limit is not something we always do on purpose. All the same, it can be costly in terms of fines, and driving bans, as well as playing a significant role in many road accidents.
> 
> In the U.K. alone, in 2013, more than 15,000 drivers received fines of £100 or more for speeding.
> 
> We are now launching Intelligent Speed Limiter, a technology that could help prevent drivers from unintentionally exceeding speed limits.
> 
> The system monitors road signs with a camera mounted on the windscreen, and slows the vehicle as required. As the speed limit rises, the system allows the driver to accelerate up to the set speed - providing it does not exceed the new limit.


----------



## ekim68

Why It's Time to Book Travel Directly Again With Hotels, Airlines



> NEW YORK (MainStreet) - Almost 20 years into the revolution triggered by the launch of Expedia (1996), Priceline (1997), Hotwire (2000) and many other online travel agencies, a new question is being asked: Is now the time to go back to booking direct with airlines, hotels, even car rental companies? The reason: Just maybe one-stop convenience is getting trumped by sweeter deals found when shopping directly.
> 
> That sounds so 1995, but savvy travelers are insisting the dominance of the OTAs is at an end. George Hobica, founder of Airfarewatchdog.com, remembers when he would walk into a Borders bookstore a decade ago and knew it was a dinosaur because people weren't buying books - they were flipping through pages, maybe taking notes on key passages. He says he sees the same at OTAs: "People are not buying from them, they are using them for informational purposes," Hobica says.


----------



## ekim68

The Kochs take millions in subsidies in Montana, then try to block Medicaid expansion



> In every red state where they've spent big, the Koch brothers have defeated Medicaid expansion, the piece of the Affordable Care Act that is optional for states and gives relief to the working poor. But in Montana - by some measurements the reddest state in the country - the Kochs are hitting the skids. Their monster political group, Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, has laid an egg. And Medicaid expansion now has a real chance of happening.
> 
> What's gone wrong?
> 
> A few things. First, the Kochs underestimated the local population and made a fundamental misreading of the terrain, as have many outside groups that have botched Montana campaigns (starting with Custer and his troops). They sent in a crew of young D.C. hotshots with little understanding of the state's politics, to run a negative campaign against moderate Republican legislators who support expanding Medicaid.


----------



## ekim68

Climate denial is a rejection of God's gift of knowledge, says Episcopal leader



> The highest ranking woman in the Anglican Communion has said climate denial is a "blind" and immoral position which rejects God's gift of knowledge.
> 
> Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.


----------



## ekim68

One Professional Russian Troll Tells All



> More and more, posts and commentaries on the Internet in Russia and even abroad are generated by professional trolls, many of whom receive a higher-than-average salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online.
> 
> There are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte, all increasingly focused on the war in Ukraine. Many emanate from Russia's most famous "troll factory," the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg's Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle. In recent weeks, former employees have come forward to talk to RFE/RL about life inside the factory, where hundreds of people work grinding, 12-hour shifts in exchange for 40,000 rubles ($700) a month or more.


----------



## ekim68

Living In The Hidden Tunnels Of Las Vegas



> Matthew O'Brien, an expert on the underground flood channels of Las Vegas, takes the Seeker team to experience the hardship, lifestyle, and creativity of those who live in these tunnels.


----------



## ekim68

The Best Single-Purpose Web Sites That Do Exactly What They Say They Do



> Kids these days have the most convoluted web site names. Facebook? Twitter? eBay? I'm sorry, but I like my coffee black and my web sites self-explanatory. Here's a handful of actually useful web sites that do exactly what they sound like.


----------



## ekim68

Welfare Makes America More Entrepreneurialp



> Research shows that when governments provide citizens with economic security, they embolden them to take more risks.


----------



## ekim68

Congressional Rep. John Carter Discovers Encryption; Worries It May One Day Be Used On Computers To Protect Your Data



> Here's a suggestion: if you're a Congressional Representative whose job it is to regulate all sorts of important things, and you state in a hearing "I don't know anything about this stuff" before spouting off on your crazy opinions about how something must be done... maybe, just maybe educate yourself before confirming to the world that you're ignorant of the very thing you're regulating. We famously saw this during the SOPA debate, where Representatives seemed proud of their own ignorance. As we noted at the time, it's simply not okay for Congress to be proud of their own ignorance of technology, especially when they're in charge of regulating it.


----------



## ekim68

Cutting carbon dioxide could help prevent droughts, new research shows



> Recent climate modeling has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give the Earth a wetter climate in the short term. New research offers a novel explanation for why climates are wetter when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are decreasing. Their findings show that cutting carbon dioxide concentrations could help prevent droughts caused by global warming.


----------



## ekim68

Peruvian Newspaper Reveals TPP Favors Foreign Companies

​


> A new chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) was leaked Thursday by WikiLeaks to Peruvian newspaper La Republica. The treaty has been negotiated in secret since 2010. The organization Public Citizen, which was present at the negotiations in Hawaii between March 9 and 15, verified the authenticity of the leaked document.
> 
> The 55-page chapter, dated Jan. 20 this year, shows the treaty will reinforce the mechanisms that allow transnational corporation investment in the countries to sue the state where they operate, even before attempting to go through the national mechanisms.
> 
> The chapter also specifies that companies will be able to sue the state in private courts when they lose profits, or the expectation of profits, due to social conflicts and changes in the public health or environmental codes of a nation. It will also protect companies from direct and indirect expropriations and any changes in financial legislation.


----------



## ekim68

Biopolymer Derived From Crustaceans Could Combat Military Mortalities



> A foam composed of a polymer derived from crustacean shells may prevent more soldiers from falling victim to the most prolific killer on the battlefield: blood loss.


----------



## ekim68

Six surprising facts about who's winning the operating system and browser wars in the U.S.



> Summary:The United States government has given the public access to its massive analytics database, and the results are fascinating. What share does the Mac really have? Is Windows 8.1 a hit or a miss? Who's winning the browser wars? I've dug deep to get the answers.


----------



## ekim68

MRSA superbug killed by 1,100-year-old home remedy, researchers say



> Even in the age of AIDS, avian flu and Ebola, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA, is terrifying.
> 
> The superbug, which is resistant to conventional antibiotics because of their overuse, shrugs at even the deadliest weapons modern medicine offers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated MRSA contributed to the deaths of more than 5,000 people in the United States in 2013. It even attacked the NFL, and some say it could eventually kill more people than cancer. And presidential commissions have advised that technological progress is the only way to fight MRSA.
> 
> But researchers in the United Kingdom now report that the superbug proved vulnerable to an ancient remedy. The ingredients? Just a bit of garlic, some onion or leek, copper, wine and oxgall - a florid name for cow's bile.
> 
> This medicine sounds yucky, but it's definitely better than the bug it may be able to kill.


----------



## ekim68

The NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else



> The National Security Agency want to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records and have the keys to tech companies' encryption - and, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less.
> 
> NSA director Mike Rogers testified in front of a Senate committee this week, lamenting that the poor ol' NSA just doesn't have the "cyber-offensive" capabilities (read: the ability to hack people) it needs to adequately defend the US. How cyber-attacking countries will help cyber-defense is anybody's guess, but the idea that the NSA is somehow hamstrung is absurd.
> 
> The NSA runs sophisticated hacking operations all over the world. A Washington Post report showed that the NSA carried out 231 "offensive" operations in 2011 - and that number has surely grown since then. That report also revealed that the NSA runs a $652m project that has infected tens of thousands of computers with malware.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter Is Now Placing Ads Within User Profiles



> Your Twitter profile may soon include a new decoration: Advertising.
> 
> Twitter is bringing promoted tweets, the app's signature ad unit, to people's profile pages as part of a new test. That means when you visit the page of another user, you may find a targeted Twitter ad waiting for you a few tweets into that user's stream.
> 
> The ads are separated from other tweets by a small bumper that creates a break in the stream, and a label that reads "Suggested by Twitter" - you can see an example at the bottom of this post.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook tracks all site vistors, violating EU law, report says



> Facebook tracks everyone who visits its site, including people who don't have an account, and even continues to track users and non-users who have opted out of targeted ads, researchers at two Belgian universities have found.


----------



## ekim68

California leads nation in solar installations as world sees 14% increase



> California became the first state to generate more than 5% of its electricity from utility solar, according a new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
> 
> California's utility-scale (1 megawatt or larger) solar plants generated a record 9.9 million mega watt hours (MWh) of electricity in 2014, an increase of 6.1 million MWh from 2013. California's utility-scale solar production in 2014 was more than three times the output of the next-highest state, Arizona, and more than all other states combined, according to the EIA.


----------



## ekim68

"Shadowy" anti-net neutrality group flooded FCC with comments



> "A shadowy organization with ties to the Koch Brothers" spearheaded an anti-net neutrality form letter writing campaign that tipped the scales against net neutrality proponents, according to an analysis released today by the Sunlight Foundation.
> 
> The first round of comments collected by the Federal Communications Commission were overwhelmingly in support of net neutrality rules. But a second round of "reply comments" that ended September 10 went the other way, with 60 percent opposing net neutrality, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The group describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to expand access to government records.
> 
> (UPDATE: The 60 percent figure is being disputed by pro-net neutrality groups that organized their own form letter campaigns. The group "Fight For The Future" says that the Sunlight Foundation undercounted the pro comments by at least 500,000.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> California leads nation in solar installations as world sees 14% increase


Yea and power companies are fighting back on power they have to buy back now and that can hurt the growing solar.


----------



## ekim68

Why Africa's largest lake is in grave danger



> Hamisi is looking for a place to spend the night, but he is also keeping an eye out for government patrols on the beaches. Normally the patrols operate only in the daytime-it is too dangerous for them at night-but for a few weeks of the year they venture out, armed in the darkness, hunting illegal fisherman. Some shut up shop during this period, afraid of being arrested or having their nets and boats confiscated, but Hamisi, a short, stocky father of five in his early forties, can't afford to stop. "The government tells us not to fish from the beach," he tells me, "but if we don't fish our children will die."
> 
> Hamisi's struggle is felt by a growing share of the 35 million people who depend on these troubled waters for survival. Lake Victoria's lethal combination of overfishing and pollution threatens not only the once-abundant fish stocks, but also the fragile environmental and economic ecosystems supported by Africa's largest lake.


----------



## ekim68

As if the drought in California isn't enough....

Piping water from a national forest



> Miles from the nearest paved road in the San Bernardino National Forest, two sounds fill a rocky canyon: a babbling stream and the hissing of water flowing through a stainless steel pipe.
> 
> From wells that tap into springs high on the mountainside, water gushes down through the pipe to a roadside tank. From there, it is transferred to tanker trucks, hauled to a bottling plant and sold as Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water.
> 
> Nestle Waters North America holds a longstanding right to use this water from the national forest near San Bernardino. But the U.S. Forest Service hasn't been keeping an eye on whether the taking of water is harming Strawberry Creek and the wildlife that depends on it. In fact, Nestle's permit to transport water across the national forest expired in 1988. It hasn't been reviewed since, and the Forest Service hasn't examined the ecological effects of drawing tens of millions of gallons each year from the springs.


----------



## ekim68

Report: 61,000 U.S. bridges 'structurally deficient'



> WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- Even after improvements to some of the nation's bridges, tens of thousands across the United States remain structurally deficient and in need of "significant repair," the American Road & Transportation Builders Association found in an analysis of U.S. Department of Transportation records.
> 
> Experts warn the problems at some 61,000 bridges could get worse if dollars continue to be diverted from federal highway and transit funding, which is set to expire on May 31 without congressional action.


----------



## ekim68

Unpowered ankle exoskeleton takes a load off calf muscles to improve walking efficiency



> We might have started off in the water, but humans have evolved to be extremely efficient walkers, with a walk in the park being, well, a walk in the park. Human locomotion is so efficient that many wondered whether it was possible to reduce the energy cost of walking without the use of an external energy source. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon and North Carolina State have provided an answer in the affirmative with the development of an unpowered ankle exoskeleton.
> 
> The result of eight years of work begun by Steve Collins and Greg Sawicki when they were graduate students together at the University of Michigan in 2007, the device has been shown to reduce the metabolic cost of walking by around seven percent. The researchers claim this is roughly equivalent to taking off a 10-lb (4.5 kg) backpack and equates to the same savings provided by electrically-powered exoskeletons.


----------



## valis

automotive history has been made, I do believe.

http://jalopnik.com/delphis-autonomous-audi-made-it-from-san-fransisco-to-n-1695458887


----------



## ekim68

Wow, that's cool... I just hope there are a bunch available for when my post-driving days are here...


----------



## hewee

valis said:


> automotive history has been made, I do believe.
> 
> http://jalopnik.com/delphis-autonomous-audi-made-it-from-san-fransisco-to-n-1695458887


I know a person I trust ti work on my truck was not around the pass 4 years and I know it cost me added money and more sloppy work.

Who was hurt so rented the place out and had building made next to it to rent a doughnut shop or what ever and that never worked out. But then he went back to school and now uses that other building to teach others. 
Delphi Automotive Technical Instructor and California Bureau of Automotive Repair Certified Automotive Instructor.

http://www.alsautorepair.com/index.html

http://ifixallcars.com/about-us.html

http://northerncaliforniasmoginstitute.com/

He turn an old Shell station into a place and grew like crazy. You work for him you got to stay up with school etc and do things right or your fired. Build 4 more big and high bays to service motor homes, big rigs etc. Was doing cop cars and CHP cars and is working to get them back.

Just had work done from Ford and it has new owner and service is not good anymore. So glad Al is back. I wish I knew when the last work was done but now I will go over to get any work done from an honest person I trust.

Plus he will give me ride down the road to my dads and really I could walk to my dads from his place.

Already you see so many more cars at the place because people trusted him and he did great work and now they are all coming back.

Hard to find people like this now days but Al is one.


----------



## ekim68

BOOM: Exploding Arab Arms Imports, US Dealers, Drive GOP War Hawks



> Many commentators were astonished when, in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Egypt, and greeted his host, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, by presenting him an AK-47 assault rifle. This bombastic display cemented Russia's renewed role as a major arms supplier to Egypt, displacing some US business that lapsed as relations frayed during Egypt's Arab Spring political chaos. But only a few weeks before Putin was telling Sissi to say hello to his little friend, President Barack Obama met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And while the two shared tea, parades and lofty ideals, behind the scenes, defense officials were hammering out a massive transfer of arms from America to India. DC had just eclipsed Moscow as the largest supplier to New Delhi, a much larger market than Cairo. India was the world's largest arms importer until it was recently overtaken by Saudi Arabia.


----------



## ekim68

The Georgia Legislature Just Pulled the Plug on Electric Cars



> For once, Georgia ranks among the top states in America for something other than poverty, corruption, or miserable traffic.
> 
> Don't worry, they're fixing that.
> 
> A generous state tax break has helped make Georgia the number two state for electric vehicles, and made Atlanta the top market for the compact Nissan Leaf. Both the Leaf and the higher-end Tesla sedans are now common sights in and around metro Atlanta, where more than 10,500 are registered.
> 
> But this year, Georgia lawmakers needed to raise nearly $1 billion to patch up crumbling roads, highways, and bridges. So they are pulling the plug on that $5,000 tax credit - a move budget analysts say will contribute $66 million to the state's coffers in 2016 and nearly $190 million by 2020.


----------



## ekim68

The World's Most Dangerous Naval Weapon



> The weapon that has damaged more U.S. naval ships in the last 60 years is not the torpedo, the deck gun, the anti-ship missile or the terrorist attack.
> 
> It's sea mines.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Navy commander: China's artificial islands violate international law



> U.S. Navy commander said China's construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea is unprecedented and Asia's largest economy is creating a "great wall of sand" that is drawing the ire of neighboring countries.
> 
> U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Harry Harris said Tuesday that China's creation of artificial land through the pumping of sand onto live coral reefs has created 1.5 square miles of artificial landmass.
> 
> "China's pattern of provocative actions toward smaller claimant states...is inconsistent with international law," Harris said in a speech at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.


----------



## ekim68

Graphene light bulb set for shops



> A light bulb made with graphene - said by its UK developers to be the first commercially viable consumer product using the super-strong carbon - is to go on sale later this year.
> 
> The dimmable bulb contains a filament-shaped LED coated in graphene. It was designed at Manchester University, where the material was discovered.
> 
> It is said to cut energy use by 10% and last longer owing to its conductivity.
> 
> The National Graphene Institute at the university was opened this month.


----------



## ekim68

There's a 400 million dollar collectible sneaker economy on Ebay



> Remember those Back to the Future shoes we all freaked out over in 2011? They're but one instance of rare collectible sneakers, which have grown into a 400 million dollar economy on Ebay. Who knew?


----------



## ekim68

valis said:


> automotive history has been made, I do believe.
> 
> http://jalopnik.com/delphis-autonomous-audi-made-it-from-san-fransisco-to-n-1695458887


More on this....

Delphi's self-driving car completes US coast-to-coast trip



> The vehicle is equipped with numerous technologies in order to drive autonomously. These include six long-range radars, four short-range radars, three vision-based cameras, six Lidar sensors, a localization system, intelligent software algorithms and a full suite of Advanced Drive Assistance Systems.
> 
> The systems installed help with activities like collision mitigation, object detection, forward collision warnings and lane departure warnings. Over the course of the trip, nearly three terabytes of data was collected from the Roadrunner's systems. The data collected will help Delphi to continue developing safety technology.


----------



## ekim68

Schools becoming the 'last frontier' for hungry kids



> America's schools are no longer just a place for students to learn their ABCs.
> 
> They are also increasingly where children eat their three squares.
> 
> The classroom has become a dining room as more children attending public schools live in poverty. More than half of students in public schools - 51% - were in low-income families in 2013, according to a study by the Southern Education Foundation.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Schools becoming the 'last frontier' for hungry kids


----------



## ekim68

Conservatives Trash Iran Deal Framework That Experts Call "A Very Convincing Agreement" 



> Conservative media figures are lashing out against tentative framework for a historic deal on Iran's nuclear program as a "surrender to Tehran," -- ignoring the widespread approval among diplomats, foreign relations and nuclear weapons policy experts of the agreement between the United States and five other nations aimed at limiting Iranian nuclear ambitions.


----------



## ekim68

Affordable Electric Cars Are Coming Soon, Study Says



> For many of us, purchasing an electric vehicle is still a pie in the sky dream. But that might be changing soon, if a new peer-reviewed study is correct that the cost of electric car batteries is falling much more quickly than we assumed.


----------



## ekim68

Planes Without Pilots



> MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Mounting evidence that the co-pilot crashed a Germanwings plane into a French mountain has prompted a global debate about how to better screen crewmembers for mental illness and how to ensure that no one is left alone in the cockpit.
> 
> But among many aviation experts, the discussion has taken a different turn. How many human pilots, some wonder, are really necessary aboard commercial planes?
> 
> One? None?
> 
> Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit. Already, government agencies are experimenting with replacing the co-pilot, perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote operators.


----------



## ekim68

Two Court Rulings Completely Disagree With Each Other Over Whether Websites Need To Comply With Americans With Disabilities Act



> On March 19th, there was a ruling [pdf] in a case in a federal district court in Vermont, brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Scribd, saying that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applied to the internet, and thus Scribd had to comply with the ADA. The specific concern is whether or not a website is a "place of public accommodation." Three years ago there was a similar ruling against Netflix (also brought by the National Federation for the Blind), which we noted had some troubling aspects to it. Since then, there have been a number of cases that have gone the other way. And, indeed, just this week the 9th Circuit appeals court upheld a lower court ruling [pdf] saying that Netflix does not need to comply with the ADA.


----------



## ekim68

5 Years After the BP Oil Spill, 20 Species Still Suffering



> The BP oil spill dumped a reported 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In all, 16,000 miles of coastline across Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were impacted. Not surprisingly, five years later the Gulf has yet to recover and a new report from the National Wildlife Federation found that 20 species of animals are still suffering in the aftermath.


----------



## ekim68

How an Insurer Is Taking Money From the Fan Beaten at Dodger Stadium



> First he was assaulted for wearing the wrong team's clothes. Then he was sucker-punched by the insurance system.


----------



## ekim68

The Salary Required to Be "Middle Class" in Every State



> "Middle class" doesn't have a definite, official definition. But the Pew Charitable Trust defines it as households that earn between 67 and 200 percent of a state's median income. Based on this metric and some statistics, Business Insider came up with a list of how much you have to earn to be considered middle class, depending on your state.


----------



## ekim68

How We Could Blow the Energy Boom



> America's vast new surplus of natural gas could lead to great prosperity and a cleaner environment. But if we don't fix our decrepit, blackout -prone electric grid, we could wind up sitting in the dark.


----------



## valis

valis said:


> automotive history has been made, I do believe.
> 
> http://jalopnik.com/delphis-autonomous-audi-made-it-from-san-fransisco-to-n-1695458887


wow, was I ever wrong. 20 years wrong.

http://jalopnik.com/they-drove-cross-country-in-an-autonomous-minivan-witho-1696330141


----------



## ekim68

Wow....Thanks Tim...:up: And yes I do remember the 486DX2.....


----------



## valis

you knew I was gonna ask that part, didn't you? 

What an astounding tale. I can't believe that. Suck it, Google.


----------



## ekim68

Tea Party hires actors to feign indignation over plan to save Everglades



> Here's what happened: On Thursday, during a meeting of the South Florida Water Management District, "Tea Partiers" gathered outside to protest a state plan to purchase a big swath of the Everglades and protect it. But as the Palm Beach Post reports, they were mostly actors hired by the Tea Party of Miami and the company U.S. Sugar. The Tea Party chapter put the casting call out on Facebook, captured by a reporter for Creative Loafing Tampa. They offered $75 cash to show up for two hours and hold banners and signs, which would be provided.


----------



## trodas

our banks destroy the economy

...and I don't think I need to show the proofs of all this claims... or so I?


----------



## ekim68

Pre-Inca canals may solve Lima's water crisis



> A revival of pre-Inca water technology in the mountains of the Andes is set to keep taps flowing in the drought-affected Peruvian capital, Lima. Grouting ancient canals, it turns out, is a far cheaper solution to the city's water crisis than building a new desalination plant.
> 
> Lima is one of the world's largest desert cities and relies for water on rivers that flow out of the Andes. But those rivers diminish to a trickle during a long dry season, leaving the population of almost 9 million with intermittent water supplies.
> 
> Now the city's water utility company, Sedapal, has decided to invest in conservation projects in the Andes to keep the rivers flowing and taps running. And researchers have discovered that the most cost-effective way is to revive a system of ancient stone canals, known locally as amunas, that were built in the Andes by the Wari culture between AD 500 and 1000, centuries before the rise of the Incas.


----------



## ekim68

The Washington Post explains the double standard of welfare restrictions for the poor



> Recent moves in places like Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Florida have sought to strictly control those receiving welfare benefits through things like drug-testing, food stamp restrictions for "luxury items," and legislation that bans welfare recipients from spending government money at strip clubs-even though there's no virtually no evidence the poor actually spend their money this way.
> 
> The Washington Post's Emily Badger explains why putting such restrictions on government assistance is a massive double standard and an incredibly problematic move when it comes to reducing our economic inequality. She writes:
> 
> "We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor."


----------



## ekim68

Republican Senators Just Voted To Sell Off Your National Forests



> Our public lands - including National Forests, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas - are arguably our greatest treasure. Well, almost every Republican Senator just voted to sell them to the highest bidder. This is what you can do about it.


----------



## ekim68

COMPTROLLER STRINGER: BILLIONS IN PENSION FUND FEES PAID TO WALL STREET HAVE FAILED TO PROVIDE VALUE TO TAXPAYERS



> (New York, NY) - New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer today released an analysis by his office showing that Wall Street money managers failed to provide value to the City's pension funds over the last 10 years, even as they raked in billions of dollars in fees. The analysis found that high fees and failures to hit performance objectives have cost the pension system some $2.5 billion in lost value over the past decade.
> 
> "We need to demand more value from Wall Street when they invest the hard-earned pension dollars of our workers, because right now money managers are being paid exorbitant fees even when they fail to meet baseline targets," Comptroller Stringer said. "When you do the math on what we pay Wall Street to actively manage our funds, it's shocking to realize that fees have not only wiped out any benefit to the funds, but have in fact cost taxpayers billions of dollars in lost returns. It's clear that the status quo needs to change."


----------



## ekim68

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct



> The biggest extinction event in planetary history was driven by the rapid acidification of our oceans, a new study concl​udes. So much carbon was released into the atmosphere, and the oceans absorbed so much of it so quickly, that marine life simply died off, from the bottom of the food chain up.
> 
> That doesn't bode well for the present, given the disturbingly similar rate that our seas are acidifying right now. Parts of the Pacific, for instance, are already so acidic that sea snails' shells begin dissolving as soon as they're born.


----------



## ekim68

6 modern-day Christian terrorist groups our media conveniently ignores 



> The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently released an in-depth report on terrorism in the United States. Covering April 2009 to February 2015, the report (titled "The Age of the Wolf") found that during that period, "more people have been killed in America by non-Islamic domestic terrorists than jihadists." The SPLC asserted that "the jihadist threat is a tremendous one," pointing out that al-Qaeda's attacks of September 11, 2001 remain the deadliest in U.S. history. But the study also noted that the second deadliest was carried out not by Islamists, but by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995-and law enforcement, the SPLC stressed, are doing the public a huge disservice if they view terrorism as an exclusively Islamist phenomenon.


----------



## ekim68

We're Six Years Closer to a Clean Energy Future Than We Thought



> Key price indicators in the clean tech industry are about six years ahead of estimates, and it's mostly thanks to companies like Tesla that are pioneering cheaper, smarter solutions for mass-market consumption which can be used across a wide range of applications. This is a very good thing for Earth.


----------



## ekim68

Marine and Hydrokinetic Resource Assessment and Characterization



> The Water Power Program has released reports and maps that assess the resource potential of the nation's waves, tidal, ocean, and river currents, and ocean thermal gradients. These resource assessments are pivotal to understanding water power's potential for future electricity production. With more than 50% of the population living within 50 miles of coastlines, there is vast potential to provide clean, renewable electricity to communities and cities across the United States using marine and hydrokinetic technologies.


----------



## ekim68

Jobless in Seattle? Not Yet, Anyway. Part 2



> On Wednesday, I threw in my $0.02 about the controversy surrounding the increase in Seattle's minimum wage. Unlike any of those who have been decrying the new law and its impact, I used some data to demonstrate the absence (as yet) of any ill effects. Specifically, I looked at restaurant permit issuance and found nothing out of the ordinary. Today, I'll double down on Wednesday's $0.02 with a bit more data and a bit of backstory.


----------



## ekim68

Bush Officials ​Screwed Up FBI's Case Against Blackwater, Emails Show



> Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.


----------



## ekim68

Dispersant Used to Fight Deepwater Horizon More Toxic to Coral Than Oil



> It's almost five years since Deepwater Horizon went belly up-and now research suggests that a dispersant used to clear up the site of the spill is more toxic to cold water corals than the oil itself.
> 
> In research carried out by scientists from Temple University and the Pennsylvania State University, it was found that cold-water coral species from the Gulf declined in health when exposed to the dispersant. In fact, lower concentrations of the dispersant were required to bring about ill health than the concentrations of oil required to do so. The results are published in Deep-Sea Research II.


----------



## ekim68

Spain's hologram protest: Thousands join virtual march in Madrid against new gag law 



> Late last year the Spanish government passed a law that set extreme fines for protesters convening outside of government buildings.
> 
> In response to the controversial Citizen Safety Law, which will take effect on July 1, Spanish activists have staged the world's first ever virtual political demonstration.
> 
> After months of massive flesh-and-blood protests against the so-called 'gag law', thousands of holograms last night marched in front of the Spanish parliament in Madrid.
> 
> Organised by the group Holograms for Freedom, ghost-like figures holding placards took aim at the imminent draconian measures, arguing that holographic people are now afforded greater freedoms than their real-life counterparts.


----------



## ekim68

Despite Claiming To Want To Negotiate A Net Neutrality 'Compromise,' Many Republicans Rush In To Kill New Rules



> It's getting rather ridiculous to have to keep repeating it at this point, but it's fairly ridiculous that net neutrality/open internet is a partisan issue at all. The public overwhelmingly supports net neutrality, no matter which party they're associated with.


----------



## ekim68

Posted on Tax Day....

Corporate Tax Havens Stiff Taxpayers by $110B A Year



> On the eve of Tax Day, a prominent consumer advocacy group on Tuesday provided a vivid reminder of how some of the largest Fortune 500 companies avoid paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes on profits parked overseas.
> 
> Last year alone, the U.S. Treasury and state governments lost roughly $110 billion in tax revenues after major corporations funneled their cash through accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and other offshore tax havens, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).


----------



## ekim68

New technique puts two branches of the immune system to work fighting cancer



> A team of MIT researchers has developed a new approach to attacking cancer, creating a method that allows two major branches of the immune system to work together. The new technique, which is known as cancer immunotherapy, has already proved successful in tests on laboratory mice.
> 
> Previous attempts to harness the power of the human immune system to attack tumors have focused on two different strategies. Scientists either stimulate T cells to tackle cancerous cells, or attack the tumors with antibodies. However, neither technique has proved hugely successful in its own right.
> 
> The research, conducted by a team of MIT scientists, focuses on combining the two approaches, utilizing both antibodies and T cells through the use of a specially modified molecule.


----------



## ekim68

Breathtaking Views of Iconic Cities, Filmed By Flying Drones



> One of the coolest things about aerial drones is the way that they've been used in filming, flying high and quickly to capture astonishing views. In these videos, drones let us tour some of the worlds most visually striking cities from the air.


----------



## ekim68

A Dude Will Live In This Giant Ball for One Year to Study Icebergs



> It sounds like a great idea: Grab a cleaving iceberg from the Greenland coast and live on it until it melts into the sea, getting a first-hand glimpse at the effects of climate change. But how exactly would one live on an iceberg? Inside this giant ball, of course.
> 
> Outside has the story of Alex Bellini, an Italian explorer who plans to make a year-long trip inside this floating survival capsule. It was originally designed by engineer Julian Sharpe as a rescue pod for two to ten people in tsunamis. Bellini is tearing out the extra seats and making a one-bedroom apartment out of the aircraft-grade aluminum orb, which has an inner lining that rotates so the floor inside will always remain level.


----------



## ekim68

Dutch government facing legal action over failure to reduce carbon emissions 



> The first public hearings will take place in the Hague on Tuesday in the first case in the world to use existing human rights and tort law to hold a government responsible for failing to reduce carbon emissions fast enough.
> 
> The 886 citizens involved in the class action against the Dutch government aim to force it to take more robust action to reduce emissions. They also hope to offer a legal solution to the political impasse on international climate change action.


----------



## ekim68

Electric Car Batteries Just Hit A Key Price Point



> Electric vehicle demand in the past five years has soared in this country. The same is true worldwide. By the end of 2014, more than 700,000 total plug-in vehicles had been sold worldwide (plug-in hybrids and pure battery electrics), up from about 400,000 at the end of 2013. As of 2015, dozens of models of electric cars and vans are available for purchase, mostly in Europe, the United States, Japan, and China.
> 
> A major reason for the rapid jump in EV sales is the rapid drop in the cost of their key component -- batteries.


----------



## ekim68

Big Oil Is About to Lose Control of the Auto Industry



> While the U.S. pats itself on the back for the riches flowing from fracking wells, an upheaval in clean energy is quietly loosening the oil industry's grip on the automotive industry.
> 
> Presentations by analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) this week pick away at the idea that supply alone is behind the plunge in crude prices to $50 a barrel. The presentation also shows that low-pollution cars are gaining ground, weakening the link between oil and driving.


----------



## poochee

:up:


----------



## ekim68

Major Advance in Artificial Photosynthesis Poses Win/Win for the Environment



> A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.


----------



## ekim68

Costly NY Startup Program Created… 76 Jobs



> Last year, the New York state government launched Start-Up NY, a program designed to boost employment by creating tax-free zones for technology and manufacturing firms that partner with academic institutions.
> 
> In theory, those tax-free zones on university campuses would give companies access to the best young talent and cutting-edge research. But only a few firms are actually taking the bait: According to a report from the state's Department of Economic Development, the program only created 76 jobs last year, despite spending millions of dollars on advertising and other costs. If that wasn't eyebrow-raising enough, the companies involved in the program have only invested a collective $1.7 million so far.


----------



## ekim68

Senator: Decade-old Gulf oil leak is 'unacceptable' 



> A U.S. senator from Florida is pressing federal officials to disclose technical data and other information about a decade-old oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, after an investigation by The Associated Press revealed evidence that the spill is far worse than a company or government regulators have publicly reported.
> 
> In a letter Friday to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Sen. Bill Nelson said it is "unacceptable" that oil is still leaking from the site off Louisiana's coast where an oil platform owned by Taylor Energy Company toppled during Hurricane Ivan in 2004.


----------



## ekim68

Electroceuticals spark interest



> When drugs can't coax cells in the pancreas to produce insulin, or loosen arteries to reduce blood pressure, a well-placed jolt of electricity might do the trick. Spurred by decades of success with pacemakers and cochlear implants, and by advances in miniaturized technology, interest is surging in 'electroceuticals' - bioelectronic implants that stimulate nerves to treat disease.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Project Loon close to launching thosands of balloons



> Google says it's Project Loon is close to being able to produce and launch thousands of balloons to provide Internet access from the sky.
> 
> Such a number would be required to provide reliable Internet access to users in remote areas that are currently unserved by terrestrial networks, said Mike Cassidy, the Google engineer in charge of the project, in a video posted Friday.


----------



## ekim68

Climate-change deniers are in retreat



> There is no denying it: Climate-change deniers are in retreat.
> 
> What began as a subtle shift away from the claim that man-made global warming is not a threat to the planet has lately turned into a stampede. The latest attempt to deny denial comes from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful group that pushes for states to pass laws that are often drafted by industry. As my Post colleagues Tom Hamburger, Joby Warrick and Chris Mooney report, ALEC is not only insisting that it doesn't deny climate change - it's threatening to sue those who suggest otherwise.


----------



## ekim68

Resistance to antibiotics found in isolated Amazonian tribe



> When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami's gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array of antibiotic-resistance genes, according to a new study, even though these mountain people had never ingested antibiotics or animals raised with drugs. The find suggests that microbes have long evolved the capability to fight toxins, including antibiotics, and that preventing drug resistance may be harder than scientists thought.


----------



## ekim68

Norway Will Be the First Country to Turn Off FM Radio in 2017



> Norway's Minister of Culture announced this week that a national FM-radio switch off will commence in 2017, allowing the country to complete its transition over to digital radio. It's the end of an era.


----------



## ekim68

The BP Oil Spill Happened 5 Years Ago Today. We're Still Paying the Price.



> The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico five years ago today, killing 11 men and sending nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the sea. After the well was finally plugged, the national media went home, but the story is still very much unfolding everywhere from federal courtrooms to Louisiana backyards.


----------



## ekim68

Internet Security Marketing: Buyer Beware



> As security breaches increasingly make headlines, thousands of Internet security companies are chasing tens of billions of dollars in potential revenue. While we, the authors, are employees of Internet security companies and are happy for the opportunity to sell more products and services, we are alarmed at the kind of subversive untruths that vendor "spin doctors" are using to draw well-intentioned customers to their doors. Constructive criticism is sometimes necessarily harsh, and some might find the following just that, harsh. But we think it's important that organizations take a "buyers beware" approach to securing their business.


----------



## ekim68

Most Cyberattacks Are Phishing Related, Not Sophisticated Technical Attacks



> To hear politicians and the media talk about things, "cybersecurity" threats are some sort of existential threat that can only be stopped by giving the government more information and more control over our data. There is, of course, little to actually support that notion. And, two new studies show that (as has been the case for decades), the real threats are not because of super sophisticated technology and tools for hacking, but rather because end users are fallible and IT folks don't do a very good job locking doors


----------



## ekim68

Renewables Beat Fossil Fuels Second Year in a Row



> Start spreading the news: The world is now deploying more renewable energy in the production of electricity-more wind and solar power, in particular-than it is fossil fuels. And it has been since 2013, according to the analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That year, the world added 143 gigawatts of new renewables capacity, compared to the 141 gigawatts of power generated by coal, natural gas and oil combined.


----------



## ekim68

Lucas strikes back - against his neighbors! Director to build hundreds of affordable homes in millionaire neighborhood after they blocked him from building a studio



> His neighbors wouldn't let him build a film studio.
> 
> So George Lucas is retaliating in a way that only the cream of Hollywood could - by building the largest affordable housing development in the area.
> 
> The complex of affordable housing, funded and designed by the Star Wars director, would provide homes to 224 low-income families.
> 
> And there's very little his fellow Bay Area residents can do about it.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Lucas strikes back - against his neighbors! Director to build hundreds of affordable homes in millionaire neighborhood after they blocked him from building a studio


----------



## ekim68

FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades



> The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
> 
> Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.


----------



## ekim68

The Hidden FM Radio Inside Your Pocket, And Why You Can't Use It



> You may not know it but most of today's smartphones have FM radios inside of them. But the FM chip is not activated on two-thirds of devices. That's because mobile makers have the FM capability switched off.
> 
> The National Association of Broadcasters has been asking mobile makers to change this. But the mobile industry, which profits from selling data to smartphone users, says that with the consumer's move toward mobile streaming apps, the demand for radio simply isn't there.


----------



## ekim68

Kochs defeated in Montana: 6 lessons the country can learn from this rural Western state



> The passage of Medicaid expansion in Montana this weekend was an unlikely defeat for the Koch brothers, who came in as heavy favorites and spent a fortune trying to kill the measure. Sadly for the Kochs, poor people in Montana will now get medical care.


----------



## ekim68

Happy Earth Day....

Earth Day: The History of a Movement


----------



## ekim68

Automakers to gearheads: Stop repairing cars



> Automakers are supporting provisions in copyright law that could prohibit home mechanics and car enthusiasts from repairing and modifying their own vehicles.
> 
> In comments filed with a federal agency that will determine whether tinkering with a car constitutes a copyright violation, OEMs and their main lobbying organization say cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle.
> 
> Allowing them to continue to fix their cars has become "legally problematic," according to a written statement from the Auto Alliance, the main lobbying arm of automakers.
> 
> The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to vehicles when it was signed into law in 1998.


----------



## ekim68

Japan's maglev train breaks world speed record with 600km/h test run



> Japan has again demonstrated its prowess in high-speed rail travel with its state-of-the-art maglev train setting a world record of just over 600km/h (373mph), just days after it broke its previous 12-year-old record.
> 
> The seven-car maglev - short for "magnetic levitation" - reached a top speed of 603km/h on Tuesday during what officials described as a "comfortable" zip along a test track near Mount Fuji.


----------



## ekim68

German court rules Adblock Plus is legal



> Following a four-month trial, a German court in Hamburg has ruled that the practice of blocking advertising is perfectly legitimate. Germany-based Eyeo, the company that owns Adblock Plus, has won a case against German publishers Zeit Online and Handelsblatt.


----------



## ekim68

Republicans who limit what medical students can learn doom us to stupid doctors



> Most people expect their physicians to be smart - skillful, schooled and, perhaps above all else, knowledgable. So it's somewhat baffling (and entirely infuriating) that some Republicans want to keep important medical knowledge from soon-to-be doctors.
> 
> A North Carolina bill introduced this month would prevent state medical school departments from allowing employees to perform abortions or to "supervise the performance of an abortion". Essentially, the bill's sponsors and supporters wants to make teaching how to perform an abortion - a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure - illegal. As The New Republic's Jamil Smith wrote, if passed, the bill would "produce less intelligent doctors."


----------



## ekim68

Study links brain anatomy, academic achievement, and family income



> Many years of research have shown that for students from lower-income families, standardized test scores and other measures of academic success tend to lag behind those of wealthier students. A new study offers another dimension to this so-called "achievement gap": After imaging the brains of high- and low-income students, they found that the higher-income students had thicker brain cortex in areas associated with visual perception and knowledge accumulation. Furthermore, these differences also correlated with one measure of academic achievement -- performance on standardized tests.


----------



## ekim68

Shoe That Grows gives poor kids footwear that fits for years



> For children living in poverty, footwear is one of many problems. Almost as soon as a child has received shoes to wear, they're likely to have grown out of them and have to make do with them being too small. The Shoe That Grows changes this. It allows children to adjust its size as their feet grow.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Shoe That Grows gives poor kids footwear that fits for years


----------



## ekim68

Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops



> The hard drive was provided last year by the Fort Smith Police Department to North Little Rock attorney Matt Campbell in response to a discovery demand filed in the case. Campbell is representing three current or former police officers in a court action, which was filed under Arkansas' Whistle-Blower Act. The lawsuit alleges former Fort Smith police officer Don Paul Bales and two other plaintiffs were illegally investigated after reporting wrongful termination and overtime pay practices in the department.
> 
> According to court documents filed last week in the case, Campbell provided police officials with an external hard drive for them to load with e-mail and other data responding to his discovery request. When he got it back, he found something he didn't request. In a subfolder titled D:\Bales Court Order, a computer security consultant for Campbell allegedly found three well-known trojans, including:
> 
> Win32:Zbot-AVH[Trj], a password logger and backdoor
> NSISownloader-CC[Trj], a program that connects to attacker-controlled servers and downloads and installs additional programs, and
> Two instances of Win32Cycbot-NF[Trj], a backdoor


----------



## ekim68

New invention expands Wi-Fi bandwidth tenfold



> The vast range of Wi-Fi-enabled devices available today means that anyone could have several personal electronic devices all trying to connect to a network simultaneously. Multiply this by many hundreds of people in a busy public place with Wi-Fi connectivity and this often means that available bandwidth is greatly reduced. To help address this problem, researchers at Oregon State University claim to have invented a new system called WiFO that incorporates infrared LEDs to boost the available Wi-Fi bandwidth by as much as ten times.


----------



## DaveBurnett

That is not new. My old laptop had infra red serial communication many years ago. It wasn't very practical though as it is line of sight (very much so) and unless they have improved it a lot, not very fast, easily confused, and not very selective.


----------



## ekim68

How a computer can help your doctor better diagnose cancer



> Correctly diagnosing a person with cancer - and identifying the specific type of cancer - makes all the difference in successfully treating a patient.
> 
> Today your doctor might draw from a dozen or so similar cases and a big book of guidelines. But what if he or she could instead plug your test results and medical history into a computer program that has crunched millions of pieces of similar data?
> 
> That sort of future is looking increasingly possible thanks to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Working with a team from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), PhD student Yuan Luo and MIT Professor Peter Szolovits have developed a computational model that aims to automatically suggest cancer diagnoses by learning from thousands of data points from past pathology reports.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's New Battery Could Solve One of Solar Power's Biggest Problems



> So far, specific details are thin on the new battery designed for home use that Tesla's announcing next week. But just based on what we do know, it's a pretty big deal. The quest for a good battery that can store home-generated power is kind of like the holy grail for a renewable energy future. This one product might change everything.
> 
> A New York Times article published earlier this week essentially sets up the problem that Tesla's battery will solve. In Hawaii, 12 percent of homes have some kind of solar energy, by far the highest rate for any place in the US at the moment. In fact, that rate is growing too quickly-solar customers are dumping so much energy back onto the grid that they're taxing the delicate and often aging infrastructure that was only designed to deliver power to homes. What's happening in Hawaii is actually indicative of what's going to be an issue everywhere as many cities start to see an increase in large-scale solar implementation: There's going to be too much energy generated, and nowhere to put it.


----------



## ekim68

Security companies accused of exaggerating Iran's cyberthreats against the U.S.



> Beware the new Green Scare.
> 
> Reports of Iran's cyberwar against the United States have been greatly exaggerated, throngs of critics say, in order to make it look like Iran is on the clear cyberwar-path against the West. The reality appears to be much more complicated than that.
> 
> Last week, a report claiming Iran had conducted hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks against American industrial targets made a big splash in the New York Times, attracting a great deal of attention from around the world and within the security industry.
> 
> The report arrived as relations between Iran and the U.S. made global headlines-and right before its authors set up shop at RSA, the biggest commercial security conference in the world.
> 
> Now, the report's authors stand accused of hyping up the Iranian threat, arbitrarily redefining words in order to fit their agenda, and focusing in on attacks that never actually took place.


----------



## ekim68

Dangerous 'cybersecurity' bills going through Congress threaten the rights of journalists and whistleblowers



> Along with dozens of other civil liberties organizations, Freedom of the Press Foundation has signed on to two letters strongly opposing the dangerous "cybersecurity" bills making their way through Congress and expected to be voted on sometime in the next week. The bills are little more than new surveillance powers wrapped in a cheap disguise, and you can read the full letters that describe the bill's deficiencies here and here.
> 
> If passed, the bills will adversely affect all Americans' privacy, but they have particularly critical consequences for journalists and whistleblowers, so we wanted to highlight those concerns that the letters did not fully cover.


----------



## ekim68

How a Giant Ball Will Help This Man Survive a Year on an Iceberg



> A look inside the survival capsule Italian explorer Alex Bellini has commissioned to help him achieve an unprecedented feat: Spend a year on an iceberg as it melts into the Atlantic.


----------



## ekim68

TV maker Vizio may finally get paid after beating 17th patent troll



> Lawsuits brought by "patent trolls," companies that have no product but file barrages of patent lawsuits, have become commonplace across the tech sector. For the few companies that choose to fight these cases until the end, it's an expensive endeavor, since defending a patent suit can cost anywhere from $1 million to several times that amount.
> 
> Television maker Vizio is one of the companies that fights back. It's beaten no less than 16 "non-practicing entities," and last week, the company released a statement showcasing its list of patent troll cases that ended in a key statistic: "$0 to plaintiff." The list includes the usual bizarrely named shells, like "E-Contact Techs" and "Man Machine Interface," as well as well-known patent holding companies like Walker Digital and Intellectual Ventures (whose patents were used by Pragmatus Telecom, one of the shells Vizio sent packing.)
> 
> Now, the company is trying to collect fees from one of its opponents, a company called Oplus Technologies. For the first time, it stands a real chance, in a case where it spent more than $1 million to win. Two recent Supreme Court decisions make it easier for victorious defendants to collect fees in patent cases. The TV maker is up against a storied patent plaintiffs' firm, Chicago-based Niro, Haller & Niro, that has fought for Oplus tooth and nail.


----------



## ekim68

Powering Stanford's campus with solar panels, 22 miles of pipe



> School officials recently flipped the switch on a system that uses more than 22 miles of water-filled pipes to heat and cool 155 buildings on campus, while a newly built electricity substation draws power from the grid. Next year, the school will even have its own solar power plant.
> 
> When the roughly $500 million energy upgrade is done, more than two-thirds of Stanford's electricity will come from renewable sources. Stanford's old power plant will soon be torn down to make room for academic buildings.


----------



## ekim68

The FCC chairman is a former cable lobbyist. And he just helped kill the Comcast merger.



> Nobody can claim that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is an industry puppet anymore.
> 
> Comcast's spectacular failure to close its $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable undercuts the age-old Washington wisdom that money and political connections - of which Comcast has a great deal - are the keys to power.
> 
> But it also upends a longstanding narrative about the tendency of private sector officials like Wheeler to favor their former colleagues when they enter public service.


----------



## ekim68

A Portable Washing Machine That Doesn't Need a Drop of Electricity



> If camping seems like fun but you'd prefer if roughing it wasn't so rough, the Drumi from Yirego is a compact portable washing machine that can clean around six or seven garments without the need for a power outlet, a generator, or even a sunny day to feed a solar panel.
> 
> At just 22-inches tall the Drumi can easily be stashed in the trunk of your car alongside sleeping bags and a tent, and with a capacity of around five liters of water it can clean a few days worth of soiled camp clothes as long as you've got the energy to operate its foot pump.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> A Portable Washing Machine That Doesn't Need a Drop of Electricity


Now that is something that can be used by so many people in the world.


----------



## ekim68

Cameras reveal the secret lives of Chernobyl's wildlife



> Automatic cameras in the Ukrainian side of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have provided an insight into the previously unseen secret lives of wildlife that have made the contaminated landscape their home.


----------



## ekim68

Scalia and Roberts don't know best: Here's how we take our politics back from reactionary court and billionaire donors 



> Right-wing justices have perverted our campaign-finance system. There's a mechanism to reclaim it: The Constitution .


----------



## ekim68

Audi creates green 'e-diesel fuel of the future' using just carbon dioxide and water



> German car manufacturer Audi says it has created the "fuel of the future" made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable sources.
> 
> The synthetic "e-diesel" was made following a commissioning phase of just four months at a plant in Dresden, Germany.
> 
> Unlike regular diesel, the clear fuel does not contain any sulphur or fossil oil, while it has an overall energy efficiency of around 70%.
> 
> Germany's federal minister of education and research, Dr Johanna Wanka, said she has already used the fuel in her Audi A8, while the company hopes the Dresden factory, operated by clean tech company Sunfire, will produce 160 litres of it every day in the coming months.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Why didn't they stop at the Hydrogen and Oxygen stage??


----------



## ekim68

America, Land of the Pothole



> Get in your car and go for a drive just about anywhere in the U.S. You will be confronted with a transportation system desperately in need of a reboot. I'm not referring to a full upgrade to smart roads -- the sensor-driven intelligent system that promises to move vehicles more cheaply and efficiently. Rather, I refer to essential repairs: Filling potholes, basic maintenance.
> 
> In the U.S., we have allowed a transportation grid that was once the envy of the world to become an embarrassing wreck.


----------



## ekim68

Conservative thinktank seeks to change Pope Francis's mind on climate change 



> A US activist group that has received funding from energy companies and the foundation controlled by conservative activist Charles Koch is trying to persuade the Vatican that "there is no global warming crisis" ahead of an environmental statement by Pope Francis this summer that is expected to call for strong action to combat climate change.
> 
> The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative thinktank that seeks to discredit established science on climate change, said it was sending a team of climate scientists to Rome "to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science".


----------



## ekim68

The Next Generation of Medical Tools May Be Home-Brewed



> When you think of MIT, images of ultra-high tech come to mind: Nobel Prize winners and world-class thinkers inventing their way into the future, pushing the boundaries of genetic engineering and robotics.
> 
> The future, however, doesn't always meet our expectations. Take, for example, researcher José Gómez-Márquez, whose big thoughts shape "Little Devices," the lab he directs at MIT. The Little Devices lab takes a DIY approach to designing and building tools, mainly for healthcare. The diagnostic kits that come out of his hacking have a lot more in common with what you'd read about in Make: magazine than in The Lancet or IEEE Spectrum.
> 
> This directed tinkering meets a vital need. Most people on Planet Earth simply do not have the money or the insurance to gain access to the high-tech equipment and specialized physicians enjoyed by the wealthier strata. The little devices Gómez-Márquez champions are low-cost alternatives designed for ubiquity.


----------



## ekim68

Seven Of The Most Beautiful Botanical Mazes On Earth



> Hedge mazes, corn mazes, and the like may confound our senses when we're inside trying to find our way out, but when viewed from above, some of them are particularly beautiful. Here are some of the loveliest mazes that you can lose yourself in.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial blood vessels can cause your body to regrow the real thing



> A blocked blood vessel can be pretty nasty, and the two most common treatments involve wedging it open or transplanting another vessel from elsewhere in your body. Scientists in Vienna think they may have a slightly more elegant solution to the latter, having developed a method of replacing blocked vessels with artificial ones. The clever part here is that the synthetic polymer that the prostheses are made of encourages the body to grow a real vessel in its place. In one trial on a rat, it took less than six months before the artificial material had broken down and been replaced with a brand new blood vessel.


----------



## ekim68

Top-Selling Home Routers Vulnerable to Hacker Attack



> What's the acceptable time frame to implement a patch for a major security flaw? One day? One week? One month? Try eight months - and counting. A significant flaw in software used by many popular home wireless routers use could let malefactors hijack them easily, and may affect favorite models from D-Link, TRENDnet and Netgear, among others.
> 
> The warning comes courtesy of Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), a subdivision of Hewlett-Packard's Tipping Point security division. ZDI discovered the flaw in August 2014, and notified Realtek, the company that produces the router software, immediately. In accordance with ZDI's policies, it contacted Realtek four times, all without reply, before making details of the vulnerability public.


----------



## ekim68

Real Places On Earth So Surreal, They Look Like Alien Landscapes



> If you want to see strange and exotic landscapes, you don't have to travel the solar system; you just have to take a closer look at our own planet. From fiery pits to rock formations that seem to defy gravity, these views show us a side of the Earth that looks almost alien, but are wholly terrestrial.


----------



## ekim68

Space radiation may damage astronauts' brains



> NASA hopes to send the first round-trip, manned spaceflight to Mars by the 2030s. If the mission succeeds, astronauts could spend several years potentially being bombarded with cosmic rays-high-energy particles launched across space by supernovae and other galactic explosions. Now, a study in mice suggests that these particles could alter the shape of neurons, impairing astronauts' memories and other cognitive abilities.
> 
> The concern about cosmic rays is a long-standing one, prompting NASA (and science fiction writers) to spend a lot of time discussing ways of protecting astronauts from them. (A buffer of water around the spacecraft's hull is one popular idea.) But scientists don't really know how much of a threat the radiation poses. It's not feasible to study the effects of cosmic rays on real astronauts, such as those living in the International Space Station, because many variables, including the stress of living on a spaceship, can affect cognition, says Patric Stanton, a cell biologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla. It's also impossible to control the level of radiation astronauts are exposed to, making it difficult to do rigorous experiments, he says.


----------



## ekim68

Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX 12 Demo Steals Show At Microsoft BUILD



> Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the past several years and are starting to blur the line between animation and real actors. One of the more difficult tasks for CG artists is to recreate human emotions, especially crying, though you wouldn't know it after watching a tech demo that Square Enix showed off at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference.


----------



## ekim68

Inside the Military-Police Center That Spies on Baltimore's Rioters



> On Ambassador Road, just off I-695 around the corner from the FBI, nearly 100 employees sit in a high-tech suite and wait for terrorists to attack Baltimore. They've waited 11 years. But they still have plenty of work to do, like using the intel community's toys to target this week's street protests.
> 
> They are the keepers of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, a government "fusion center" set up to share information and coordinate counterterrorist activities between 29 law enforcement agencies-federal, state, and local, including Baltimore city and county cops-in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Seeded by a state anti-terror advisory council whose meetings are closed to the public, nourished by Republican and Democratic governors alike, MCAC has expanded its access to spying tools over the past decade and a half. It can pinpoint cellphone users. It can monitor movements of state motorists through their license plates, as it has done with an estimated 85 million drivers.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Is Now Selling Pre-Owned Vehicles Online



> Tesla Motors Inc. has very quietly started to sell used cars online, following in the footsteps of larger car companies. Its new certified vehicle program brings down the staggering costs of one of their electric cars while still ensuring manufacturer maintenance and repairs.
> 
> Most of the cars that are on Tesla's website were previously owned by people who have since traded up to the AWD Model S. Soon, this stockpile will also include leased Teslas.


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Holy Trinity of whistleblowers: Statues of Assange, Snowden and Manning go up in Berlin



> One of the German capital's central squares has become the stage for a provocative art piece, which not only celebrates whistleblowers, but encourages other ordinary citizens to speak out.
> 
> "They have lost their freedom for the truth, so they remind us how important it is to know the truth," Italian sculptor Davide Dormino told the media in Berlin's Alexanderplatz.


----------



## ekim68

Chernobyl, 29 years on: a race against time



> Nearly three decades after the start of the Chernobyl disaster, its atomic legacy is a stark and ominous reminder that nuclear power can never be a safe energy source.
> 
> In 1986, two explosions destroyed Chernobyl reactor unit 4, located in the Ukraine. Its graphite core burned for ten days. The radioactive releases heavily contaminated what became a 2600 km2 exclusion zone - which included 76 cities, towns, and villages. Due to the power of the explosion, fire, and reactor core meltdown, radioactivity was projected to high enough altitudes that the plume was carried thousands kilometers away, sweeping across the whole of Europe and contaminating vast tracts of land. In terms of radioactive caesium (Cs137), a total of at least 1.3 million km2 of land was contaminated to varying degrees - an area roughly twice the size of France. And this contamination will last for many generations, given the 30-year half-life of Cs137.


----------



## ekim68

Taking walks with this leg brace can power an artificial heart



> Someday, folks with artificial hearts might have to take long, daily walks to stay alive -- not because exercise is good for their health, but because those walks literally power their synthetic organ. A team of students from Rice University called "Farmers" are developing a device that can generate energy and feed it back into the body to be used by an artificial heart. Their creation? A modified medical leg brace with a motor attached right on the joint, so it can produce energy every time the user bends his knee.


----------



## ekim68

To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past



> "You can't really understand what is going on now without understanding what came before."
> 
> Steve Jobs is explaining why, as a young man, he spent so much time with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs a generation older, men like Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, and Regis McKenna.


(A very good and historical read...:up: )


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption



> Elon Musk announced Tesla's home / business battery today. tl;dr: It'll get enthusiastic early adopters to buy. The economics are almost there to make it cost effective for a wide market. [Update: It might actually be cost effective in the US today. See the third cost estimate down below.] And within just a few years, it almost certainly will be cheap enough to be cost effective for a broad market. Not a complete game changer for the home mrket today, but a shot fired in an incredible energy storage disruption.
> 
> At the utility scale, it may actually be even more disruptive. Tesla appears to be selling the utility scale models at $250 / kwh. Multiple utility studies suggest that such a price should replace natural gas peakers and drive gigantic grid-level deployments.


----------



## ekim68

House panel holds hearing on 'politically driven science'-sans scientists



> Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is worried that scientists employed by the U.S. government have been running roughshod over the rights of Americans in pursuit of their personal political goals. So this week Gohmert, the chair of the oversight and investigations subpanel of the U.S. House of Representatives' Natural Resources Committee, held a hearing to explore "the consequences of politically driven science." Notably absent, however, were any scientists, including those alleged to have gone astray.


----------



## ekim68

New ACLU Cellphone App Automatically Preserves Video of Police Encounters



> The ACLU in California today released a free smart-phone app that allows people to send cellphone videos of police encounters to the ACLU, automatically-and the ACLU will preserve the video footage, even if the cops seize the phone and delete the video or destroy the phone. The app, "Mobile Justice CA," works for both iPhones and Android users. It's available at Apple's App Store and at Google Play.


----------



## ekim68

Lens turns smartphone into a microscope: Costs only 3 cents



> Researchers at the University of Houston have created an optical lens that can be placed on an inexpensive smartphone to magnify images by a magnitude of 120, all for just 3 cents a lens.


----------



## ekim68

Megacity metabolism: is your city consuming a balanced resource diet?



> New York is an energy hog, London and Paris use relatively fewer resources and Tokyo conserves water like a pro. These are just a few of the findings from a new study on "megacity metabolism"-the world's first comprehensive survey of resources used and removed in each of the planet's 27 largest metropolitan areas.
> 
> Led by engineers at the University of Toronto, an international team of researchers examined data on how resources pass through the globe's largest cities, such as burning natural gas for heating, using electricity for public transit or disposing of solid waste and wastewater. Published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings could point the way toward strategies to make cities cleaner, greener and more sustainable-or at least less greedy.
> 
> Megacities-metropolitan areas with populations greater than 10 million-continue to grow in size and economic prominence. In 1970, there were only eight megacities across the world. This number grew to 27 in 2010, and it's expected to reach 37 by 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Rare African plant signals diamonds beneath the soil



> There's diamond under them thar plants. A geologist has discovered a thorny, palmlike plant in Liberia that seems to grow only on top of kimberlite pipes-columns of volcanic rock hundreds of meters across that extend deep into Earth, left by ancient eruptions that exhumed diamonds from the mantle. If the plant is as choosy as it seems to be, diamond hunters in West Africa will have a simple, powerful way of finding diamond-rich deposits. Prospectors are going to "jump on it like crazy," says Steven Shirey, a geologist specializing in diamond research at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.


----------



## ekim68

WHO report: 74% of men and 64% of women in UK to be overweight by 2030



> Europe's growing obesity crisis will see almost three-quarters of men and two-thirds of women in the UK being overweight in 15 years, health experts have said.
> 
> Projections by the World Health Organisation and UK-based researchers lay bare a problem "of enormous proportions" facing many countries over the next decade and a half.
> 
> Ireland leads the trend, with new figures to be presented on Wednesday to the European Congress on Obesity, in Prague suggesting that 89% of men and 85% of women in the country will be overweight or obese by 2030.
> 
> In the UK, the comparable figures will be 74% for men and 64% for women, up from 70% and 59% respectively five years ago. The statistics for 57 countries are based on analysis of existing data for 2010 and projections which involved the UK Health Forum, an alliance of public interest and professional groups.


----------



## ekim68

NASA's Radar Found 4 Men Trapped in Rubble in Nepal By Their Heartbeats



> A couple years ago, NASA and DHS unveiled a portable radar unit based on technology used to detect alien life on distant exoplanets. This radar unit, though, would be used closer to home-to find people burried under rubble. In the first real-world demonstration of its use, the device helped save 4 men trapped under earthquake rubble in Nepal.


----------



## ekim68

Google finds 1 in 25 page-views are ad-injected - and Chrome Store saturated with adware



> A new study from Research at Google has determined that as much as 1 in 25 pageviews on the web contain ads that are not supposed to be there - and most are supplied by the notorious Superfish adware.
> 
> Ad injection hit the headlines in February of this year when Robert Graham at Errata Security published a report detailing how Superfish adware bundled with certain models of Lenovo laptop was using a self-signing, locally installed certificate to help it to inject ads into even secure web pages, prompting embarrassment at Lenovo and the ultimate issuing of a removal tool for the offending software.
> 
> The new report, led by Google research scientist Kurt Thomas, transforms perception of the practice from an opportunistic hack to a veritable industry in its own right, led by market leader Superfish.


----------



## ekim68

Greenhouse gas benchmark reached 



> Global carbon dioxide concentrations surpass 400 parts per million for the first month since measurements began


----------



## ekim68

Tesla: Model 3 to be shown in March 2016



> Tesla is gearing up to add two cars to its line of electric vehicles. The Model 3-a smaller and cheaper version of the Model S-will be unveiled around March 2016 with production likely starting in late 2017, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday during an earnings call. And the company is expected to start delivering the Model X, an SUV with Falcon Wing Doors, in late summer of this year.


----------



## ekim68

The rise of the social algorithm



> For the Facebook-uninitiated, much of the activity of Facebook is in the form of news that users post to their feed, which their friends have some access to and can like and comment on. When you open Facebook, you see a list of recent posts by friends; however, you typically will not see all posts, which are algorithmically sorted. The rationale for such curation is that in its absence, users would be deluged by uninteresting content from their friends. Facebook tries to pick out the gems from the detritus, anticipating what you will like and click on. But what are we missing? And are these computational choices troubling?


----------



## ekim68

How Satellites Can Monitor California's Underground Water



> Traditional land surveying techniques can also track water-but that method is labor-intensive. After days of painstaking measurements taken with tripods and levels, a surveyor will be left with one small area of measurement. Surveyors can also use GPS data, Farr says, but there are very few GPS stations in the Central Valley.
> 
> A better way, Farr says, is to use interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR. This technique, first developed about a decade ago, monitors changes in ground deformation. In the early days it was used almost exclusively to study earthquakes and volcanoes-creating maps like these, of the April 25th earthquake in Nepal. "Groundwater was like the poor stepchild," says Farr. But as California enters its fourth year of crippling drought, more researchers are working to refine InSAR's water watching abilities.
> 
> InSAR works by beaming radar waves at the surface of the Earth. The wave bounces off the surface and returns to the satellite, traveling in an undulating, up-down, sinusoidal wave. The height of the ground determines where the wave is in its oscillation as it returns to the satellite. The same ground can be re-scanned again in, say, a month or two, to detect changes in the surface level and shape within an accuracy of a few centimeters. "It's almost miraculous," says Farr.


----------



## valis

heck, even I know that one, Mike; there simply _isn't_ any.

Wonder how long before the golf courses fold. Cannot believe they are still operating.


----------



## ekim68

I wonder if you could feel the land shrinking over time...


----------



## ekim68

Hawaii Votes to Go 100% Renewable



> Hawaii's legislature voted yesterday to stake the state's future on renewable energy. According to House Bill 623, the archipelago's power grids must deliver 100 percent renewable electricity by the end of 2045. If the compromise bill is signed by the governor as expected, Hawaii will become the first U.S. state to set a date for the total decarbonization of its power supply.


----------



## ekim68

Dropbox Moves Accounts Outside North America To Ireland



> Similar to a previous announcement by Twitter, Dropbox has changed its Terms of Service for users outside of North America (USA/Canada/Mexico) such that services will now be provided out of Ireland. Will other companies follow this trend and leave the USA (and the jurisdiction of the NSA)?


----------



## ekim68

Losing focus: Why tech is getting in the way of work



> Before you read this article I want to ask you a simple question.
> 
> Have I got your full attention?
> 
> Probably not. And that's especially true if you are looking at this in your office.
> 
> Finding focus is a something almost everyone has to deal with. And research figures in the US show that in the workplace we are having more and more trouble keeping both internal and external stimuli at bay.
> 
> Blame it on technology.


----------



## ekim68

Hello, 1995 is calling: AOL still has 2.1 million dial-up customers



> NEW YORK, May 9 (UPI) -- Remember when connecting to the Internet started with a free AOL CD, those infernal beeping and squealing sounds and the arduously slow dial-up connection?
> 
> For some 2.1 million Americans 1995 is still a reality.
> 
> AOL revealed in its quarterly earnings report Friday that dial-up is not dead, shocking news in the age of faster-is-better. At 56 kilobit per second download speeds, dial-up is 200 times slower than the average U.S. broadband speed. Even many smartphones are 100 times faster.
> 
> More interesting still, a large percentage of those 2.1 million pay up to $20 a month for the service.


----------



## ekim68

Republican presidents flunk the economy: 11 reasons why America does worse under the GOP



> The data is unequivocal: The economy performs far better under Democrats than Republicans. Here's why


----------



## ekim68

MIT says solar power fields with trillions of watts of capacity are on the way



> A massive study on solar power by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to two main conclusions: Solar energy holds the best potential for meeting the planet's long-term energy needs while reducing greenhouse gases and federal and state governments must do more to promote its development.


----------



## ekim68

New technique allows for production of drug-delivering silicone microspheres



> Scientists are increasingly looking at using medication-filled microspheres for targeted drug delivery within the human body. Silicone would be a particularly good building material for such spheres, as it's biocompatible, waterproof, and chemically stable. Unfortunately, using traditional methods, it can't be made into small enough spheres. Now, however, a new process has allowed for the creation of silicone microspheres that are about one one-hundredth the size of any previously produced.


----------



## ekim68

The Indonesian horse that acts as a library



> Adult illiteracy in Indonesia is dropping, but one region has almost a million adults who cannot read. In central Java, the BBC meets one man and his horse who are helping improve access to books.
> 
> For a formerly wild horse that barely reaches shoulder-height on an adult man, Luna is an unlikely figure to help improve literacy rates in Indonesia.
> 
> Luna is looked after by Ridwan Sururi, 42, in the village of Serang, in the Purbalingga region of Java island.


----------



## ekim68

What to Say When the Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them



> First of all, they shouldn't ask.
> 
> "As a basic principle, we can't tell you to stop recording," says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.'s metropolitan police union and a 21-year veteran on the force. "If you're standing across the street videotaping, and I'm in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I'm subject to recording, and there's nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording."
> 
> "What you don't have a right to do is interfere," he says. "Record from a distance, stay out of the scene, and the officer doesn't have the right to come over and take your camera, confiscate it."


----------



## ekim68

Who even knew about drones ten years ago?

Pilots say poll shows public want strict curbs on flying drones in cities



> Most people think there should be stricter rules on the qualifications for flying a drone in urban areas, according to a new report.
> 
> A survey of more than 2,000 adults by the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) also showed that half think there should be prison sentences for those flying drones in a way that endangers an aircraft.


----------



## ekim68

Pope says many powerful people don't want peace



> (ANSA) - Vatican City, May 11 - Pope Francis said Monday that "many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war". The Argentine pontiff made the hard-hitting comment in response to a question from one of the 7,000 children taking part in an audience held with the Peace Factory organisation.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Pope says many powerful people don't want peace


You know they have killed or had killed more people on earth than anyone else. Look up the history and the Holy Roman Empire and they are going to do it again.

They will not do the killing them self but will control the Government that will do the killing. It's also right there in your Bible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

http://www.timelines.ws/countries/HOLY_ROMAN_EMP.HTML

The Holy Roman Empire is going to return too.

Watch the Pope and Germany and your see the Holy Roman Empire return. Then you will have WW3


----------



## DaveBurnett

Just look at some of the seedier statistics for the Vatican City if you want a laugh.


----------



## hewee

The vatican owns the world owns the world. 





This will tell you more and is worth watching.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER - A 6000 Year History - HD FEATURE 





http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/hoax/whoownsu.html

http://mainerepublicemailalert.com/...nc-irs-federal-reserve-and-the-british-crown/


----------



## ekim68

Direct-to-consumer auto sales: It's not just about Tesla



> A fundamental principle of competition is that consumers - not regulation - should determine what they buy and how they buy it. Consumers may benefit from the ability to buy cars directly from manufacturers - whether they are shopping for luxury cars or economy vehicles. The same competition principles should apply in either case.
> 
> For several years now, there have been reports of the challenges faced by Tesla Motors in selling its luxury electric cars directly to consumers. In state after state, the company has faced legislative and litigation resistance to its business plan to sell its products without using a network of third-party dealers like other auto manufacturers. Over the past year, FTC staff have urged in a blog post and comment letters to legislators that state prohibitions against direct consumer auto sales by manufacturers should be eased. Our point: States should allow consumers to choose not only the cars they buy, but also how they buy them.


----------



## poochee

:up:


----------



## ekim68

Why Driverless Cars Don't Need Windows



> For the last 80-some years, the model car has been pretty standard. The tail fins and bucket seats came and went, but there were almost always four wheels, two headlights, and windows, plenty of big, clear windows ringing the car. All of that will change soon because the robot cars upend so many parts of the game that the designers can begin again with a clean file in their design software.
> 
> Reconsidering the role of car windows may be the most obvious.


----------



## ekim68

New device allows for skin biopsies in under five minutes without anesthetic



> Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the Institute Ramón y Cajal for Health Research (IRYCIS) have created a new device that significantly cuts down the time required to perform a skin biopsy. It doesn't require any specialized skills to use, and could open the door to faster skin cancer diagnoses.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> New device allows for skin biopsies in under five minutes without anesthetic


:up:


----------



## ekim68

UK Plans To Do Away With Free Speech... In The Name Of Free Speech



> Last fall, we noted that UK Home Secretary Theresa May had made it clear that if her Conservative Party were re-elected, one of the first orders of business would be a new "Extremist Disruption Orders" plan that would outlaw any speech or events that the government declared "extremist." She wasn't kidding around. Following last week's election in the UK, David Cameron appears to be announcing just such a plan to basically wipe out anything resembling free expression in the UK (and, yes, I know, the UK doesn't view free expression in the same way as the US does, and there's nothing like the First Amendment there -- you don't have to point that out in the comments). The broad-reaching plans seem absolutely insane:


----------



## hewee

A very bad thing to do.


----------



## DaveBurnett

It is not intended to stop free speech as such. There are a lot of cases in places like Oxford and Cambridge Universities where extreme jihadists are converting vulnerable people to causes that those same people would not normally entertain. 

There has been quite an increase in the number of young people "going on holiday to Europe" and ending up in the middle east war zones. This is an attempt to outlaw such extremes and protect these impressionable people; many of whom are away from parental influence for the first time in their lives.

I am sure that the same protection will be afforded to young American freshers when the time comes.


----------



## ekim68

Thanks for your insights Dave. I knew that jihadists were recruiting but I didn't know where and it's been some time since I was an impressionable youth....


----------



## ekim68

More Proof Of America's Inadequate Infrastructure



> The details are still being sorted out on the deadly Amtrak crash that killed at least six people earlier this week and injured 100s more. But what we do know is that the stretch of track where the train derailed did not have the latest automated speed control system. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) board member Robert Sumwalt stated, had the safety system called Positive Train Control (PTC) "been in place, this accident would not have occurred."
> 
> I have frequently addressed the issue of infrastructure spending as a simple way to improve the standard of living in the United States. But the issue today is about much more than not busting an axle or ruining your set of run flat tires. This is now about basic health and safety.


----------



## ekim68

Why Billionaires Don't Pay Property Taxes in New York



> Thanks to the structure of city and state tax codes, the billionaires buying pieds-à-terre in the sky over Central Park are hardly paying property taxes at all. The values of these new condos are being assessed at just a fraction of what they're worth. And buyers are paying only a fraction of that fraction in property taxes.
> 
> This is a pressing issue for at least three reasons. For one thing, the property-tax levy is New York City's single largest source of revenue. The city is leaving money behind by failing to tax the most valuable homes at a rate closer to their market value. Meanwhile, well apart from the ultra-luxury condos, the city is overtaxing apartment buildings, whose renters are struggling the most with affordability. These outcomes go hand in hand.
> 
> Second, with every new supertall residential tower in Midtown-each one more architecturally dramatic than the last-the effective property tax rates paid by owners on Billionaires Row stand to fall even lower. While nice condos attract big tax breaks, nice neighborhoods earn long-lasting tax breaks.


----------



## ekim68

Dissolvable Electronic Stent Designed For Monitoring Blocked Arteries



> To restore blood flow in a narrowed or blocked artery, doctors can implant a metal stent to hold open the vessel. But over time, stents can cause inflammation and turbulent blood flow that lead to new blockages. Now, researchers have designed a stent carrying a suite of onboard electronic sensors, drug delivery particles, data storage, and communication capabilities to detect and overcome these problems. The entire device should dissolve as the artery heals.


----------



## ekim68

America's Changing Religious Landscape



> The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men.


----------



## ekim68

IdentityTheft.gov Shows You How to Recover From a Stolen Identity



> Identity theft has the potential to ruin lives, but it can also make you feel helpless if you're a victim. The Federal Trade Comission (FTC) just took the wraps off of IdentityTheft.gov, a new resource designed to offer that much-needed help if your identity has been stolen.


----------



## ekim68

The 'living concrete' that can heal itself



> (CNN)It's the world's most popular building material, and ever since the Romans built the pantheon from it some 2,000 years ago, we've been trying to find ways to make concrete more durable.
> 
> No matter how carefully it is mixed or reinforced, all concrete eventually cracks, and under some conditions, those cracks can lead to collapse.
> 
> "The problem with cracks in concrete is leakage," explains professor Henk Jonkers, of Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands.
> 
> "If you have cracks, water comes through -- in your basements, in a parking garage. Secondly, if this water gets to the steel reinforcements -- in concrete we have all these steel rebars -- if they corrode, the structure collapses."
> 
> But Jonkers has come up with an entirely new way of giving concrete a longer life.
> 
> "We have invented bioconcrete -- that's concrete that heals itself using bacteria," he says.


----------



## ekim68

Feds Say That Banned Researcher Commandeered a Plane



> A security researcher kicked off a United Airlines flight last month after tweeting about security vulnerabilities in its system had previously taken control of an airplane and caused it to briefly fly sideways, according to an application for a search warrant filed by an FBI agent.
> 
> Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, told the FBI agent during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight entertainment system, or IFE, on an airplane and overwrote code on the plane's Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. He was able to issue a climb command and make the plane briefly change course, the document states.


----------



## ekim68

Argentina's Currency Solution: Go Cashless



> Argentinians do not trust their currency. In other words they don't trust the monetary system that "organizes" their economy.





> Wall Street Journal's Michael J. Casey, who spent "six and a half happy years in Buenos Aires," says in his book Age of Cryptocurrency: "their society is in permanent war with itself. [...] Skipping taxes is the norm --why, people reason, would you pay the crooks who will steal your money?"
> 
> Yet Argentina has great potential in its internal market. Its people are highly educated and the country's natural resources are enormous. Its industry is mostly modern and its financial systems are up to date with current technology.
> 
> That's why the best solution to solve the currency situation is to go cashless. It could help the government restore credibility to its financial system and surface the enormous stockpile of money currently circulating in the black market.
> 
> Going cashless will also help curb corruption, because electronic cash would make all transactions accountable. People will have to justify the origin of any form of cash to get it converted into digital wallets or bank accounts. That would deter many fraudsters, and corrupt officials would have a harder time accepting bribes.


----------



## ekim68

The Future of Wind Turbines? No Blades



> It's no longer surprising to encounter 100-foot pinwheels spinning in the breeze as you drive down the highway. But don't get too comfortable with that view. A Spanish company called Vortex Bladeless is proposing a radical new way to generate wind energy that will once again upend what you see outside your car window.
> 
> Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity. But it goes about it in an entirely different way.


----------



## ekim68

Over 1,000 people sue Japan gov't to halt involvement in TPP



> TOKYO (Kyodo) -- More than 1,000 people filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government Friday seeking to halt its involvement in the 12-country talks for a Pacific Rim free trade agreement as "unconstitutional."
> 
> A total of 1,063 plaintiffs, including eight lawmakers, claimed in the case brought to the Tokyo District Court that the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact would undermine their basic human rights such as the right to live and know that are guaranteed under the Constitution.


----------



## ekim68

Schools that ban mobile phones see better academic results



> It is a question that keeps some parents awake at night. Should children be allowed to take mobile phones to school? Now economists claim to have an answer. For parents who want to boost their children's academic prospects, it is no.
> 
> The effect of banning mobile phones from school premises adds up to the equivalent of an extra week's schooling over a pupil's academic year, according to research by Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy, published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.


----------



## ekim68

4 U.S. Companies Getting Rich Off Gulf Arab Conflict With Iran



> In mid-May, President Barack Obama hosted top officials from Gulf Arab states at Camp David, the idyllic presidential retreat in Maryland. The meeting was designed to assure Gulf Arab leaders that the U.S. still has their back, even though the Obama administration is hurtling full-speed ahead toward a landmark nuclear deal with Iran.
> 
> Many of the monarchs from the Gulf decided to snub Obama by not showing up for the retreat. Instead, they sent other top officials, a way of showing their displeasure at the impending nuclear deal with Iran, the state they have been battling over Middle East hegemony for years. Despite the snubs, the Obama administration announced at the summit that there will be more security assistance and expedited weapons sales for Gulf Arab states as a way of ensuring their strategic position against Iran.
> 
> That promise of more arms is not surprising. In recent years, the Gulf states, flush with oil wealth, have bought massive amounts of American weapons.


----------



## ekim68

$1 Billion? No Thanks: First Nation Turns Down Offer for LNG on Ancestral Land



> A First Nation in northern British Columbia has said no thank you to a $1 billion ($960 million US) offer from a Malaysian company looking to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal on ancestral land.
> 
> In a statement, the band said it was not averse to development, or even an LNG terminal, in the vicinity. Just not in that particular spot.


----------



## ekim68

Immune system discovery could lead to one-jab universal flu shot



> An international team of researchers claim to have uncovered how human immune cells remember previously encountered strains of influenza. This discovery may pave the way to the development of a single universal flu shot to immunize people against all strains of the infectious disease for their entire lives.
> 
> Influenza is a virulent and infectious virus that affects countless scores of people worldwide, and has resulted in several pandemics that have killed millions. One of the reasons that influenza is so hard to eradicate or inoculate against is the fact that it mutates so often, meaning the immune system can't quickly swing known methods into action to combat it.


----------



## ekim68

Holographic patterning used to create 3D microbatteries



> Unfortunately, the development of functional microscale devices has been stalled by difficulties in miniaturizing energy storage to match. The high energy and high power density required for most applications is difficult to achieve in microbatteries due to their size and footprint restrictions. Though scientists have been researching a variety of possible workarounds, few functional microbatteries have been developed; the majority of the existing microbatteries designs simply cannot be manufactured easily.
> 
> A team of researchers has now fabricated microbatteries containing microelectromechanical and complementary metal-oxide-seminconductor (CMOS) devices using a futuristic 3D fabrication route. By combining 3D holographic lithography with conventional photolithography, the scientists demonstrated increased control of the electrode structure and spatial arrangement.


----------



## ekim68

Get Ready for Solar Boom From China Plants as Asia Demand Swells



> Solar panel makers globally are preparing for their best year since 2011, when U.S.-backed Solyndra LLC went bust, as China and Japan take advantage of falling prices to shift more of their energy production to clean power.
> 
> Panel production is forecast to grow by almost a third this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's a significant reversal for an industry that's been crippled by its own excess as companies in China including JA Solar Holdings Co. and LDK Solar Co. raised almost $3 billion in 2007 and 2008 to expand production.
> 
> By 2010, the market was so oversupplied that the cost of solar cells began tumbling. With the cost of panels down by 66 percent since then, demand is surging as solar technology, for the first time, is able to compete head-to-head on price with fossil fuels in many places.


----------



## ekim68

Pope Francis makes Tea Party heads explode: Why Steve King & Louie Gohmert have it in for the pontiff



> The Bishop of Rome is coming to Washington in September to address a joint session of Congress, and boy are things already getting frisky. Pope Francis is an extraordinarily popular Pope who's not afraid to wield that popularity for human rights and economic justice. In other words, he's well to the left of most members of Congress, and he may well get up in their faces about issues near and dear to him. Since you're sort of required to clap for the Pope, this is going to make for an interesting scene.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Pope Francis makes Tea Party heads explode: Why Steve King & Louie Gohmert have it in for the pontiff


Yep!


----------



## ekim68

Deutsche Bank mulls UK EU exit plan



> Deutsche Bank has set up a "working group" to review whether to move parts of its British divisions to Germany if the UK leaves the EU.
> 
> The working group has been established, but it is "early days and no decisions have been made", a spokesperson for the bank told the BBC.
> 
> Prime Minister David Cameron has promised a referendum on the UK's EU membership by the end of 2017.
> 
> Deutsche Bank employs 9,000 people in the UK.


----------



## DaveBurnett

It is a bluff.
We'll see about the referendum! It has been promised before and not materialised


----------



## ekim68

Students develop mobile hybrid power system for disaster relief



> When disaster strikes -- whether it's a devastating earthquake, a massive flood or a violent volcanic eruption -- electricity is one of the most immediate needs, both for local populations and relief providers.
> 
> Recently, a team of student researchers at Florida International University designed and built a mobile electricity supply unit that generates and stores power from renewable energy sources. The hybrid power system, which derives electricity from a combination of solar and wind energy, is low-cost and can be quickly and easily assembled and disassembled.


----------



## ekim68

Fake Diplomas, Real Cash: Pakistani Company Axact Reaps Millions



> Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire: hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.
> 
> Their websites, glossy and assured, offer online degrees in dozens of disciplines, like nursing and civil engineering. There are glowing endorsements on the CNN iReport website, enthusiastic video testimonials, and State Department authentication certificates bearing the signature of Secretary of State John Kerry.
> 
> "We host one of the most renowned faculty in the world," boasts a woman introduced in one promotional video as the head of a law school. "Come be a part of Newford University to soar the sky of excellence."
> 
> Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.


----------



## ekim68

Whales can be told apart by their voices - study



> US researchers say that they can distinguish individual whales based on the sound of the animals' voices.
> 
> Using a large set of recordings of North Atlantic right whales, they found that detailed analysis of one particular type of call allowed them to single out individual whales.


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon says no one should be held accountable for $34 million debacle



> Defense officials say decision to construct lavish facility in Afghanistan was prudent, even though it was never used.


----------



## ekim68

World's longest glass bridge set to open in China next year 



> In a bid to attract more tourists to the region, Hunan Province in China has commissioned the architectural firm of Haim Dotan to produce a completely transparent glass bridge spanning 370 m (1,214 ft) across the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon. Dizzyingly high at about 400 m (1,312 ft) above the canyon floor, the span is claimed to be capable of holding up to 800 people at a time.


----------



## ekim68

Brain-Controlled Bionic Legs Are Finally Here



> For a full decade, Gudmundur Olafsson was unable to move his right ankle. That's because it wasn't there. Olafsson's amputated lower leg was the delayed casualty of an accident from his childhood in Iceland, when he was hit by an oil truck. I lived in pain for 28 years, says Olafsson. After 50-plus operations, I had it off. For years after the operation he wore a Proprio Foot, a prosthetic with a motorized, battery-powered ankle, sold by the Reykjavik-based company Ossur. The Proprio is essentially a wearable robot, with algorithms and sensors that automatically adjust the angle of the foot during different points in its wearer's stride. Olafsson's ankle moved on autopilot.
> 
> But 14 months ago Ossur upgraded his hardware. Now, at age 48, Olafsson can move his right ankle by thinking about it. When the electrical impulse from his brain reaches the base of his leg, a pair of sensors embedded in his muscle tissue connect the neural dots, and wirelessly transmit that signal to the Proprio Foot.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> World's longest glass bridge set to open in China next year


Nice, but scary to me.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Brain-Controlled Bionic Legs Are Finally Here


:up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

> World's longest glass bridge set to open in China next year




I hope it closes at midnight!!
http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-longes...ail&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-f5030d1ada-91556965


----------



## ekim68

I wonder who will read this whole article....

What Happens Behind the Scenes When You Buy Things with Your Phone



> Youve decided to buy a new pair of shoes, and youre going to pay for them by tapping your smartphone against the checkout stand. Its just like using your credit card  except that it isnt. Heres whats really happening to the money on your phone, when you spend it and when you are just carrying it around.


----------



## ekim68

9 Ways Japanese Schools Are Different From American Schools



> They say education is the foundation of societyand since Japanese and American societies are different in many ways, it may not surprise you that aspects of the two countries educational systems are like chalk and cheese. To find out just how different learning your ABCs (or あいうs) can be in the U.S. and Japan, study up on these nine things that are commonplace in Japanese public schools, but probably wouldnt fly in America.


----------



## ekim68

Here's One Way the Developing World Totally Has America Beat



> China is by far the world's biggest investor in clean energy technologies like solar and wind. Last year, its clean energy spending hit a record $83 billion, a 39 percent jump from the year before, and more than twice what is spent in the United States.
> 
> Although America and most other G20 nations are moving toward a clean energy overhaul, its the developing world where you'll find the most explosive growth: When you add in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and South Africa, clean energy investment in developing countries totaled $131 billion in 2014, only six percent less than the combined total for developed countries. It's the closest that gap has ever been, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF):


----------



## ekim68

Burglars use drone helicopters to target homes



> Unmanned drones are being piloted over private homes by burglars in a bid to identify potential targets, police have confirmed.
> 
> Detectives fear the mini-helicopters, which can be bought for as little as £30, are being deployed to take surveillance photographs from above, posing a brand new threat to home security.


----------



## ekim68

How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics



> The creation of Fox News in 1996 was an event of deep, yet unappreciated, political and historical importance. For the first time, there was a news source available virtually everywhere in the United States, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a conservative tilt. Finally, conservatives did not have to seek out bits of news favorable to their point of view in liberal publications or in small magazines and newsletters.


----------



## ekim68

Animals are now legally recognised as 'sentient' beings in New Zealand 



> The New Zealand Government has formally recognised animals as 'sentient' beings by amending animal welfare legislation.
> 
> The Animal Welfare Amendment Bill was passed on Tuesday.
> 
> The Act stipulates that it is now necessary to 'recognise animals as sentient' and that owners must attend properly to the welfare of those animals'.


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> Whales can be told apart by their voices - study


here about this guy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale


----------



## ekim68

I read about that and I'm curious about what the Documentary will be like...


----------



## ekim68

California Oil Spill: Biologists Eyeing Extent of Damage to Waters, Wildlife



> Two days after a ruptured oil pipeline spewed crude into the waters off of California  tainting 9 miles of ocean teeming with coastal creatures  environmentalists are scrambling to assess how mucked up the ecosystem is.
> 
> This much is clear: It could be weeks before the beach near Santa Barbara is cleaned up, and even years before the damage to the water and wildlife is realized, scientists say.


----------



## ekim68

American Crash: Part V



> Thom Hartmann is right beyond dispute: the cult(ure) of Reagan brought us the Amtrak disaster in Pennsylvania. The 40th President did so by nurturing a culture of political cynicism in America.


----------



## ekim68

Well, Yesterday....

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Windows 3.0 



> The first version of Windows to support a stunning palette of 256 full colours, Windows 3.0, turns 25 today, having launched on May 22, 1990. Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows to see widespread use, largely because it was the first version to come pre-installed on the PCs shipped by the manufacturers of the day, starting with Zenith PC. It supported a range of memory modes, from 16-bit Real Mode (for machines with less than a 286-based processor) to 32-bit enhanced mode (which required a higher-end 386). This version of Windows was the first to be a real operating system, significantly expanding the role held by DOS.


----------



## ekim68

More Than 900 Workers Have Already Died Building Qatars World Cup Infrastructure



> In 2022, Qatar will host the World Cup. The host city has already made some waves with its stadium shaped like a certain body part. But what you might not know is that, since 2012, about 900 workers have died while working on infrastructure in Qatar, in a building boom anticipating the World Cup.





> For comparison, 25 construction workers died during the preparations for Sochi. Only six workers have died during construction for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil that starts this summer. Only eleven men died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s. By all measures, the death count in Qatar is extreme.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> More Than 900 Workers Have Already Died Building Qatars World Cup Infrastructure


----------



## DaveBurnett

That makes me glad that I do not watch the silly game in any form.


----------



## ekim68

France is making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away edible food



> Leave it to France to lead the way again in the food world.
> 
> In an effort to curb food waste, which accounts for roughly one-third of all food produced worldwide, France is making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away any food that is considered edible. The European country's parliament voted unanimously for the new law, which will force grocers to either donate the food to charity or make sure that it is used as animal feed.


----------



## ekim68

Memorial Day is Tomorrow and this is related....

The most expensive wars in U.S. history



> Declared an official holiday in 1971, Memorial Day honors those who have given their lives in service to the United States. While the human toll is always great, wars also cost treasure as well as blood.


----------



## ekim68

The Trillion Fold Increase In Computing Power, Visualized



> Its easy to get hung up over the imperfections in our technology (srsly Apple, is it that hard to give a phone a back button?) and forget just how astounding modern processing power is. A community of IT professionals called Experts Exchange has now produced a fascinating infographic to remind us.


----------



## ekim68

City in the sky: world's biggest hotel to open in Mecca 



> Four helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like sideplates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca. It is the crowning feature of the holy citys crowning glory, the superlative summit of what will be the worlds largest hotel when it opens in 2017.
> 
> With 10,000 bedrooms and 70 restaurants, plus five floors for the sole use of the Saudi royal family, the £2.3bn Abraj Kudai is an entire city of five-star luxury, catering to the increasingly high expectations of well-heeled pilgrims from the Gulf.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> France is making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away edible food


I think that is good. I know supermarkets throw away a lot. They now give away to food banks etc so much now and that is good.

Even I save all the fruit and veggies waste in 3 gallon buckets and I give then to friend who feeds his chickens with it. Then I get some of the best eggs in return too.

So in a way I keep eating the same food over and over.

Also I have almost no trash for garbage pick up. I could put that one trash bin out once every couple of months before it gets full but I do not do that. I may skip a week because all my trash are in bags so I got a clean trash can but don't get that much when you get fresh fruits and veggies.

Now the green waste is what I get the most of with paper and plastic


----------



## ekim68

George W. Bush's CIA Briefer: Bush and Cheney Falsely Presented WMD Intelligence to Public



> On "Hardball," Michael Morell concedes the Bush administration misled the nation into the Iraq War.


----------



## ekim68

California Is Giving Free Solar Panels to the Poor



> In California, polluting companies are paying to line the roofs of the disadvantaged with solar panels. It's not charity, either, exactlyit's public policy. Very good policy.
> 
> The San Francisco Chronicle explains how a new program arising from the state's cap-and-trade lawin which companies must pay, per ton, for their carbon pollutionis delivering solar to the poor: "Run by Oakland nonprofit Grid Alternatives, the effort will install home solar arrays in disadvantaged neighborhoods, using $14.7 million raised through Californias cap-and-trade system for reining in greenhouse gas emissions."
> 
> California is the best state in the country for solar; incentive programs, innovative companies, and progressive consumers have helped solar get a foothold there more than anywhere else.


----------



## ekim68

Israel Seeks Surge in US Security Support



> TEL AVIV, Israel  Israel is seeking a hefty surge in annual security assistance from Washington and has begun preliminary talks with the US administration on a long-term package that would provide up to $45 billion in grant aid through 2028.


----------



## ekim68

In Court, For-Profit Colleges Demand End to Gainful Employment Rule



> The big for-profit colleges were back in court in Washington again this morning, arguing to a federal judge that the Obama Administration did not have the power to subject them to even the most minimal standards of accountability for leaving their students with overwhelming debt.
> 
> Despite the mountain of evidence that many for-profit colleges have engaged in predatory behavior by deceiving, under-educating, and overcharging students, despite the scores of lawsuits and investigations underway by federal and state law enforcement, these for-profit colleges are demanding permanent entitlement to billions annually from taxpayers without having to meet any real measures of success at all.


----------



## ekim68

Internet used by 3.2 billion people in 2015



> Nearly half of the global population will be using the internet by the end of this year, according to a new report.
> 
> The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body, predicts that 3.2 billion people will be online. The population currently stands at 7.2 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Study: Fire suppression has killed Wisconsin's pine barrens



> MADISON, Wis., May 26 (UPI) -- Researchers say pine barrens used to be abundant in Wisconsin. Now, they're nearly gone, apparently starved of wildfire, according to scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
> 
> Pine barrens are a unique ecosystem characterized by grasses, shrubs, small pines and other plants that thrive among dry, acidic and infertile soils. The habitat is reliant upon wildfire to prevent the encroachment of less fire-resistant plant species.
> 
> Without regular fires, pine barrens typically mature into larger, denser forest. In Wisconsin, like many places around the United States, aggressive fire suppression has limited the number of wildfires allowed to burn and take their natural course.


----------



## ekim68

SensorWake alarm clock wakes you up with your favorite aromas



> Let's be honest, there isn't really an easy way to get up in the morning. Your warm, toasty bed will always be warm and toasty, and outside of it will always present a cold and unfathomable start to the day. Still, that hasn't stopped a long line of takes on the classic alarm clock designed to make mornings that little bit easier. The latest to clock on in this ongoing struggle is by French startup SensorWake, whose tabletop timepiece sees your favorite scents waft through your nostrils just as you're due to wake.


----------



## ekim68

Computer chips made of wood promise greener electronics



> U.S. and Chinese researchers have developed semiconductor chips that are nearly entirely made out of wood-derived material.
> 
> Aside from being biodegradable, the chips could be produced for only a fraction of the cost of conventional semiconductors, according to the group of 17 researchers, mostly from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with others from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
> 
> The researchers used a cellulose material for the substrate of the chip, which is the part that supports the active semiconductor layer. Taken from cellulose, a naturally abundant substance used to make paper, cellulose nanofibril (CNF) is a flexible, transparent and sturdy material with suitable electrical properties.


----------



## ekim68

A good read on the FIFA arrests......

The Clock Finally Runs Out for FIFA



> Soccers international governing body has long been suspected of mass corruption, but a 47-count U.S. indictment is one of the first real steps to accountability.


----------



## ekim68

Is This the Worst Congress Ever?



> Case in point: College students who use new Stafford loans to pay for the 2014-2015 school year will see borrowing costs rise 21 percent. As of July 1, interest on new student loans rises to 4.66 percent from 3.86 percent last year, with future rates potentially increasing even more. This comes as interest rates on mortgages and other consumer credit hovered near record lows. For a comparison, the rate on the 10-year Treasury is 2.6 percent. Congress could have imposed lower limits on student-loan rates, but chose not to.
> 
> This is but one example out of thousands of an inability to perform the basic duties, which includes helping to educate the next generation of leaders and productive citizens. It goes far beyond partisanship; it is a matter of lack of will, intelligence and ability.


----------



## ekim68

Thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we avoided severe ozone depletion



> Concentrations of ozone depleting chemicals was at its peak in 1993, but over the years they have declined and a new research points out that the Montreal Protocol, which came into force in 1987, has played a major role in not only ensuring that use of these chemicals is not only reduced, but also has helped us avoid a severe ozone depletion.
> 
> A new study in Nature Communications confirms the huge part the Montreal Protocol has played in saving the ozone layer. Study lead author Professor Martyn Chipperfield, from the School of Earth & Environment at the University of Leeds, We knew that it [Montreal Protocol] would save us from large ozone loss in the future, but in fact we are already past the point when things would have become noticeably worse.


----------



## ekim68

Despite bond-selling spree, cities, states spending less on infrastructure



> An Amtrak train that derailed earlier this month resulting in the death of eight people and the injury of more than 200, sparked a debate on declining infrastructure spending and its devastating effect on American cities and states.
> 
> Some claimed that conservative opposition to more funding for Amtrak contributed to the accident, while President Barack Obama pleaded for more infrastructure spending and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg condemned Congress for kicking the can down a pothole-filled road.
> 
> However, the main point was this: construction spending has dropped significantly, relative to the size of the economy, in the last five years.
> 
> Yet the municipal bond marketwhich is where states, cities and all types of local agencies issue bonds to finance their needsrecorded pretty robust bond issuance in 2015.


----------



## valis

how to end a Naval career in one easy step:

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/uss-arizona-memorial-reportedly-struck-during-docking-o-1707312516


----------



## poochee

valis said:


> how to end a Naval career in one easy step:
> 
> http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/uss-arizona-memorial-reportedly-struck-during-docking-o-1707312516


----------



## valis

Indeed......details are still emerging, but now it may be a tug captain at fault.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists find way to create supersized fruit



> When Spanish explorers first brought domesticated tomatoes to Europe 500 years ago, the fruit was already gigantic compared with its olive-sized wild counterparts. Researchers trying to understand the genetic basis of this girth have uncovered a way to make other fruits larger as well. The team discovered this secret by studying two mutant tomato strains that had many branches coming off the upper part of the stem and that produced unusually fecund fruit. Fruit size and other plant traits depend on what happens in the uppermost part of the stem, a growing tip called the meristem. There, unspecialized cells called stem cells divide to make more of themselves or specialize into specific plant parts, like carpels, the flower organs that make seed compartments. Wild tomatoes have two; beefsteaks have eight or more.


----------



## ekim68

The tar sands sell-out



> Amid the strip mines and steam plants sprawled across the northern Alberta wilderness, Fort McKay is just a tiny dot on the map.
> 
> It is also one of the single biggest source sites of the carbon pollution that is choking the planet.
> 
> This tiny First Nations community grew rich on oil, and was wrecked by oil. Local Cece Fitzpatrick grabbed what she saw as a last chance for Fort McKay and decided to run for chief, promising to stand up to the industry which came here 50 years ago.


----------



## ekim68

Life Expectancy



> Life expectancy has increased rapidly since the onset of industrialization and modernization. In a pre-modern, poor world, life expectancy was around 30 years in every country. In the early 19th century, life expectancy started to increase in the early industrialized countries while it stayed low in the rest of the world. Just half a century ago, the health of the world was very unequal; there was good health in the rich countries and persistent bad health in those countries that remained poor. But this global inequality is decreasing. Countries that not long ago were suffering from bad health are catching up rapidly. No country in the world has a lower life expectancy than the the countries with the highest life expectancy in 1800. Since 1900 the global average life expectancy has more than doubled and is now approaching 70 years.


----------



## ekim68

This Cane for the Blind Recognizes Faces From 30 Feet Away



> The canes camera and facial recognition software work in tandem. The camera, located just below the handle, has a 270-degree lens for capturing as much of the users environment as possible. The software built into the cane draws on a database of photos pulled from services like Gmail and Outlook (the teams has plans to incorporate Linkedin, too), and you can add as many faces to the database as you want by snapping a photo with the canes camera. As soon as the camera notices a person, its software (an open-source computer-vision algorithm) will begin scanning the face to see if theres a match. If the scanned images matches a portrait in the database, the corresponding name and location will be fed back to the cane carrier via a bluetooth bone-conduction ear piece, which uses vibrations to communicate information and to cut down on aural distraction.


----------



## ekim68

A very good read....And, Wino, it will be less time than you think for getting off of the Fossil Fuel Trough...

Will Tesla Batteries Force Home Wiring To Go Low Voltage?



> Industry consultant claims the advent of solar power and home batteries from companies like Tesla will force the reinvention of home wiring from primarily AC high voltage to DC home-run low voltage to reduce power conversion loss.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S.'s Quietest Places



> So scientists with the National Park Service set off across the U.S. to study our audio ecology. They recorded more than a million hours of sound from the depths of the Great Basin's deserts to the hurly-burley of the megalopolis that stretches from Boston, through New York City and on to Washington, D.C.
> 
> They found that if you're craving quiet on the east coast head to the north woods of Maine or the Adirondacks in upstate New York. But for real quietdefined as less than 20 decibelsthe West is best.
> 
> The great swath of territory west of the Rockies but east of the western coast includes national parks, wilderness areas and even public lands that are probably as quiet as they were centuries ago.


----------



## DaveBurnett

> Will Tesla Batteries Force Home Wiring To Go Low Voltage?


Meanwhile half the world don't even have wiring!!!


----------



## ekim68

Microscopic sonic screwdriver invented



> A team of engineers have created tiny acoustic vortices and used them to grip and spin microscopic particles suspended in water.
> 
> The research by academics from the University of Bristol's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, is published in Physical Review Letters. The researchers have shown that acoustic vortices act like tornados of sound, causing microparticles to rotate and drawing them to the vortex core. Like a tornado, what happens to the particles depends strongly on their size.


----------



## ekim68

ISIS vs. 3D Printing



> Time and again, conflict has been bad news for historical artifacts and sculptures. There was the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the Nazi's battle to burn as much degenerate art as they could find. Swept up in a violent fervor, mobs and soldiers have been quick to destroy what took societies centuries to create; what museums and collectors spent decades collecting, preserving, and documenting for the public.
> 
> The digital era looks different: files can be cheaply hosted in data centers spread across several states or continents to ensure permanence. Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian born artist, educator, and activist, wants to apply that duplicability to the artifacts that ISIS has destroyed.


----------



## ekim68

China unveils world's first facial recognition ATM



> China has unveiled the world's first ATM with an inbuilt facial recognition feature on Friday. It is also China's first independently developed ATM.
> 
> Clients who use other people's bank cards at such ATMs will not be able to withdraw money even if they know the password.
> 
> Designed and produced by Tsinghua University and Hangzhou-based Tzekwan technology company, the new ATMs will be linked with banks and local police offices to crack down on financial crimes.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> China unveils world's first facial recognition ATM


:up:


----------



## ekim68

$375 billion wasted on billing and health insurance-related paperwork annually: study



> Medical billing paperwork and insurance-related red tape cost the U.S. economy approximately $471 billion in 2012, 80 percent of which is waste due to the inefficiency of the nations complex, multi-payer way of financing care, a group of researchers say.
> 
> The researchers  physicians and health policy researchers with ties to the University of California, San Francisco, the City University of New York School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School  note that a simplified, single-payer system of financing health care similar to Canadas or the U.S. Medicare program could result in savings of approximately $375 billion annually, or more than $1 trillion over three years.


----------



## ekim68

Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors



> Compared with most animals, we humans engage in a host of behaviors that are destructive to our own kind and to ourselves. We lie, cheat and steal, carve ornamentations into our own bodies, stress out and kill ourselves, and of course kill others. Science has provided much insight into why an intelligent species seems so nasty, spiteful, self-destructive and hurtful.


----------



## ekim68

Deepwater Horizon: jury selection begins for BP exec charged in oil spill



> Jury selection began on Monday for the trial of the most senior BP executive charged in connection with 2010s fatal Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.
> 
> David Rainey, BPs former vice president for exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, will stand trial in New Orleans, charged with obstructing a congressional investigation in the weeks after the oil spill, the largest in US history.
> 
> Prosecutors allege he deliberately withheld information about how much oil was being pumped into the Gulf following the explosion at the BP well.


:up: Finally some accountability.....!


----------



## ekim68

A Temporary Tattoo That Senses Through Your Skin



> Modern cars are laden with sensors that constantly monitor the vehicles vitals and indicate, for example, when a filter needs replacing or whether the air bag is working. Electronics diagnose failures after they happen and even predict problems that are imminent. Wouldnt it be great if we could monitor our bodies in much the same way?
> 
> That very idea, ironically enough, is what has brought me to Illinois. Im here to see John Rogers, a materials science professor at the University of Illinois with a bold vision: Someday, he believes, we will all have sensors on our bodies that send information to a mobile phone, similar to the way a cars sensors feed the vehicles computer.


----------



## ekim68

Poll Shows Americans Favor Overhaul of Campaign Financing



> Americans of both parties fundamentally reject the regime of untrammeled money in elections made possible by the Supreme Courts Citizens United ruling and other court decisions and now favor a sweeping overhaul of how political campaigns are financed, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.
> 
> The findings reveal deep support among Republicans and Democrats alike for new measures to restrict the influence of wealthy givers, including limiting the amount of money that can be spent by super PACs and forcing more public disclosure on organizations now permitted to intervene in elections without disclosing the names of their donors.
> 
> And by a significant margin, they reject the argument that underpins close to four decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on campaign finance: that political money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.


----------



## ekim68

Millennials and Political News



> When it comes to where younger Americans get news about politics and government, social media look to be the local TV of the Millennial generation. About six-in-ten online Millennials (61%) report getting political news on Facebook in a given week, a much larger percentage than turn to any other news source, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. This stands in stark contrast to internet-using Baby Boomers, for whom local TV tops the list of sources for political news at nearly the same reach (60%).


----------



## ekim68

One thing all travelers should do for good connectivity in the hotel



> Business travelers requiring solid Wi-Fi connections for getting work done in the hotel should not overlook this database of the best places with good connectivity.


----------



## ekim68

Shell sought to influence direction of Science Museum climate programme



> Shell tried to influence the presentation of a climate change programme it was sponsoring at the Science Museum in London, internal documents seen by the Guardian show.
> 
> The Anglo-Dutch oil group raised concerns with the museum that one part of the project creates an opportunity for NGOs to talk about some of the issues that concern them around Shells operations.
> 
> The company also wanted to know whether a particular symposium at the museum was invite only  as that would ensure we do not proactively open up a debate on the topic [of Shells operations].
> 
> The concerns are raised in a series of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and once again raise awkward questions about the influence of fossil fuel companies over Britains most valued cultural institutions.


----------



## ekim68

Steve Albini: The music industry is a parasite and copyright is dead



> In 1993, Albinis essay, The Problem With Music, explained his issues with major labels, attacking them for being helmed by faceless industry lackeys and holding bands hostage with opaque contracts and unfair royalty splits.


----------



## ekim68

Batteriser is a $2.50 gadget that extends disposable battery life by 800 percent



> A completely new alkaline battery is rated to generate 1.5 volts, but once its output drops below 1.35 or even 1.4 volts, it effectively becomes useless to many devices. The batterys chemical cocktail is still loaded with juice, but the circuitry in many gadgets (especially more sophisticated ones, like Bluetooth keyboards and bathroom scales) considers the battery dead.
> 
> This is where Batteriser comes in. Its essentially a voltage booster that sucks every last drop of useable energy from ostensibly spent batteries. So, instead of using just 20 percent of all the power hidden inside of your Duracells and Energizers, Batteriser makes effective use of the remaining 80 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Where Should Poor People Live?



> Studies say that lower-income people do better when they live in affluent neighborhoods, but rich people dont want them there. A few states are seeking ways around that resistance.


----------



## ekim68

Water Wives



> In the parched village of Denganmal, in western India, there are no taps. The only drinking water comes from two wells at the foot of a nearby rocky hill, a spot so crowded that the sweltering walk and wait can take hours.
> 
> For many men in the hamlet some 140 km from Mumbai, the solution was a water wife.


----------



## poochee

Glad I don't live there.


----------



## valis

poochers, I hate to say this, but you pretty much are. I was born in SoCal, got out when I was 6, and I am very, very glad I am not there any more. Lake Mead is sooooo low right now. 

Just be safe, poochee.


----------



## poochee

valis said:


> poochers, I hate to say this, but you pretty much are. I was born in SoCal, got out when I was 6, and I am very, very glad I am not there any more. Lake Mead is sooooo low right now.
> 
> Just be safe, poochee.


Yep, things are not good!


----------



## ekim68

New test could reveal every virus that's ever infected you



> Cant remember every viral infection youve ever had? Dont worry, your blood can. A new test surveys the antibodies present in a persons bloodstream to reveal a history of the viruses theyve been infected with throughout their life. The method could be useful not only for diagnosing current and past illnesses, but for developing vaccines and studying links between viruses and chronic disease.


----------



## ekim68

What Did the USA Freedom Act Actually Amend?



> There has been a lot of ink spilled here and elsewhere about the USA Freedom Act over the last several weeks. Its privacy protections. Its alterations to the governments surveillance authority. Its increase in material support for terrorism sentences. But I have two much more basic (and very nerdy) questions to ask: What did the USA Freedom Act actually amend and how will the US Code read once all the dust settles? As I explain below, although the USA Freedom Act was written to modify the existing business records provision, the fact that Congress let that provision expire means the USA Freedom Act is now modifying language that no longer exists. Simply put, by waiting until several days after midnight on June 1 to pass the USA Freedom Act, Congress may have ended up creating a series of utterly unnecessary headaches for itself (and everyone else), and potentially opened the door to challenges to business records court orders served on, for example, libraries and schools.


----------



## ekim68

Initial Titles Inducted into Video Game Hall of Fame



> Six different video games have met the criteria needed to be the first inductees to the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Located at the Strong National Museum of Play which is based in Rochester, New York the Hall of Fame requires games to meet four specific requirements for consideration. They have to be iconic, have longevity, have reached across international boundaries and also have exerted influence on the design and development of other games, on other forms of entertainment or on popular culture and society.


----------



## ekim68

Rare 9-way kidney swap a success, San Francisco doctors say



> SAN FRANCISCO  Doctors at UC San Francisco and California Pacific Medical Center finished the final of 18 surgeries in a rare nine-way, two-day kidney transplant swap at the two San Francisco hospitals.
> 
> Transplant surgeons at both hospitals successfully completed 10 surgeries involving five donors and five recipients on Thursday and the final eight surgeries on Friday for four donor-recipient pairs in whats considered to be the the longest kidney transplant chain performed in one city in such a short period of time.


----------



## ekim68

GravityLight gets brighter, tougher and easier to use



> The GravityLight was designed to replace the use of kerosene lamps in the developing world. It uses a weight to drive a gear-train and generate electricity from the kinetic energy created. Now, a new version of this safe, cheap and convenient lighting solution has been created.


----------



## ekim68

Fracking Has Contaminated Drinking Water, EPA Now Concludes



> After years of asserting that hydraulic fracturing has never tainted drinking water, the Obama administration issued a long-awaited study of the controversial oil and gas production technique that confirmed "specific instances" when fracking "led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells."


----------



## DaveBurnett

Well (sic) that is really a surprise. 
I think anyone with the slightest sense knew that is was just a case of how long before the lies were conclusively revealed.
The oil and gas industry have known all along that it was happening; they just want to make easy money before they are stopped.
Of course there are places where oil will be trapped in shale and fracking can release it, but those places HAVE to be well away from anywhere that the water is likely to be. It just means that the oil companies will have to do a little more research and testing before getting hold of their black gold.

Yes I have oil/gas shares, but I would like to be allowed to live to collect the dividends and not poisoned by long chain hydrocarbons.


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court won't overrule gun ownership restrictions



> WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused to weigh in again Monday on one of its most controversial topics: the right to bear arms.
> 
> The justices declined to reconsider the rights of local governments to constrain that right -- upheld by the high court in two landmark decisions over the past decade -- by requiring that handguns be disabled or locked up when they are not being carried.
> 
> The high court left standing a San Francisco law imposing those restrictions, but Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented.


----------



## ekim68

Stanford scientists build water-powered computer



> PALO ALTO, Calif., June 9 (UPI) -- A water-powered clock -- it sounds like a gimmick. But Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, says he and his students are aiming to build a whole new class of computers.
> 
> Prakesh isn't building a computer recognizable to consumers. It's a synchronous computer, or computerized clock. But what makes it special is that it can manipulate and process both information and physical material -- that and it operates using the physics of water droplets.


----------



## ekim68

Study shows how the US could achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2050



> A team of researchers led by Stanford University's professor Mark Z. Jacobson has produced an ambitious roadmap for converting the energy infrastructure of the US to run entirely on renewable energy in just 35 years. The study focuses on the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies such as wind, solar and geothermal solutions, claiming that the transition is both economically and technically possible within the given timeframe.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX Has a Radical New Invention Idea



> Elon Musks SpaceX is planning a new network of satellites, and theyll come with an interesting function: an Internet connection.





> Whether well truly be able to connect to a SpaceX-provided Internet connection someday (it will likely take a long time before that gets approved) is still unclear. But Musk has said in the past that he believes such a communication system will be necessary for travel to Mars, his ultimate goal for SpaceX.


----------



## ekim68

Norway parliament votes to cut coal investments



> (Reuters) - Norway's parliament voted on Friday to reduce coal investments by its $880 billion sovereign wealth fund, the world's biggest, in a decision hailed by environmentalists as a model to help slow climate change.
> 
> Under the unanimous deal, the fund will sell all shares in companies that get more than 30 percent of their turnover or activity from coal. The right-wing government and the fund itself will have to work out exact definitions.
> 
> Environmentalists hailed the vote, mainly targeting mining companies and power generators, which was expected after a bipartisan decision by a key parliamentary committee late last month.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Federal Government Will Adopt HTTPS For All Of Its Websites



> Following a catastrophic Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack, where the data of over 4 million federal employees was stolen, as well as other private sector data breaches, the U.S. government seems to be getting more serious about defensive online security instead of simply using the "cybersecurity" rhetoric to pass more surveillance laws.
> 
> The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued today the "HTTPS-Only Standard" directive (PDF), which will require all federal websites and services to use secure HTTPS connections. All federal websites will have to use this standard by December 31, 2016, so most federal services will likely still remain unencrypted for the next one and a half years.


----------



## ekim68

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback Threatens to Defund Judiciary if It Rules Against Him



> On Thursday, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that threatens the entire state's judiciary with destruction if it rules against a law he favors. Brownback has spent much of his tenure attempting to curb the state supreme court and consolidate power in the executive branch. Thursday's startling maneuver suggests the deeply conservative governor has no compunction about simply obliterating separation of powers when another branch of government gets in his way.


----------



## ekim68

Jaguar Land Rover maps potholes for self-driving cars



> British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover is developing a system that not only maps potholes in roads but will eventually be able to recognise unmapped ones on approach, and share the information via the cloud with local authorities, drivers  and other intelligent cars.
> 
> JLR, a subsidiary of Indian car-maker Tata Motors, has equipped a selection of Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport vehicles with road-profiling sensors which can identify and register irregularities in the road surface, including raised manhole covers, broken drain caps, potholes and other obstructions.


----------



## ekim68

Net neutrality takes effect Friday; ISPs scramble to avoid complaints



> The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules take effect Friday this week, and they've already had a noticeable impact on the behavior of Internet service providers.


----------



## ekim68

Overwhelming Majority of Americans Want Campaign Finance Overhaul



> On Tuesday the New York Times and CBS News released one of the most in-depth surveys in recent history on Americans views about money in elections. The results werent hard to interpret: across the board, Americans agree that money holds far too much sway and that sweeping changes are needed in our political system. A full 85 percent of respondents said our current system is so flawed that it needs to either see fundamental changes or be rebuilt completely.


----------



## ekim68

Whats in your frac fluid? U.S. doctors want to know



> WASHINGTON  U.S. doctors want more information about the ingredients of the chemical compounds pumped underground during hydraulic fracturing operations at oil and gas wells nationwide.
> 
> The chemical disclosure request came in the form of a policy plank adopted by the American Medical Associations House of Delegates during the groups annual meeting Tuesday.
> 
> The AMA said in a statement that the group is concerned about the inability to effectively monitor and track the possible long-term public health and environmental changes associated with hydraulic fracturing.


----------



## ekim68

The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries 



> Luis Paradas office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washingtons lobbying row  a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the road to riches, when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law  where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars.
> 
> Fifteen years ago, Paradas work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the worlds countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. ranks last in every measure when it comes to family policy, in 10 charts



> So lets see how the United States stacks up against the rest of the world when it comes to policies that support not the Mad Men-era traditional breadwinner-homemaker families, but the modern reality that the majority of children in the United States and in most of the rest of the world live in families headed by a single working parent, or by two working parents.


----------



## ekim68

First Demonstration of a Surveillance Camera Powered by Ordinary Wi-Fi Broadcasts



> The ability to power remote sensors and devices using Wi-Fi signals could be the enabling technology behind the Internet of things, say electrical engineers.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX founder files with government to provide Internet service from space



> Elon Musks space company has asked the federal government for permission to begin testing on an ambitious project to beam Internet service from space, a significant step forward for an initiative that could create another major competitor to Comcast, AT&T and other telecom companies.


:up:


----------



## ekim68

These Are the Sad Remains of the Soviet Space Shuttle Program



> Russian photographer and urban explorer Ralph Mirebs just published one of the saddest photoseries on space exploration. He managed to get inside an abandoned hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where two Buransthe prototype space shuttles of the Russian space programare slowly decaying in their burial crypt.


----------



## ekim68

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders: Media are inept and GOP agenda is hidden



> What does Bernie Sanders think of the medias performance so far this campaign? Barely adequate. The huge speaking fees Bill and Hillary Clinton have accepted? Wrong question, he says; you should be asking why anyone pays them. How about primary debates? Sanders says the entire system should be redesigned to bring Republicans on stage with Democrats.


----------



## ekim68

Cameroonian Women and Girls Saying No to Child Marriage



> MAROUA, Cameroon, Jun 10 2015 (IPS) - Twelve-year-old Bienvienue Taguieke was expected to obey her parents and marry a man 40 years her senior, but an association of women in Cameroons Far North Region, where child marriages are rife, put a stop to it in a sign that women are starting to speaking out against the practice.
> 
> I was a pupil at a government school in Guidimdaz, a village in the Mokolo area of the Far North Region when a man offered 5,000 CFA francs (around 8.50 dollars) to my mother for my hand in marriage. I refused and alerted some people including the headmistress of my school, Bienvienue, now 15, told IPS.


----------



## ekim68

Connecticut gun controls estimated to have cut fatal shootings by 40%



> Studying the impact of gun control laws in the US is notoriously challenging. A variety of demographic factors influence the prevalence of lethal violence, and it's difficult to find states that share all these factors and differ in terms of gun laws. In addition, laws get enacted at times when the nation as a whole may be experiencing changes in the rate of crimes, violent and otherwise.
> 
> These issues make it difficult, but not impossible. Last year, Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health performed an analysis that tracked what happened before and after a single state (Missouri, in this case) loosened its gun control laws. That work suggested that killings using firearms increased by 25 percent after the law was passed. Now, Webster is back as part of a team that did essentially a converse study: what happens after a state significantly tightens its limits on gun sales? In this analysis, the rate of gun homicides dropped by 40 percent.


----------



## ekim68

75% of Russia's Satellite Electronics Come From US



> One Russian aerospace industry expert noted today that three-quarters of all their satellite electronics comes from the United States: "According to [Nikolay Testoyedov], up to 75 percent of the electronic components for Russian satellites come from the US. Consequently, if it retaliates should Moscow refuse to sell RD-180 rocket motors to Washington  which Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has threatened  Russia's satellite program would be frozen for at least two years. "The imported electronic components in our satellites represent 25 to 75 percent of the total in communications; in military ones, somewhat less; in commercial ones, more," Testoyedov says.


----------



## ekim68

Hybrid road sweeper keeps air cleaner, too



> Empa, ETH Zürich and Bucher Municipal have developed a hybrid-electric powertrain for road sweepers that's said to consume half the energy of diesel-hydraulic vehicles and reduce emissions by more than 60 percent.
> 
> The design replaces conventional hydraulic power distribution with a more efficient electric drive system. A small natural gas engine with a power generator acts as the drive source.
> 
> The main goal of the project was is to offer a cleaner and more efficient alternative to diesel sweepers while keeping costs on par with current technologies. Why sweepers? These vehicles spend seven hours a day at work and guzzle up to 10,000 liters of diesel per year, more than 10 times what a passenger car uses, the team say.


----------



## ekim68

Text Walking Lanes Installed in Antwerp, Belgium to Prevent Distracted Pedestrians From Colliding



> The mobile device repair shop MLab has installed Text Walking Lanes on the streets of Antwerp, Belgium to prevent distracted pedestrians from collisions that could result in dropped and damaged devices. The lanes are similar to those recently installed in other places like the city of Chongqing, China and the campus of Utah Valley University.


----------



## ekim68

The California drought is a problem Silicon Valley isn't helping to solve



> Californias drought  which last year is estimated to have cost the states agriculture industry $1.5bn and more than 17,000 seasonal jobs  has been met with a drought of ideas from some of the worlds most out-of-the-box thinkers.
> 
> But while close to $12bn went into just internet startups last year  even as analysts talk about another emerging internet bubble  only few hundred million dollars are traditionally invested in water startups every year.


----------



## ekim68

Something is rotten in Michigan: Poisoned water supplies, dissolved school districts and a massive unraveling of American democracy



> Something is rotten in the state of Michigan.
> 
> One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldnt turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigans austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyders appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself  all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of fiscal responsibility.


----------



## ekim68

Wal-Mart Learns to Live Without Everyday Poverty Wages



> The bottom line is this: The strengthening economy and competitive labor market have forced changes on the retail giant. So far, it seems to be having a beneficial effect for the employees.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Wal-Mart Learns to Live Without Everyday Poverty Wages


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Google Maps Now Warns if Your Destination Will Be Closed When You Arrive



> Google Maps is packed to the brim with useful information about the world around you like when stores closed and how long it will take you to get there. Now, the app will combine those pieces of information to warn you that a store will be closed by the time you get there.


----------



## ekim68

Water Level in Lake Powell



> Among the dams on the Colorado is Arizonas Glen Canyon Dam, which creates Lake Powell. The deep, narrow, meandering reservoir extends upstream into southern Utah. In the early 21st century, this modern marvel of engineering faced an ancient enemy: prolonged drought in the American Southwest. Combined with water withdrawals that many believe are not sustainable, the drought has caused a dramatic drop in Lake Powells water level.


----------



## ekim68

Energy harnessed from humidity can power small devices



> Researchers have built devices that harness changes in atmospheric humidity to generate small amounts of electricity, lift tiny weights, and even power a toy car. In the grand scheme of things, that captured energy is not free, but its pretty darn close. The study suggests that evaporation could be used to operate a variety of gadgets that dont require a lot of power, scientists say.


----------



## ekim68

LeanChair makes a stand against sitting (or standing)



> Sitting for long periods, it turns out, is not good for your health. Unfortunately, though, standing has its own problems ... like being uncomfortable. The LeanChair offers a middle ground, reducing the risks associated with sitting and taking some of the standing weight off your legs.


----------



## ekim68

Mens rights activists rush to defend Iowa gun nut who murdered woman for sexual harassment complaint 



> Over the weekend, an Iowa man who identified himself as a born free, gun toting, Constitution loving American shot and killed a woman with whom he worked after she reportedly filed a sexual harassment claim against him. According to one local radio station, Alexander Kozak was fired from his job on Friday because of the harassment complaint, prompting him to get his gun and murder Iowa Childrens Museum employee Andrea Farrington. Farrington appears to have been the latest in a line of women to report Kozaks harassing behavior.
> 
> So, obviously he decided to kill her  thats the logical course of action to take against someone who feels targeted and harassed and says something about it, right? Well, yes, according to several mens rights activists at the Roosh V forum, an online community of pick-up artists who rushed to defend Kozaks actions on Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Wal-Mart Has $76 Billion in Undisclosed Overseas Tax Havens



> Wal-Mart Stores Inc. owns more than $76 billion of assets through a web of units in offshore tax havens around the world, though you wouldnt know it from reading the giant retailers annual report.
> 
> A new study has found Wal-Mart has at least 78 offshore subsidiaries and branches, more than 30 created since 2009 and none mentioned in U.S. securities filings. Overseas operations have helped the company cut more than $3.5 billion off its income tax bills in the past six years, its annual reports show.


----------



## ekim68

Global conflicts 'cost 13% of world GDP'



> Conflicts around the world cost $14.3tn (£9.1tn) last year, 13% of world GDP, says a survey on global peace.
> 
> That amount is equivalent to the combined economies of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, the report by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) said.
> 
> The divide between the most peaceful and the least peaceful nations was deepening, the annual report added.
> 
> Iceland is the world's most peaceful nation, whilst Syria is the least.


----------



## ekim68

GM powers data center with used Chevy Volt batteries



> General Motors believes old Chevy Volt (and eventually, Bolt) batteries have a future as backup power sources for houses and buildings that use renewable energy. In fact, the company has repurposed five old Volt batteries to help power its data center in Milford, Michigan. They store energy generated by the center's 74-kilowatt solar array and wind turbines, and then feed the surplus back to the Milford campus grid. GM senior manager Pablo Valencia said that's possible, because the batteries retain 80 percent of their storage capacity, even after they're no longer ideal for cars.


----------



## ekim68

Is Your ISP Not Following Net Neutrality? The FCCs Got A Complaint Form For That.



> Hooray! Net neutrality is finally, well and truly, the law. The courts did not uphold industry groups requests to press pause on the implementation, and so as of right now, ISPs are common carriers under Title II and are not allowed to mess around with your connections.
> 
> Does that mean theyll all behave perfectly well in perpetuity and we can live happily ever after? Well, no. Probably not. Thats not the way the world works, sadly. But it does mean that when someone breaks the rule, you can  and should  file a complaint.
> 
> The FCC has updated their new consumer help center  specifically, the internet service complaint form.


----------



## ekim68

Drone Pilots Suffer PTSD Just Like Those in Combat



> Although drone operators may be far from the battlefield, they can still develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study shows.
> 
> About 1,000 United States Air Force drone operators took part in the study, and researchers found that 4.3 percent of them experienced moderate to severe PTSD. In comparison, between 10 and 18 percent of military personnel returning from deployment typically are diagnosed with PTSD, the researchers wrote.


----------



## ekim68

Internet Wars, Chapter IV: FCC A New Hope For Consumers



> The FCC's rules of the open Internet have been in effect for less than a week, but the FCC wants ISPs to know it isn't playing around. On Friday, the FCC kicked things off by fining Verizon and Sprint a combined total of $158 million for illegal billing practices, and today the FCC launched a fine against AT&T for $100 million over misleading consumers.
> 
> The reason for this fine is focused on the inaccurate use of the term "unlimited" when advertising data plans, and for failing to disclose the actual Internet speeds that customers on "unlimited" data plans receive after hitting a specified data threshold.


----------



## DaveBurnett

"Up to" needs to be banned as well.


----------



## ekim68

India surging ahead in the field of Green Energy - 100 GW Solar Scale-Up plan



> The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, today gave its approval for stepping up of Indias solar power capacity target under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) by five times, reaching 1,00,000 MW by 2022. The target will principally comprise of 40 GW Rooftop and 60 GW through Large and Medium Scale Grid Connected Solar Power Projects. With this ambitious target, India will become one of the largest Green Energy producers in the world, surpassing several developed countries.


----------



## ekim68

Francis Strikes a Blow Against the Golden Calf



> Pope Francis has clearly embraced what he calls a very solid scientific consensus that humans are causing cataclysmic climate change that is endangering the planet. The pope has also lambasted global political leaders for their weak responses and lack of will over decades to address the issue.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street Analysts, Honestly Wrong at Last



> Sometimes the gains from a new regulatory regime are obvious. The creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is a perfect example. Your bank deposits are guaranteed by the government up to some stated amount, no matter the recklessness or irresponsibility of the bankers running the place. It wasnt always this way. Before the FDIC, bank runs were common and depositors could and did lose all their money. The changes were an enormous improvement, allowing people to safely deposit their cash without fear of a run on the bank in times of trouble. Savings increased, stress over bank accounts fell, bank lending rose. The entire economy benefitted. It was pretty hard to misconstrue the impact: a win-win-win.


----------



## ekim68

Iceland Still Ranked Worlds most Peaceful Nation: United States Inches up to 94th



> If its lack of conflict youre looking for, try Iceland.
> 
> Apparently theres something about the Nordic countries that makes them prone to outbreaks of peace. Denmark was ranked second and Finland No. 6. The other two Nordic nations, Sweden and Norway, placed were No. 13 and 17, respectively.


----------



## ekim68

China and Russia Almost Definitely Have the Snowden Docs



> Last weekend, the Sunday Times published a front-page story (full text here), citing anonymous British sources claiming that both China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents. Its a terrible article, filled with factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims about both Snowdens actions and the damage caused by his disclosure, and others have thoroughly refuted the story. I want to focus on the actual question: Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents?
> 
> I believe the answer is certainly yes, but that its almost certainly not Snowdens fault.


----------



## ekim68

'Leap Second' Clocks In On June 30



> At the end of June, a rare event will occur. Due to a barely discernible slowing of the Earth's rotation, a leap second will be added to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to keep it synchronized with the slowly lengthening solar day.
> 
> That might seem like a simple thing to do, but as John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, said when asked about keeping computer clocks synchronized: "Time gets complicated fast." Not everyone will add the leap second in the same way, or at same time. Some organizations, including Google, will do it their own way.


----------



## ekim68

The SeaQualizer Gives Doomed Fish a Fighting Chance



> Its got to be one of the worst ways to go: pulled to the surface against your will, changes in pressure attacking your body, only to be tossed away, no relief in site.
> 
> Its called barotrauma, its a bad way to die, and kills billions of fish every year. Fish inadvertently caught by sport and commercial fishers are known as bycatch, and when theyre thrown back, their inability to return to native depths sends their bodies into panic and often kills them. But a new device wants to give them a fighting chance.
> 
> Hoping to find innovative solutions to the problem, the World Wildlife Fund launched the International Smart Gear Competition in partnership with industry leaders, scientists, and fishermen. As sophisticated as the competition sounds, its solutions arent being made in a James Bond-esque lab: According to WWF, most are being pioneered by the people closest to the problemfishermen themselves.


----------



## ekim68

Using Light to Activate a Mouse's Happy Memory Protects It from Stress



> Need a little more explanation? The image shows neurons in a mouse brain that were active when the rodent formed a happy memory. And that memory had therapeutic value: When researchers artificially reactivated those neurons while the mouse was under stress, the mouse exhibited fewer depression-like behaviors. The research was published this week in Nature.
> 
> Theres still a lot to unpack here: Whats a happy memory for a mouse? Why was it so stressed out? And how can you tell if a mouse is depressed?
> 
> The work comes from MITs Susumu Tonegawa, one of the worlds foremost memory hackers. In previous experiments, Tonegawa and his colleagues have switched mices bad memories to good, and have enabled mice to retrieve memories that they couldnt access on their own. All of these experiments made use of optogenetics, a sophisticated technique in which light is used to control neurons.


(Dr. McCoy; to the Bridge.. )


----------



## ekim68

US States Economic Performance, in a Map



> The US may be classified as a rich nation, but wealth varies widely across all 50 states. We used brand-new data just released on June 10th, 2015 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis to investigate this disparity.


----------



## ekim68

Near Misses Lead to More Drone Legislation



> Consumer Drone Safety Act would require manufacturers to retrofit existing consumer drones to meet certain safety precautions, including maximum height for flight and any restricted flying zones.


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> Iceland Still Ranked Worlds most Peaceful Nation: United States Inches up to 94th


out of what? 90?

Been a rough, rough year so far US side.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Weekend-Shootings-Across-Chicago-308824041.html


----------



## ekim68

Are We Seeing the End of Homeopathy?



> Several years ago, during a lecture on Science-Based Medicine, I noted that if there were one medical pseudoscience that was vulnerable to extinction it was homeopathy. Homeopathy is perhaps the most obviously absurd medical pseudoscience. It is also widely studied, and has been clearly shown to not work. Further, there is a huge gap in the public understanding of what homeopathy is; it therefore seems plausible that the popularity of homeopathy can take a huge hit just by telling the public what it actually is.
> 
> Further, homeopathy is in a precarious regulatory position. Homeopathic products are presented and regulated as drugs, but clearly they are not, and they are also not supplements, herbal drugs, nutrition-based, or natural products. They are simply fraudulent drugs riding a wave of ignorance.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Are We Seeing the End of Homeopathy?


Homeopathy will not end while there are gullible people about. I used to be a medical rep, and one of my doctors was a private homeopathic doctor as well as being a NHS GP. I was chatting to him one day and I asked him about homeopathy. "Do you find that it works?" I said. His reply was, "It works very well for psychosomatic problems." He then laughed and winked. For me that said it all.


----------



## ekim68

Map Displays Five Years of Oil Pipeline Spills



> Industry insists that pipelines are safe, but ruptures and leaks are a daily occurrence. Eighty people have died and 389 have been injured in such incidents in the last five years.


----------



## ekim68

Air pollution is making your brain age faster



> Air pollution already messes with our genes, test scores, and mental health. But now all that pollution has a new target: your brain (and were not talking bout the dirty jokes you start telling after a few too many morning mimosas, hey-o!).
> 
> According to a recent study from the University of Southern California, our brains are actually getting polluted by the airborne toxins, which cause them to age faster, the New York Times reports:


----------



## ekim68

UK Woman Gets "World's Most Advanced" Bionic Hand Replacement



> A new technology has enabled a woman who was born without a right hand to ride a bike for the first time, among other new abilities.
> 
> Steeper Group, which is based in Leeds, created the BeBionic small hand for Nicky Ashwell, a 26-year-old from London; the company claims it is the most anatomically accurate out there and offers an unrivalled level of precision and natural movements.
> 
> To make it happen, the company used technology also found in Formula 1 cars to build an accurate skeletal structure with miniaturised components, so that it isnt too bulky. It mimics the functions of a real hand with 14 different precision grips.


----------



## ekim68

Aging Nuclear Power Plant Must Close Before It Closes Us



> We must face facts regarding the Indian Point nuclear plant. Its infrastructure is aging, its safety is dubious and most everyone knows it. What many people dont know is that it can be replaced at little cost to ratepayersand energy technologies taking its place would create new economic opportunities for New York.
> 
> Indian Pointjust 38 miles north of New York Cityis vulnerable to terrorism, has 2,000 tons of radioactive waste packed into leaking pools and relies on an unworkable evacuation plan. While some argue that transformer accidentssuch as the one that occurred last monthcan happen at any power facility, they happen with astonishing frequency at Indian Point. Its age is problematic: You wouldnt rely on a 40-year-old appliance, why extend this trust to a nuclear plant? Moreover, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says Indian Point 3 has the highest risk of earthquake damage of all the nations reactors. About 20 million people live within 50 miles of Indian Point.


----------



## ekim68

Cant We Govern Ourselves? The WTO Has Usurped This Right



> In 1995 the United States handed over its sovereignty to the World Trade Organization (WTO), an unjust international body made up of foreign people who oversee all of our dealings as they relate to international trade. They gained this power when we signed on to their charter, and we have been paying the price ever since.
> 
> Whenever WTO members feel they have been wronged, they can file a complaint against the offending country. A panel of unelected bureaucrats then adjudicates the disputes. 9 out of 10 times a complaint has been brought against the United States the WTO panel has ruled against us.


----------



## ekim68

The Best Way to Map Radiation? Bento Boxes Stuffed With Geiger Counters



> Back in 2011, a team of volunteers crammed Geiger counters into bento-shaped boxes to map the radiation following the Fukushima meltdown. It turned into the biggest collection of radiation data in history. Next up: tackling air pollution.
> 
> The nonprofit, formed one week after the March 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake to map Fukushima radiation, is called Safecast. To date, it has now gathered 32 million data points around the world using 800 sensors, making the biggest project of its kind in history.
> 
> Independent and apolitical, its based mostly in Tokyo, but the once small team has grown to include over 100 global volunteers. The data Safecast initially collected gave Japans citizens a more informed idea of where radiation existed.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: SEC hunts hackers who stole corporate emails to trade stocks



> U.S. securities regulators are investigating a group of hackers suspected of breaking into corporate email accounts to steal information to trade on, such as confidential details about mergers, according to people familiar with the matter.
> 
> The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked at least eight listed companies to provide details of their data breaches, one of the people said. The unusual move by the agency reflects increasing concerns about cyber attacks on U.S. companies and government agencies.
> 
> It is an "absolute first" for the SEC to approach companies about possible breaches in connection with an insider trading probe, said John Reed Stark, a former head of Internet enforcement at the SEC.


----------



## dwhswebhosti

Wow that is awesome, not sure how you could let it go. So much family history there.


----------



## ekim68

New NASA data show how the world is running out of water



> The worlds largest underground aquifers  a source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people  are being depleted at alarming rates, according to new NASA satellite data that provides the most detailed picture yet of vital water reserves hidden under the Earths surface.
> 
> Twenty-one of the worlds 37 largest aquifers  in locations from India and China to the United States and France  have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water was removed than replaced during the decade-long study period, researchers announced Tuesday. Thirteen aquifers declined at rates that put them into the most troubled category. The researchers said this indicated a long-term problem thats likely to worsen as reliance on aquifers grows.


----------



## ekim68

The state of encryption tools, 2 years after Snowden leaks



> Its been two years since Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents to journalists, revealing a vast high-tech surveillance operation targeting millions of Americans and foreigners around the world.
> 
> Since the first Snowden articles were published in June 2013, the global public has increasingly adopted privacy tools that use technology like strong encryption to protect themselves from eavesdroppers as they surf the Web and use their phones.
> 
> Of course, there are concerns other than the National Security Agency to contend with as well, most notably hackers and privacy-invading corporations, both of which make privacy tools that much more appealing.


----------



## ekim68

Analysts: Netflix poised to top American networks Nielsen ratings by 2016



> As Netflix continues to add more content to its streaming serviceand millions more paying subscribers each quarterthe company's viewing audience is growing fast enough to draw subjective comparisons to major American TV networks. On Thursday, an investment bank's analysts crunched the numbers and came to a substantial conclusion: Netflix will surpass the top networks' reported Nielsen viewer numbers by next year.


----------



## ekim68

Grenada Rebuilds Barrier Reefs



> BASSETERRE, St. Kitts, Jun 24 2015 (IPS) - The Eastern Caribbean nation of Grenada is following the example of its bigger neighbours Belize and Jamaica in taking action to restore coral reefs, which serve as frontline barriers against storm waves.
> 
> Coral reefs also play an extremely important role in the Caribbean tourism economy, as well as in food production and food security, but they have been adversely affected by rising sea temperatures and pollution.


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court vs. Neighborhood Segregation



> The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that policies that segregate minorities in poor neighborhoods, even if they do so unintentionally, violate the Fair Housing Act. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that so-called disparate-impact claimsclaims that challenge practices that adversely affect minoritiescan be brought under the Fair Housing Act. However, the court warned against remedies that impose outright racial quotas, a sign that disparate-impact claims must be brought cautiously.


----------



## ekim68

Paul Krugman Reveals the Real Reason Conservatives Fear Obamacare



> One conservative fear has truly come to pass. Health reform has apparently succeeded. The government can actually make a positive difference in people's lives.
> 
> The horror.


----------



## ekim68

DARPA: We Are Engineering the Organisms That Will Terraform Mars



> Its no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. If youre in the excitement camp, however, heres a nugget for you: DARPA believes that it's on the way to creating organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth.


----------



## ekim68

AMD Clarifies Why It Uses Intel Core i7 In Its Project Quantum Gaming PC 



> Recently, AMD showed off its plans for its Fiji based graphics products, among which was Project Quantum  a small form factor PC that packs not one, but two Fiji graphics processors. Since the announcement, KitGuru picked up on something, noticing that the system packs an Intel Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" CPU. We hardly need to point out that it is rather intriguing to see AMD use its largest competitor's CPU in its own product, when AMD is a CPU maker itself.


----------



## ekim68

Who Needs GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak's Amazing 1985 Car Navigation System



> With backing from Atari's cofounder, an engineer-navigator brought high-tech driving directions to carsduring the Reagan Administration.


----------



## ekim68

Additives keep lithium-ion batteries from catching fire



> Processor chips may get all the glory, but if it wasn't for lithium-ion batteries, modern electronics would look like something out of the 1950s. Unfortunately, while they may be compact and long lasting, these batteries also suffer from overheating and can become fire hazards as they get old. Now a team led by Stanford University and the Department of Energys SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has come up with an additive that holds the promise of extending lithium battery life while improving safety and performance.


----------



## ekim68

'Star Wars hoverbikes' may be coming to the US military



> Star Wars-style hoverbikes could be coming to the US military after engineers in the UK and US struck a deal with the US Department of Defense.
> 
> The bikes have similar functionality to helicopters, but overcome some of the older technology's design limitations.
> 
> The devices can be used in military as well as emergency and aid operations, the developers told the Reuters news agency.


----------



## ekim68

Major internet providers slowing traffic speeds for thousands across US



> Major internet providers, including AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon, are slowing data from popular websites to thousands of US businesses and residential customers in dozens of cities across the country, according to a study released on Monday.
> 
> The study, conducted by internet activists BattlefortheNet, looked at the results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers (ISPs), representing 75% of all wireline households across the US.
> 
> The findings come weeks after the Federal Communications Commission introduced new rules meant to protect net neutrality  the principle that all data is equal online  and keep ISPs from holding traffic speeds for ransom.
> 
> Tim Karr of Free Press, one of the groups that makes up BattlefortheNet, said the finding show ISPs are not providing content to users at the speeds theyre paying for.


----------



## ekim68

Disney World will ban selfie-sticks from its theme parks 



> Walt Disney World is banning selfie-sticks from its theme parks, citing safety concerns, a company spokeswoman said Friday morning.
> 
> Under a new policy, which takes effect Tuesday, the poles wont make it past the bag check at any Disney World theme park. The sticks also won't be allowed in Disney World water parks or DisneyQuest, a gaming attraction at Downtown Disney.


----------



## ekim68

In the Future, Autonomous Coffee Shops Might Rule the Road



> Self-driving cars are just beginning to creep onto our highways. But in the future, autonomous vehicles may dominate the roads, freeing up their human passengers to engage in all sorts of other activities. For instance, you might want to spend your morning commute pouring through your emails whilst a barista prepares your pumpkin spice latte. Wait, what?!


----------



## ekim68

Cuba first to ​eliminate mother-to-baby HIV transmission



> Cuba has become the first country to eliminate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to baby, the World Health Organisation has announced.
> 
> The WHOs director general, Margaret Chan, said it was one of the greatest public health achievements possible and an important step towards an Aids-free generation.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Cuba first to ​eliminate mother-to-baby HIV transmission


:up:


----------



## ekim68

Test Pilot Admits the F-35 Cant Dogfight



> A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet cant turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemys own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January.


----------



## ekim68

Goldman Sachs Doesnt Have Clean Hands in Greece Crisis



> According to investigative reports that appeared in Der Spiegel, the New York Times, BBC, and Bloomberg News from 2010 through 2012, Blankfein, now Goldman Sachs CEO, Cohn, now President and COO, and Loudiadis, a Managing Director, all played a role in structuring complex derivative deals with Greece which accomplished two things: they allowed Greece to hide the true extent of its debt and they ended up almost doubling the amount of debt Greece owed under the dubious derivative deals.


----------



## ekim68

National Rifle Association's Televised News Show Canceled



> The Sportsman Channel has decided to not renew the National Rifle Association's (NRA) weekday news show, Cam & Company, ending the program's two-and-a-half year run on the outdoor-themed network.
> 
> The hour-long show served as a vehicle for the NRA's frequent misinformation and extremism on the issue of gun violence. During the June 26 broadcast, host Cam Edwards announced the end of the series, effective that day.


----------



## ekim68

GinzVelo makes for gonzo transportation



> Electric bikes may help you climb hills, fight headwinds and arrive at work in a non-sweaty state, but they still won't keep you dry when it rains. That's one of the reasons that some people  mostly deep-pocketed people  are looking at human/electric hybrid velomobiles. One of the latest such vehicles to hit the road is Virginia-based inventor Peter Ginzburg's GinzVelo.


----------



## ekim68

One in Three Americans Own Guns; Culture a Factor, Study Finds



> A new study aimed at figuring out who owns gun in the United States and why suggests that about a third of Americans have at least one.
> 
> Most are white males over the age of 55, and a "gun culture" is closely linked with ownership, the team at Columbia University reports.
> 
> The study, published in the journal Injury Prevention, is one of several trying to pin down the number of gun owners in the United States. No agency keeps statistics on gun ownership and many pro-gun activists advocate keeping gun ownership private because of fears about potential future laws that might take guns away.


----------



## ekim68

Drone hunts down suspect in car theft and robbery



> The Middleton Fire Department lent the police a rubber raft and a camera-equipped DJI Phantom quadrocopter drone used in search and rescue operations to locate Phiffer. He was hiding in the water, and when the police reached him "his shoes were floating away from him," along with a "large wad of cash," Wisconsin State Journal's Ed Trevelen reported.


----------



## ekim68

Solar Impulse 2 breaks three records en route to Hawaii



> Solar Impulse 2 has started smashing records even before the longest leg of its round-the-world flight is complete. At around three quarters of the way to its next touch down in Hawaii, the single-pilot aircraft has broken the world records for longest distance and duration for solar aviation, with the record for longest ever solo flight of any kind thrown in for good measure.


----------



## ekim68

10 Companies that Might Disappear in 2016



> Small businesses rise and fall on a weekly basis. Most of us have witnessed the decline of a corner bookstore, the demise of a family-owned video shop, or the disappearance of local ice cream parlor. In many of these cases, theres often a larger, national chain just waiting to take their place.
> 
> But those big brands can fail too, and often in spectacular fashion. Think Borders or Blockbusterbig, national brands that go bankrupt after over a decade of dominance.


----------



## ekim68

Robert Reich: Something Good Finally Happened for Working Americans and Business Lobbies Are Freaking Out



> The U.S. Department of Labor just proposed raising the overtime threshold  what you can be paid and still qualify to be paid "time-and-a-half" beyond 40 hours per week  from $23,600 a year to $50,400.
> 
> This is a big deal. Some 5 million workers will get a raise.
> 
> Business lobbies are already hollering this will kill jobs. That's what they always predict  whether it's raising the minimum wage, Obamacare, family and medical leave, or better worker safety. Yet their predictions never turn out to be true.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Are Mapping the Ocean's Plastic Because 99 Percent Is Missing



> Last week, some strange news swept the science internet: Much of the plastic scientists expected to find on the ocean's surface is gone, and no one knows exactly where it is. Now the scientists behind the research have shared a first-of-its-kind map of ocean plastic with National Geographic--and it could be key to solving the mystery.


----------



## ekim68

UK government illegally spied on Amnesty International



> A court has revealed that the UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, illegally spied on human rights organization Amnesty International. It is an allegation that the agency had previously denied, but an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal backtracked on a judgement made in June which said no such spying had taken place.
> 
> The email was sent to Amnesty International yesterday, and while it conceded that the organization was indeed the subject of surveillance, no explanation has been offered. It is now clear that, for some reason, communications by Amnesty International were illegally intercepted, stored, and examined. What is not clear is when the spying happened, what data was collected and, more importantly, why it happened.


----------



## ekim68

Theresa May named internet villain of the year 



> The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has been named the UK internet industrys villain of the year for pursuing snoopers charter legislation without fully consulting the sector.
> 
> The gong, part of the annual ISPA awards, was given for forging ahead with communications data legislation that would significantly increase capabilities without adequate consultation with industry and civil society.


----------



## ekim68

Australia's vast geothermal energy resources represent thousands of years worth of untapped power



> Australia is sitting on top of some of the world's most potent geothermal energy sources, according to government estimates. Just one percent of the hot rock energy less than 5 km under the surface would be enough to meet the whole country's entire power needs for 26,000 years if it was tapped. So why aren't we seeing more movement on it?


----------



## ekim68

California tax officials blast Blue Shield in audit 



> In a scathing audit, state tax officials slammed nonprofit health insurer Blue Shield of California for stockpiling "extraordinarily high surpluses"  more than $4 billion  and for failing to offer more affordable coverage or other public benefits.


(Gives a new meaning the word 'Non-Profit', eh?  )


----------



## ekim68

Number of young homeless people in Britain is 'more than three times the official figures' 



> The true number of young people who are homeless far exceeds government figures, according to a major new study by housing experts at Cambridge University being released on Monday.
> 
> Some 83,000 homeless young people have had to rely on councils and charities for a roof over their heads during the past year  more than three times the 26,852 young people recorded in homeless figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government. And there are about 35,000 young people in homeless accommodation at any one time across Britain.


----------



## DaveBurnett

That is a very misleading story and very likely to be emotive.
For "Britain" in that story read "London".
As far as government statistics and figures are concerned the rest of Britain doesn't exist.

Even the numbers quoted (83,000) likely includes young people on council lists that are most definitely not homeless. I know that because my own son was on one of the lists when I moved from Felixstowe and left him down there because he had a good job. 
It took 6 months to get him a flat with the council. Meanwhile he was classed as homeless otherwise he would not even have got on the waiting list.


----------



## ekim68

Brazil probes currency market activity of 15 global banks



> Fifteen of the world's largest banks are under investigation on suspicion of rigging the Brazilian currency, antitrust watchdog Cade said on Thursday, the first such probe in one of the busiest foreign exchange markets globally.
> 
> In a document, Cade alleged that the banks colluded to influence benchmark currency rates in Brazil by aligning positions and pushing transactions in a way that deterred competitors from the market between 2007 and 2013, at least. Foreign exchange trading in Brazil is estimated at about $3 trillion a year, excluding swaps and derivative transactions.


----------



## ekim68

The Immersion Supercomputer: Extreme Efficiency, Needs No Water



> It sounds like science fiction: Take a supercomputer and immerse it in tanks of liquid coolant, which must be kept cool with the use of water. This sci-fi scenario has created a real-world scientific computing powerhouse.
> 
> The Vienna Science Cluster uses immersion cooling, dunking SuperMicro servers into a dielectric fluid similar to mineral oil. Servers are inserted vertically into slots in the tank, which is filled with 250 gallons of ElectroSafe fluid, which transfers heat almost as well as water but doesnt conduct an electric charge.


----------



## ekim68

Hawaii, Vermont Set Ambitious Examples for Renewables



> June marked two huge milestones in renewable energy in the U.S., with Hawaii and Vermont both passing laws that put in place the nations most ambitious renewable energy goals.
> 
> Electricity generation is the nations largest emitter of climate-changing greenhouse gases, leading many states to set goals for how much of their power should come from low-carbon renewable energy. Today, 29 states have laws mandating a certain portion of their power to be generated from renewables as a way to combat climate change, but none have gone so far as Hawaii and Vermont.


----------



## ekim68

Prototype wave energy device passes grid-connected pilot test



> A prototype wave energy device advanced with backing from the Energy Department and U.S. Navy has passed its first grid-connected open-sea pilot testing.
> 
> According to the DOE, the device, called Azura, was recently launched and installed in a 30-meter test berth at the Navys Wave Energy Test Site (WETS) in Kaneohe Bay, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.
> 
> This pilot testing is now giving U.S. researchers the opportunity to evaluate the long-term performance of the nations first grid-connected 20-kilowatt wave energy converter (WEC) device to be independently tested by a third partythe University of Hawaiiin the open ocean, the DOE said.


----------



## ekim68

What was good for Germany in 1953 is good for Greece in 2015



> Economic assistance under the Marshall plan was important to both countries, but it was the granting of debt relief that made a difference to the Germans


----------



## ekim68

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/20...14: Mega Donors Fuel Rising Cost of Elections



> In the 2014 elections, 31,976 donors  equal to roughly one percent of one percent of the total population of the United States  accounted for an astounding $1.18 billion in disclosed political contributions at the federal level. Those big givers  what we have termed the Political One Percent of the One Percent  have a massively outsized impact on federal campaigns.
> 
> Theyre mostly male, tend to be city-dwellers and often work in finance. Slightly more of them skew Republican than Democratic. A small subset  barely five dozen  earned the (even more) rarefied distinction of giving more than $1 million each. And a minute cluster of three individuals contributed more than $10 million apiece.


----------



## ekim68

China Shows How to Destroy a Market



> A market, by definition, is a place where buyers and sellers can come together to exchange goods and services. That involves buying and selling those goods. Once you eliminate that free trading, you no longer have a market.
> 
> Then there is China, where the authorities have suspended the sale of 72 percent of the A share stocks. Investors with stakes exceeding 5 percent must maintain their positions, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said.
> 
> Throughout history, rules and regulations have slowly evolved to markets. Indeed, a certain level of regulation is desirable to ensure fair dealings, transparency and efficiency. By removing the ability to freely sell shares, the Shanghai Stock Exchange no longer qualifies as a market. I dont know what it is, but if forced to come up with a name, the pursuit of accuracy would suggest calling it a government bureaucracy.


----------



## ekim68

Nvidia attempts to ease the path to deep learning



> Nvidia hopes to bring artificial intelligence to a wider range of applications with an update to its Digits software for designing neural networks.
> 
> Digits version 2, released Tuesday, comes with a graphical user interface, potentially making it accessible to programmers beyond the typical user-base of academics and developers who specialize in AI, said Ian Buck, Nvidia vice president of accelerated computing.
> 
> The previous version could be controlled only through the command line, which required knowledge of specific text commands and forced the user to jump to another window to view the results.


----------



## ekim68

University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth



> A Canadian university claims to have saved between 25 and 40 percent of its network bandwidth by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network.
> 
> The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.


----------



## ekim68

New network design exploits cheap, power-efficient flash memory without sacrificing speed.



> Random-access memory, or RAM, is where computers like to store the data theyre working on. A processor can retrieve data from RAM tens of thousands of times more rapidly than it can from the computers disk drive.
> 
> But in the age of big data, data sets are often much too large to fit in a single computers RAM. The data describing a single human genome would take up the RAM of somewhere between 40 and 100 typical computers.
> 
> Flash memory  the type of memory used by most portable devices  could provide an alternative to conventional RAM for big-data applications. Its about a tenth as expensive, and it consumes about a tenth as much power.
> 
> The problem is that its also a tenth as fast. But at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June, MIT researchers presented a new system that, for several common big-data applications, should make servers using flash memory as efficient as those using conventional RAM, while preserving their power and cost savings.


----------



## ekim68

Could black phosphorus be the next silicon? 



> As scientists continue to hunt for a material that will make it possible to pack more transistors on a chip, new research from McGill University and Université de Montréal adds to evidence that black phosphorus could emerge as a strong candidate.


----------



## ekim68

What College Majors Are Most Likely to Marry Each Other?



> An old piece of wisdom in romance is that opposites attract. Perhaps it's true in some ways, but when it comes to college majors, we found more evidence that many Americans just want to date themselves.
> 
> As part of the US Census, Americans are asked about their marital status, as well as their college major if they have an undergraduate degree. We analyzed US Census data and found that Americans marry people within their own major at an unusually high rate. Looking at the 50 most common college majors, over 10% of married partners that both have college degrees had the same major. This number is as high as 21% for certain majors.


----------



## ekim68

ISRO successfully launches PSLV-C28 carrying 5 UK satellites



> SRIHARIKOTA: Heralding a new era, India tonight launched its heaviest commercial space mission ever with its polar rocket successfully putting five British satellites into the intended orbit after a flawless takeoff.


----------



## ekim68

2016 Nissan Maxima keeps an eye on drowsy drivers



> Falling asleep at the wheel is no joke and, according to the American Automobile Association, it results in 6,400 fatal crashes a year. A number of auto manufacturers are recognizing this problem and to mark Drowsy Driving Awareness Day on April 6, Nissan is presenting its Driver Attention Alert (DAA) system as part of the safety package for the 2016 Nissan Maxima, which is debuting at the New York International Auto Show.
> 
> Nissan's DAA is based on the premise that most drivers don't just zonk out without warning  they show gradual deterioration in performance that can be detected before the situation becomes dangerous.


----------



## ekim68

Demonstration of novel high-power acoustic through-the-wall sensor



> A high-power acoustic sensor, capable of detecting and tracking persons through steel walls of cargo containers, trailer truck bodies, and train cars, has been developed and demonstrated. The sensor is based on a new concept for narrowband mechanical-impact acoustic transmitters and matched resonant receivers. The lightweight, compact, and low-cost transmitters produce high-power acoustic pulses at one or more discrete frequencies with little input power.


----------



## ekim68

The Cure Culture



> There is no cure for cystic fibrosis. There is no cure for cancer. There is no cure for diabetes. There is no cure for HIV. There is no cure for Tay-sachs or Huntington's disease or ALS.
> 
> And yet, scientists, the media, and the foundations that fund research consistently promise patients and their families that cures for very serious, lifelong diseases are imminent, or at least "around the corner." For cystic fibrosis, that cure has been pitched as being gene therapy, in which a faulty gene is replaced with a functioning one.
> 
> Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? What is a cure? What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? What does it mean to be cured of a disease that has already, soon after you're born or diagnosed, wreaked havoc on your body? And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatmentsreal, honest-to-god treatmentsthat can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?


----------



## ekim68

Denmark Hits 116 Per Cent of Energy Needs With Wind Power . . . Australia Orders Halt To Wind Power Investments



> European countries continue to put the rest of the world (including the United States) to shame in amazing reductions of their use of carbon footprints and the use of clean energy. Last week saw a particularly impressive achievement for Denmark which managed to produce 140 per cent of the countrys electricity needs. In the meantime, the vehemently anti-environmental Administration of Tony Abbott in Australia cracked down on wind power to prevent further investments by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.


----------



## ekim68

Something to Like in the Iran Deal



> While the world is distracted by the unending Greek saga (will it or wont it leave the euro?) and the epic Chinese stock-market meltdown (and manipulation), something really important is going on. Three words sum it up: Iran and oil.
> 
> Negotiators have reached a deal with Iran to constrain its nuclear arms program. Despite the pessimism and outright fear-mongering, an agreement has been reached.
> 
> Dont let China's stock market and Greece's debt melodrama distract you from paying attention to this issue -- now that this deal is all but consummated, the repercussions are potentially enormous.


----------



## ekim68

Free Public Transport: a Good Idea?



> If public transport were free in your city, would you leave your car at home?


----------



## ekim68

Livin' On The Edge: The Precarious Architecture of 7 European Cliff Cities



> Long before overcrowding and overpopulation was forcing humanity to think about building vertically, Europeans were already building in, on, and even over the edge of sheer cliffs. But forget simplistic dugouts and cliff caves. Across Europe there are towns and even portions of cities that are as precarious as anything built by ancient peoples simply looking for shelter.


----------



## valis

this surprised me; I'd thought we were less dependent on coal by now.

http://gizmodo.com/coal-no-longer-uss-most-popular-electricity-source-for-1717786916


----------



## ekim68

Twitter Stock Jumps Nearly 8 Percent on Fake Bloomberg News Post



> This is a real story, but a fake one caused Twitters stock to surge nearly 8 percent. The bogus report, headlined Twitter Attracts Suitors and attributed to Bloomberg News, said Twitter had received a $31 billion buyout offer, a clever ploy to goose the companys shares.
> 
> The stock dropped soon after but was still trading about 3 percent higher from yesterdays close.
> 
> The hoax was artfully deployed, appearing on a forged website found at bloomberg.market with a post designed to look exactly like a Bloomberg article*. The fake news story keyed into one possible scenario for the troubled tech company, causing some investors to believe it had received an actual buyout bid.** Twitters current market value is just under $25 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Father of the brave: the man who rescues enslaved women from Isis 



> Abu Shujaa has become something of a legend among his Yazidi community. He runs an underground network across Syria to free Yazidis kidnapped by Isis. The group is believed to have taken hundreds of women and children hostage during a bloody assault on the Sinjar area of western Iraq last August.


----------



## ekim68

UK Tories launch quiet inquiry into privatising the NHS



> David Cameron repeatedly promised to protect "our NHS" but now the world's most beloved healthcare system is on the chopping block, thanks to a quiet inquiry in the unelected House of Lords.
> 
> Lord David Prior, the former Tory Party chairman who now serves as Under Secretary of State for NHS Productivity, moved the creation of the inquiry in a debate in the Lords on 9 July. The Tory peer Lord Cormack spoke in favour of the move, saying "Whether the extra funding comes from compulsory insurances or certain charges matters not, but it has to come." Sure, it "matters not" if you're LARPing a Dickensian robber-baron who can't fathom the possibility that the people whose pitiful personal wealth you've harvested like so much krill through attacks on working conditions, trade unions, and benefits won't actually have any money to pay to keep themselves healthy.


----------



## ekim68

This Man Took On Fox News And Became A Hero To His City



> When Fox News finally ambushed him in the hallway, Wiener knew what he was going to do. He didnt want to answer the questions because he knew Fox News was not going to make a good faith effort to cover the issue. He didnt want to just duck his head and hide, because he knew how that looked on TV. So he addressed Fox News directly: Fox News is not real news. And youre not a real reporter.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> This Man Took On Fox News And Became A Hero To His City


:up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

UK Tories launch quiet inquiry into privatising the NHS

If you read the article it does say that the point proposed and seconded was actually mute since it was already being investigated.
It struck me like the gentlemen were only on their required attendance for collecting fees and were not entirely in touch with current goings on.


----------



## ekim68

Oh, Great.....

Drone firing handgun appears in video



> Home-made quadcopter capable of firing pistol at least four times while airborne posted on YouTube


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> UK Tories launch quiet inquiry into privatising the NHS
> 
> If you read the article it does say that the point proposed and seconded was actually mute since it was already being investigated.
> It struck me like the gentlemen were only on their required attendance for collecting fees and were not entirely in touch with current goings on.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Free Public Transport: a Good Idea?


My wife and I have a bus pass. We often take the bus into Folkstone or Dover for shopping or a look round. We tend to use a pub chain called Wetherspoons. The food and drinks are really cheap and of good quality. This is usually a quiet day out, and very nice too.


----------



## ekim68

OSU researchers discover the unicorn  seaweed that tastes like bacon! 



> NEWPORT, Ore.  Oregon State University researchers have patented a new strain of a succulent red marine algae called dulse that grows extraordinarily quickly, is packed full of protein and has an unusual trait when it is cooked.
> 
> This seaweed tastes like bacon.


----------



## valis

wow. I could make the obligatory stoner joke here, but recent reads on the powers of algae will stop me from doing that.


----------



## ekim68

The Disastrous Loan Deal That Shows Wall Street Still Has a Wild West



> JPMorgan Chase & Co. knew federal authorities were investigating the largest drug-testing lab in the U.S.
> 
> But the New York-based bank didnt share that information about Millennium Health LLC with the people who were about to lend the company $1.8 billion in April 2014 because Millennium said it wasnt material, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
> 
> In most markets, such an omission would be regarded as unethical or worse. But JPMorgan was playing in the $800 billion market for leveraged loans, where just about anything goes -- and often does.


----------



## ekim68

Echo chamber of outrage: Ars attends a climate skeptics summit



> A political buffet offering everything but science.


----------



## ekim68

The Why of Weak Wages


----------



## ekim68

Spying on the SpiesWith Google Maps



> We live in a surveillance state. Accept it. There are more than 2,300 security cameras in Manhattan. At least 10,000 in Chicago. Roughly half a million in London. And then there are all the secret, and not so secret, ways the government keeps tabs on friends and foes alike.


----------



## ekim68

Antineutrino Detectors Could Be Key to Monitoring Iran's Nuclear Program



> President Obama has made it clear in a statement that the Iran nuclear deal signed yesterday was built on verification. Technology built to detect an elusive subatomic particle called the antineutrino could help.
> 
> The International Atomic Energy Agency wants a reactor-monitoring tool that is portable, safe, inexpensive, and remotely controllable. Antineutrino detectors, which give a peek into how much uranium and plutonium are in a reactor core, promise all of that.
> 
> The technology, which has been in the works since the early 2000s, has improved tremendously in the past five years, and it is now almost ready for practical use, says Patrick Huber, a physics professor at the Center of Neutrino Physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Less than two years from now, you should have at least one maybe several types of antineutrino detector technologies that would work as nuclear safeguard detectors.


----------



## ekim68

They're No. 1: U.S. Wins Math Olympiad For First Time In 21 Years



> In one of this year's most intense international competitions, the United States has come out as best in the world  and this time, we're not talking about soccer.
> 
> This week, the top-ranked math students from high schools around the country went head-to-head with competitors from more than 100 countries at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Chiang Mai, Thailand. And, for the first time in more than two decades, they won.


----------



## ekim68

6 surprising things the government spends way more on than the Pluto mission



> NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto showed us an entirely new world this week. And it did it for less than you might think.
> 
> The whole mission cost about $700 million. That's about $46.7 million per year for the 15 years in which scientists designed, built, and steered a probe to Pluto, 3 billion miles away.


----------



## ekim68

Plastic Roads Sound Like a Crazy Idea, Maybe Arent



> America has an infrastructure problem. Part of that problem is our roads, which are either in terrible condition or in the process of being torn up by road crews wholl make them betteruntil, that is, theyre in terrible condition again. Its time to try something radical, and for that, we (as always) look to the Dutch for inspiration.
> 
> A Dutch construction company called VolkerWessels is partnering with the city of Rotterdam to create a prototype for a prefabricated plastic road. If it works, it would be durable, fast to construct, and way better for the environment than asphalt.


----------



## ekim68

Cuban flag flies at embassy in Washington



> WASHINGTON  Throngs of demonstrators gathered Monday to witness the raising of the flag of Cuba over the Cuban Embassy, the first time it has flown here since the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with the communist country 54 years ago.


----------



## ekim68

Meet Your Three New National Monuments



> President Obama just created three new National Monuments, protecting over 1 million acres of land in California, Nevada and Texas for the enjoyment of the American people. Where are they, why were they protected and how can you use them? Lets take a detailed look at each.


----------



## ekim68

Dawn Of The Emotionally Aware App, Possible Future Emotion Chip To Herald Devices That Respond To Feelings



> Computer learning has helped a multitude of different technologies become a reality, with one in particular being emotion-detection. Most examples I've seen in the past have been simple, though, such as being able to detect a smile or a frown - something that shouldn't be that challenging. But with today's super-fast computers, and even mobile devices, we're now able to detect emotion with far greater granularity.


----------



## ekim68

The Fossil Fuel Energy Industry Is Now Entering Terminal Decline



> Its time to make the call  fossil fuels are finished. The rest is detail.
> 
> The detail is interesting and important, as I expand on below. But unless we recognise the central proposition: that the fossil fuel age is coming to an end, and within 15 to 30 years  not 50 to 100  we risk making serious and damaging mistakes in climate and economic policy, in investment strategy and in geopolitics and defence.
> 
> Ive written previously about 2015 being the year the Dam of Denial breaks, referring to the end of denial that climate change requires urgent, transformational economic change. While related, this is different. It is now becoming clear weve reached a tipping point where fossil fuels will enter terminal decline, independently of climate policy action.


----------



## ekim68

Another article along the same lines.....

Tesla Just Did Something Really Big



> Tesla has rocked the world of high-performance automobiles with the introduction of its new Ludicrous mode rapid acceleration feature. The internal-combustion engine business may never be the same.
> 
> Regular readers of mine usually know at least two things about me: First, I believe that all predictions are silly, more about marketing than actually trying to figure out what comes next. Second, I am a fan of sleek, go-fast machines, preferably beautiful ones from Italy, Germany or the U.K.
> 
> Thus, I am going to break with both of these traditions to make a forecast about the future of the automotive industry. Gasoline-powered cars are toast. They are over, finito, kaput, the walking dead who have not yet realized they are goners. It is highly likely that in your lifetime, you will no longer see the mass manufacturing of gasoline-powered automobiles. My guess is that by 2035, if not sooner, the majority of automobiles sold in the U.S. and Europe will no longer be gasoline-powered.


----------



## ekim68

More children living in poverty now than during recession



> A higher percentage of children live in poverty now than did during the Great Recession, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation released Tuesday.
> 
> About 22% of children in the U.S. lived below the poverty line in 2013, compared with 18% in 2008, the foundation's 2015 Kids Count Data Book reported. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Human and Health Service's official poverty line was $23,624 for a family with two adults and two children.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists find first drug that appears to slow Alzheimer's disease



> Scientists appear to have broken a decades-long deadlock in the battle against Alzheimers disease after announcing trial results for the first drug that appears to slow the pace of mental decline.
> 
> The drug, called solanezumab, was shown to stave off memory loss in patients with mild Alzheimers over the course of several years. The effects would have been barely discernible to patients or their families, scientists said, and it is no cure. But the wider implications of the results have been hailed as hugely significant because it is the first time any medicine has slowed the rate at which the disease damages the brain.


----------



## ekim68

These Are the Top 20 Cities Americans Are Ditching



> New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu: They're all places you would think would be popular destinations for Americans. So it might come as a surprise that these are among the cities U.S. residents are fleeing in droves.
> 
> The map below shows the 20 metropolitan areas that lost the greatest share of local people to other parts of the country between July 2013 and July 2014, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The New York City area ranked 2nd, losing about a net 163,000 U.S. residents, closely followed by a couple surrounding suburbs in Connecticut. Honolulu ranked fourth and Los Angeles ranked 14th. The Bloomberg calculations looked at the 100 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas.


----------



## ekim68

Pocket-Sized SCiO Spectrometer Analyzes Chemical Composition Of Anything, Displays It On Your Smartphone



> Is that a tricorder in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? While weve seen handheld devices that mimic the look and feel of Star Trek Communicators, the handheld SCiO will truly make you feel like a member Dr. McCoys medical team.
> 
> The SCiO turns science fiction into science fact by shrinking mass spectrometry technology used in traditional lab settings into a device small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. While [pricey] handheld spectrometers have been available for researchers, the SCiO is the first such device marketed directly at consumers after having a successful funding run via Kickstarter.


----------



## ekim68

Study: When Human Consumption Slows, Planet Earth Can Heal



> Despite the oft-repeated claim that the recent decline in U.S. carbon emissions was due to the so-called 'fracking boom,' new research published Tuesday shows that it was the dramatic fall in consumption during the Great Recession that deserves credit for this drop.
> 
> As nations grapple with the best strategy for decreasing carbon emissions ahead of the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Paris, the report, published in the journal Nature Communications, underscores the need for communities to transition away from an economy based on endless growth and towards a more renewable energy system to stem the growing climate crisis.


----------



## ekim68

15 Projects NASA Wants To Change From Science Fiction To Science Fact



> The projects funded by NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program sound more like a list of science fiction dreams than plausible research, yet thats exactly what they are. These 15 projects just received $100,000 to explore how feasible they can be.


----------



## ekim68

Talking to Yourself While You Work Can Boost Your Cognitive Ability



> Whether its finishing a report or searching for lost keys, if you want to get through a task, focus is everything. Distractions are everywhere, and they can really slow you down. If you find yourself lagging through something because youre distracted, try talking yourself through the process out loud.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Talking to Yourself While You Work Can Boost Your Cognitive Ability


I knew I was not crazy for talking to myself.


----------



## DaveBurnett

That can't be right, my wife would be a genius if it was!!


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> That can't be right, my wife would be a genius if it was!!


----------



## ekim68

Israel Security Establishment Breaks With Bibi on Iran Deal



> Theres a deep crack emerging in the veneer of wall-to-wall support offered by Israels political leadership to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his war against the Iran nuclear agreement.
> 
> The crack has a name you might recognize: the Israeli security establishment. You know  the folks whose job it is to identify and address threats to Israels safety. A small but growing group of high-power ex-commanders has been speaking out in media interviews and op-ed essays in the past few days, saying that Netanyahu has got the Iran issue wrong.


----------



## ekim68

Ugh....! 

World's smelliest flower in full bloom in Berkeley



> The world's smelliest flower is in full bloom at the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley. The specimen nicknamed Trudy began to spread at 5 p.m. yesterday, giving off blasts of a horrific odor, and was in full glory this morning.
> 
> Often called the "corpse flower," the enormous plant from Sumatra, Indonesia, reeks of rotting flesh when it produces one enormous stalk that reaches 10 to 15 feet. A pleated skirtlike covering that's bright green on the outside and a deep purple on the inside surrounds the phallus-like branch.


----------



## ekim68

Check Out the Latest Views of Teslas Massive Gigafactory



> Tesla is building the biggest battery factory in the world, in the desert near Reno, Nevada. Here are some of the latest images of the project, taken this week.
> 
> At 10 million square feet, this will be one of the biggest industrial factories ever built. Tesla has been secretive about the operations, declining requests to take reporters onto the site.


----------



## ekim68

Fred the Tortoise Receives a 3D Printed Shell After a Horrific Fire Destroys His Original



> Today, however, comes news out of Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, where another tortoise, named Fred, has received an entire 3D printed shell as a replacement for one that he had lost. Fred specifically is a Red-Footed Tortoise (Chelonoidis carbonaris), a species found in many areas of South America. Unfortunately he was the victim of a recent forest fire that completely deteriorated the majority of his shell.


----------



## ekim68

Anti-Iran Deal Groups Better Funded Than Pro-Deal Groups By Nearly Five to One



> The Democratic Party has latched onto the message that critics of the Iran deal are spending big money over the next 60 days to kill the agreement in Congress. Last Wednesday, for example, House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) commented that, I know theres tens of millions of dollars lined up against the agreement. And Obama, interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last week, criticized lobbyists and money working against the deal.
> 
> Indeed, the operating budgets of groups opposing the deal are massive.


----------



## ekim68

SALt lamp runs on a glass of water and two teaspoons of salt



> Many of the more than 7,000 islands in the Philippines lack access to electricity, so after the sun goes down light usually comes by way of kerosene lamps. While cheap, these fire hazards are bad for the environment and human health. This, combined with the cost of keeping them burning has given one startup the impetus to build a better solution. The SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting) lamp burns for eight hours at a time running on only a glass of water and two teaspoons of salt.


----------



## ekim68

Ten Indications Iran Wants Business Not Bombs



> There are two Irans. One wants bombs. One wants business. Business Iran, for the moment, is on top. The big bomb goes on ice, and American and European trade comes back. After all, its only business. In Iran, even senior clergy are businessmen and have the millions to prove it. Iranians have at least ten reasons to go along with the agreement. They are:


----------



## ekim68

Hawking, Musk and Wozniak call for ban on offensive AI weapons



> Hundreds of robotics and artificial intelligence researchers have called for a ban on autonomous weapons development.
> 
> In an open letter, the researchers issued a dire warning that a "global arms race is virtually inevitable". The letter calls for a "ban on offensive autonomous weapons", fearing that the reality of armed quadcopters - designed to search and eliminate people - are just years away.


----------



## ekim68

The Underground Hacking Economy is Alive and Well



> Many businesses around the world are struggling financially, but sadly the underground hacking economy seems to be alive and well. In July of this year, the FBI charged two Russian hackers for hacking into US Financial Institutions that resulted in the theft of millions of dollars from more than 800,000 victim bank accounts. One of these same hackers and several other hackers, were also charged with the stealing and selling of at least 160 million credit and debit card numbers, resulting in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the indictment, these losses included $300 million in losses for just three of the corporate victims and immeasurable losses to the identity theft victims, due to the costs associated with stolen identities and fraudulent charges.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers predict material with record-setting melting point



> Using advanced computers and a computational technique to simulate physical processes at the atomic level, researchers at Brown University have predicted that a material made from hafnium, nitrogen, and carbon would have the highest known melting point, about two-thirds the temperature at the surface of the sun.


----------



## ekim68

This conspiracy theory says ad tech companies deliberately keep web pages loading slow because they make more money that way



> But this conspiracy theory is worth discussing because, apparently, some people in the industry believe it (even if it's not true.) And two of our sources indicated that the system could be faster but can be gamed by larger, slower players. Naturally, because Business Insider couldn't confirm the theory, we decided not to name any of the companies involved in the allegations. But they are household names in the business. We're publishing this information anyway because it illustrates the paranoia and gossip that is rife within the industry, especially as publishers are dependent for revenue on companies they believe slow down their products.


----------



## ekim68

Would Republicans Support the Americans with Disabilities Act Today?



> Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, and requires businesses and public services to make their facilities accessible to disabled individuals. At the time of its enactment in 1990, the legislation was a point of extraordinary consensus, which helped it clear Congress with overwhelming majorities, and a quarter century later, it remains one of the most politically bulletproof federal regulatory laws on the books. The occasion this weekend invited great fanfare, including from Republican House Speaker John Boehner (who became a representative only after ADAs passage) and Jeb Bush (whose father signed the bill into law). But conservatives have generally greeted the anniversary with silence, and it's a fitting silence because it accounts for the critical ways American politics have changed in the intervening 25 years.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Streets Secret Dividend from the Fed May Go to Fixing Potholes



> Your humble editor and publisher of Wall Street On Parade might have had a little something to do with a growing mutiny in Congress. Back on November 4, 2012 and again on July 25, 2013, we blew the whistle on an obscene, secret entitlement program between the Fed and the too-big-to-fail banks: a century old program where every year, boom or bust, despite the overall level of interest rates in the markets, the Fed pays out a risk-free, guaranteed 6 percent dividend to its member banks. (All Fed member banks get the dividend but the lions share goes to the biggest Wall Street banks because their capital dwarfs all other banks.)
> 
> Now, after more than a hundred years, theres a plan in Congress to shrink that payout to 1.5 percent and fix our crumbling roads with the savings. Only banks with $1 billion or more in assets would be affected.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> This conspiracy theory says ad tech companies deliberately keep web pages loading slow because they make more money that way


I go along with that.
Was just at this site that has been redone and it's bad;
http://www.wellbuzz.com/dr-oz-gener...osquitoes-sunscreen-expiration-date-base-tan/
5 pages just to read a short story.

I block everything but let it happen just to see how bad it is.
Then click link to here http://www.rantcars.com/2014/09/02/...m=Title4&utm_content=invent-wellbuzz#slide_54

Seem like every story was really an ad.

Sure glad I block ads because ads like these are from lowlifes.


----------



## ekim68

Renewables briefly covered 78 percent of German electricity



> At the end of July, the storm Zeljko passed over northern Europe, causing considerable wind damage and flooding in some areas. Here in southern Germany, however, it was a relatively sunny day. In the north, where it was windy, Germany has most of its wind turbines installed. In the south, it has most of its solar. The combination of sunny weather in the south with strong wind throughout the country is rare  and led to a new record.


----------



## DaveBurnett

This conspiracy theory says ad tech companies deliberately keep web pages loading slow because they make more money that way

I don't agree with that, BUT I do think they deliberately reduce the content/size of each page so you have to view more pages and get the hit counts up.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I saw a funny comment on a site today about how to be remembered.

Write in your will that you wish to be cremated. When you are on your death bed swallow as many popcorn kernels as you can.


----------



## pyritechips

Muahahaha! I should do that with mine!


----------



## ekim68

Judge rules research chimps are not legal persons



> A state judge in New York has dealt the latest blow to an animal rights groups attempt to have chimpanzees declared legal persons. In a decision handed down this morning, New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe ruled that two research chimps at Stony Brook University are not covered by a writ of habeas corpus, which typically allows human prisoners to challenge their detention. The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), which brought the lawsuit in an attempt to free the primates, has vowed to appeal.


----------



## ekim68

Sharp Plans to Launch DC-powered Air Conditioner in 2015



> Sharp Corp aims to release an air conditioner powered by direct-current (DC) electricity within 2015.
> 
> The company made the comment in response to a question by Nikkei Electronics. The air conditioner will be released as the first product in its "DC Appliance" series.


----------



## ekim68

$75,000 in rewards offered to catch operators who flew drones above fires



> San Bernardino County supervisors unanimously agreed Tuesday to offer $75,000 in rewards for help in tracking down drone operators who interfered with firefighters during three major wildfires this summer.
> 
> After the unmanned devices were spotted flying above flames and smoke from the blazes this year  which altogether burned about 36,000 acres  fire crews were forced to ground water-dropping aircraft. Officials said the delays allowed the fires to spread, resulting in devastating property losses.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> $75,000 in rewards offered to catch operators who flew drones above fires


Guess they can turn them self in and make money from this.


----------



## pyritechips

hewee said:


> Guess they can turn them self in and make money from this.


Ha Harry! If that's the way it worked I would confess to a lot of crimes!


----------



## ekim68

What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea



> China has been feverishly piling sand onto reefs in the South China Sea for the past year, creating seven new islets in the region. It is straining geopolitical tensions that were already taut.


----------



## ekim68

Homemade Movies in Real Time on the ISS....:up:

Our evolving planet, captured from the ISS


----------



## pyritechips

*West Kelowna firefighters' efforts interfered with by drones*



> B.C. Wildfire Service says one of its helicopters has been grounded due to unmanned aerial vehicles flying close to the 560-hectare wildfire.
> 
> "We want to stress the fact that this is illegal," said Fire Information Officer Melissa Klassen.
> 
> "Anytime you have an active wildfire, the airspace directly over the wildfire within the radius of five nautical miles is restricted."


----------



## ekim68

How Driverless Cars Could Turn Parking Lots into City Parks



> A huge amount of urban traffic comes from cars circling for available parking. Robot fleets could change all that.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Users Are Talking About Race. So Should the GOP



> If Facebook userswhich is to say, most of ushad their way, the GOP candidates taking the stage during the debate tonight would have an honest and open conversation about race.
> 
> And also, theyd all ride into Cleveland on winged unicorns.
> 
> That type of discussion is, of course, unlikely, but according to new data released by Facebook today, race relations were the most talked-about political issue on the site during the period between May 29th and July 28th of this year. In second place was Mexico, followed by the economy, LGBT issues, and immigration. The rankings are based on how many posts, likes, shares, and comments these topics have received.


----------



## ekim68

Currently Quantum computers might be where Rockets were at the time of Robert Goddard



> There have been comparisons of current quantum computers to classical computers to the Wright Brothers flyer against lighter than air vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Federal Judge Strikes Down Idaho Ag-Gag Law, Defends Undercover Investigations Of Food Industry



> An Idaho law enacted to permit the state to jail anyone, who conducts undercover investigations and secretly records animal abuse, was rejected as unconstitutional by a federal judge today. The decision marked the first time a federal court had struck down a states ag-gag law.


----------



## ekim68

Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line



> Yesterday, one of New Zealand's major energy producers announced that it is planning on shuttering the last of the country's coal-fired power stations in 2018. The plant's extended life comes despite the fact that running it has become economically marginalthe company that runs it says it is locked into a coal delivery contract until mid-2017 and has substantial stockpiles on site.
> 
> New Zealand is fortunate to have abundant renewable energy sources, including a number of large hydroelectric plants. Fossil fuels have mostly been used to supplement the hydroelectric production during years of lower rainfall. But the country has also benefitted from trends that are seen in most other industrialized nations. Energy demand has largely been stable due to increased efficiency, while the cost of other renewable power sources has dropped.


----------



## ekim68

Munichs Got Its Eye on a Huge Highway System for Cyclists



> Germany gets a lot of things right. Huge beer mugs. Amusingly long words made up on a whim. And best of all, a highway system made for going as fast as possible.
> 
> Now, Munich wants to extend the thrill of the open highway to cyclists with a network of bike lanes running through the city and into the suburbs, in a bid to encourage car-free commuting.
> 
> The ambitious plan calls for a network of 14 two-way bike paths, each 13 feet wide and fully segregated from automobile traffic, that would spread out over an area of about 400 square miles. No crossroads, no traffic lights. Its an autobahn for cyclists, or, as the Germans obviously call it, a Radschnellverbindungen.


----------



## ekim68

Internet search engines may be influencing elections



> What were talking about here is a means of mind control on a massive scale that there is no precedent for in human history. That may sound hyperbolic, but Robert Epstein says its not an exaggeration. Epstein, a research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research in Vista, California, has found that the higher a politician ranks on a page of Internet search results, the more likely you are to vote for them.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Internet search engines may be influencing elections


This is a new search engine I found last week.

http://www.goodgopher.com/

Learn what makes Good Gopher the internet's search engine for truth seekers.


----------



## ekim68

Breathalyzing bike lock keeps tipsy cyclists from riding drunk



> You'd be surprised by the amount of damage and havoc that an inebriated bicyclist can inflict just by swerving through traffic, ignoring stop signs or falling off their bikes into the paths of oncoming cars. To prevent this sort of thing from happening, the Alcoho-Lock from Japanese firm KOOWHO combines the functionalities of a breathalyzer and bike lock. It works on the same principle as the ignition locks DUI offenders are often required to install on their cars. You simply blow into a mouthpiece on the underside of the lock and wait for the device to measure the amount of alcohol on your breath. If it's below the legal limit, the lock releases and you can be on your merry way. If it's above the legal limit the Alcoho-Lock will totally rat you out, sending a warning text to a family member or friend telling them you're smashed. That contact will then have the option to remotely unlock the device on your behalf.


----------



## poochee

:up:


----------



## ekim68

poochee said:


> :up:


:up:


----------



## DaveBurnett

I'd make it compulsory and sabotage it so it never unlocked. 
I think cyclists are the most badly behaved and rudest road users that you can find. 
Also they should be forced to have insurance and pay road tax like ALL other road users.

I used to cycle a lot, but I'm now ashamed to have been one.


----------



## ekim68

Not sure why you're ashamed to have been a cyclist....It's a good way to travel and it doesn't pollute like vehicles and besides, maybe you were one of the better behaved and became a role model to a few others....


----------



## ekim68

Forests grapple with 8,500 gun incidents



> CASTLE ROCK, Colo.  Perched around a secluded campfire in the Rocky Mountains, Glenn Martin jerked forward, said, "Ow," and died. The wayward bullet that struck him in the national forest has campers and other users calling for changes in recreational shooting policy.


----------



## ekim68

The Surge Fallacy



> Having misunderstood the lessons of the Iraq War, U.S. Republicans are taking a dangerously hawkish turn on foreign policy.


----------



## ekim68

Garbage to Gas



> What was once the I-95 landfill near Lorton, Virginia, is now dozens of acres of rolling green fields - dotted by more than 200 metal pipes emerging from the grass.
> 
> The pipes are wellheads for natural gas, and they are collecting the methane generated by more than 10 million tons of decomposing garbage dumped by Washington, D.C.-area residents over the course of 30 years.
> 
> A vacuum pump draws the gas from underground, through the wellheads, and connects it to roughly 14 miles of pipeline that run throughout the landfill. Under each wellhead, says Mike Malfitano, an environmental technical specialist for Fairfax County, theres a three-foot bore hole that goes 110 feet down into the waste mass.
> 
> Although it closed in 1995, county officials expect the landfill to keep emitting gas for at least the next decade. On its best days, says Fairfax County environmental engineer Chris Meoli, the landfill generates 2,000 cubic feet per minute of gas - enough to create 4.9 megawatts of electricity. Its more than enough to power the Noman M. Cole wastewater treatment plant three miles down the road, saving the county as much as $500,000 a year in power costs, according to a 2015 county report. Whats left over is sold to the grid.


----------



## ekim68

9 charged in US insider trading scheme involving hackers



> NEW YORK (Reuters) -- An alliance of U.S.-based stock traders and computer hackers in Ukraine made as much as $100 million in illegal profits over five years after stealing confidential corporate press releases, U.S. authorities said on Tuesday.
> 
> The charges mark the first time that U.S. prosecutors have brought criminal charges for a securities fraud scheme that involved hacked inside information, in this case 150,000 press releases from distributors Business Wire, MarketWired and PR Newswire.


----------



## ekim68

Foxconn pledges $5b investment in India amid rising Chinese labour costs



> "Made in India" on high-tech gadgets is expected to become a future norm after Foxconn inked a US$5-billion contract on Saturday that aims to build a manufacturing facility in the western Indian state of Maharashtra over the next 5 years.
> 
> The deal, which is one of the largest foreign direct investments seen in the history of India, comes amid a booming domestic Indian market as well as a pricier labour costs in China, which became an electronics production powerhouse due to its relatively cheaper labour.


----------



## ekim68

Lenovo used a hidden Windows feature to ensure its software could not be deleted



> A recently uncovered feature  which had been swept under the rug  allowed new Lenovo laptops to use new Windows features to install the companys software and tools even if the computer was wiped.
> 
> The oddity was first noted by Ars Technica forum user ge814 and corroborated by Hacker News user chuckup.
> 
> The users discovered the issue in May when using a new Lenovo laptop that automatically and covertly overwrote a system file on every boot, which downloaded a Lenovo updater and installed software automatically, even if Windows was reinstalled from a DVD.


----------



## pyritechips

Mike; also from the same article. It makes me comfortable knowing I have a 9 year-old computer running XP.


> *A scary future*
> 
> The revelation is one that makes me slightly nervous: a truly clean, untouched install of Windows is now very difficult to achieve and computer manufacturers are quietly installing software without user knowledge.


----------



## ekim68

Just goes to show you that installing an OS begins at the BIOS level, eh?  As of late I'm wondering if an OS is even necessary for our current Internet needs...


----------



## pyritechips

ekim68 said:


> Just goes to show you that installing an OS begins at the BIOS level, eh?  As of late I'm wondering if *an OS is even necessary for our current Internet needs*...


I can't answer that as I use my computer for a lot more than just the internet. But even cell phones and tablets have operating systems. How else can you browse the internet? I ask a sincere question since I have no other electronic device except for my desktop beast.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I would have worried, but I had already replaced the BIOS on my Lenovo with a third party one to get round some other silly restrictions about disks and network cards. Not that it is new enough to have had this problem


----------



## ekim68

Changes in the Music World..

New Rules



> Its 2015 and not only have recording revenues declined, the whole world of music has gone topsy-turvy. Yes, there are a few superstars who base their careers on successful recordings, but everybody else is now a player, destined to a life on stage. This aint gonna change, this is the new reality. You can make an album, have fun, but dont expect people to buy it or listen to it. The audience wants an experience. Youre better off honing your presentation than getting a good drum sound on hard drive.


----------



## ekim68

Brain scans can predict the success of social anxiety disorder treatment



> For patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD), current behavioral and pharmaceutical treatments work about half the time. After weeks of investment in therapy, about half of patients will likely still suffer with symptoms of anxiety, and have little choice but to try again with something else. This trial-and-error process  inevitable due to an absence of tools to guide treatment selection  is time-consuming and expensive, and some patients eventually just give up.
> 
> But new MIT research suggests that it may be possible to do better than a coin toss when choosing psychiatric therapies for patients. The study, which 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.


----------



## ekim68

96 million "shade balls" released into reservoir to combat crippling drought



> A new initiative by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has taken a surprisingly low-tech approach to water conservation, by covering the LA Reservoir in 96 million black "shade balls." It's an attempt to combat water loss through evaporation, and to heighten water quality.
> 
> California's water shortages are now believed to be so severe that the state would now require 20 inches (51 cm) of rainfall  that's the equivalent of an entire year's precipitation  to remedy the crippling rain debt.


----------



## ekim68

Back to the Future, eh? 

Author Bruce Sterling Testified to Congress in 1993 as a Time Traveler From 2015


----------



## ekim68

War in Space



> The world's most worrisome military flashpoint is arguably not in the Strait of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any map of Earth, even though it is very easy to find. To see it, just look up into a clear sky, to the no-man's-land of Earth orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name.
> 
> The emptiness of outer space might be the last place you'd expect militaries to vie over contested territory, except that outer space isn't so empty anymore. About 1,300 active satellites wreathe the globe in a crowded nest of orbits, providing worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance. For militaries that rely on some of those satellites for modern warfare, space has become the ultimate high ground, with the U.S. as the undisputed king of the hill. Now, as China and Russia aggressively seek to challenge U.S. superiority in space with ambitious military space programs of their own, the power struggle risks sparking a conflict that could cripple the entire planet's space-based infrastructure.


----------



## ekim68

Digital or Physical Books



> Digital technology has certainly had a profound effect on the traditional book publishing and retailing industries, but has it also given the book a new lease of life?
> 
> At one point it looked as if the rise of e-books at knock-down prices and e-readers like Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook posed an existential threat to book publishers and sellers.
> 
> "Literature found itself at war with the internet," as Jim Hinks, digital editor of Comma Press, succinctly puts it.
> 
> But contrary to expectations, the printed book is still surviving alongside its upstart e-book cousin, and technology is helping publishers and retailers reach new audiences and find new ways to tell stories


----------



## pyritechips

I still prefer the printed word. I have tried e-readers and am not impressed. There is something about the physical bulk and inherent value - both dollar wise and content - about finding an old first edition book in good condition to add to my collection. Books for me are both a monetary and intellectual (and romantic) investment.


----------



## ekim68

Actually I'm enjoying them both...:up:


----------



## ekim68

*London Pushes Through Stiff Resistance to Cycle Superhighways*



> London is a big huffing puffing city, so Mayor Boris Johnson's success in pushing ahead with his plan to build cycle superhighways right through the heart of it seems nothing short of a small miracle.
> 
> They won't be finished before May of next year, but the concept, as Boris Johnson said in March at the inauguration of the building, goes far beyond simply smoothing the ride for cyclists: "Getting more people on their bikes will reduce pressure on the road, bus and rail networks, cut pollution and improve life for everyone, whether or not they cycle themselves."


----------



## ekim68

Underwater Cables




> The Backbone of the Internet Could Detect Earthquakes, But No One's Using It


----------



## ekim68

How an obscure acro and an old Network World story helped link AT&T to NSA spying




> You may have noticed a story over the weekend by _Pro Publica_ and the _New York Times_ that used documents provided by Edward Snowden to reveal previously unknown details of the "highly collaborative" relationship between AT&T and the NSA that enabled the latter's controversial domestic spying program.
> 
> An aspect of the story that received only passing mention was how the reporters who wrote it connected an acronym for an obscure proprietary network configuration - SNRC -- to AT&T and the NSA in part through a 1996 story in the now-defunct print version of _Network World_. In essence, that acro proved to be a fingerprint confirming the connection … and its match was found thanks to the wonder that is Google Books.


----------



## ekim68

Pay raises remain elusive for typical American worker, but not for CEOs




> Raises have remained elusive for American workers, but one elite slice of the workforce is seeing steady growth: the CEO.
> 
> Chief executives of major corporations saw their median pay jump 5% last year to nearly $10.3 million, a pickup from the 4% gain recorded in 2013, according to a report released Monday from benefits consulting firm Mercer.
> 
> The bump comes as executive pay faces increased scrutiny. This month, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to require public companies to disclose the pay difference between their chief executive and the average worker, a gap that's sure to be shocking to many.


----------



## ekim68

Police Training Is Seriously Lacking in Actual Science




> Michael Brown was, at best, stopped by police for stealing cigarillos. Sandra Bland for failing to signal a lane change. Freddie Gray for carrying a switchblade. Yet these encounters all ended with them dead. Distrust running both ways between police and the communities they're supposed to protect have sparked cries for reform to prevent rapid escalation of police violence. What's missing in the conversation, though, is science.
> 
> That's because the science often doesn't exist. Police rarely cooperate with outside researchers, especially those perceived as reformers. "In New York where I've done a lot of my work, I can't get anyone to talk to me," says Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College who has studied how police respond to protests.


----------



## ekim68

Aston aims to launch 800-hp, all-electric Rapide in 2 years




> MONTEREY, Calif. -- Aston Martin is betting that even James Bond won't mind an 800-hp electric car.
> 
> The longtime builder of British sports cars will bring an all-electric version of its four-door Rapide to market in two years, CEO Andy Palmer confirmed to _Automotive News_.


----------



## ekim68

Glass-bottomed "sky pool" will let swimmers freestyle above the street below



> In what is claimed as a world first, a new development in London, UK, will feature a 35-m (115-ft) high suspended swimming pool that bridges two buildings. The so-called "sky pool" will be part of the Ballymore-developed Embassy Gardens, and will allow residents to don their swimwear and butterfly over to visit neighbors.


----------



## ekim68

Macy's Tests Chutes, Tablets in Dressing Rooms to Repel Amazon




> As online giant Amazon.com Inc. charges into the $300 billion U.S. apparel market, Macy's Inc. is running for the dressing room.
> 
> Even Macy's acknowledges there's little it can do to keep customers from shopping online for basic clothing -- like T-shirts, men's jeans and tighty whities. Yet the department store chain is clinging to the idea that many consumers will want to try on other kinds of apparel, such as bikinis, bras and high-fashion items, before making a purchase.
> 
> So the company is using high-tech gadgets like tablets to upgrade fitting rooms, leaning on one of the few advantages that brick-and-mortar retailers have over Web-only stores.


----------



## ekim68

San Jose looks at using garbage haulers to catch car thieves




> SAN JOSE -- The noisy garbage trucks that lumber down San Jose streets every week could soon pick up more than just trash -- they might also scan your license plate and all your neighbors' tags, too, in a proposed city-wide sweep for stolen vehicles that has civil libertarians crying foul.


[/URL]


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

U.S. banks moved billions of dollars in trades beyond Washington's reach




> NEW YORK - This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished.
> 
> "We saw strange things in the data," said Chris Barnes, a former swaps trader now with ClarusFT, a London-based data firm.
> 
> The vanishing of the trades was little noted outside a circle of specialists. But the implications were big. The missing transactions reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks - including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley - to get around new regulations on derivatives enacted in the wake of the financial crisis, say current and former financial regulators.



(The Banks are at it again..!  )[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

Wrong Fix for Short-Term Corporate Thinking




> Every now and then a remarkably bad idea springs to life. It gets debated, ridiculed and eventually discarded. In the marketplace of ideas, free and open debate help to determine which ideas are useful and which wind up in the rubbish heap. (John Stuart Mill was onto something). We tolerate reprehensible ideas because, ultimately, free speech leads society toward a greater truth.
> 
> Today's column is about a concept so misguided and ill-conceived that it cries out for a debunking.
> 
> The idea is that publicly traded corporations should stop reporting their quarterly financial results.


----------



## ekim68

Sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere to create carbon nanofibers




> Carbon nanofibers hold tremendous potential. They may one day be put to use in tougher bulletproof vests, artificial muscles or rebuilding damaged hearts, just to name a few possibilities. But could the greatest gift these little wonders offer humanity be not what they bring into the world but what they take out of it? Scientists have developed a technique that could pull the mounting carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and transform it into carbon nanofibers, resulting in raw materials for use in anything from sports gear to commercial airliners.


----------



## ekim68

women registered to vote, 1st time in Saudi Arabia




> RIYADH: Finally, women got the right of vote and registered for elections 1st time in the 100 year history of modern Saudi Arabia. They will also be able to participate in election as a candidate.
> 
> According to the foreign news agency, in Saudi Arabia women will finally get a chance to cast the vote and contest elections, scheduled in December this year.


----------



## ekim68

Mobile phone data can track the spread of infectious diseases




> Researchers at Princeton University and Harvard University 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.
> 
> Harnessing mobile phone data in this way could help policymakers guide and evaluate health interventions like the timing of vaccinations and school closings. The researchers' methodology also could apply to a number of seasonally transmitted diseases such as the flu and measles.


----------



## ekim68

World's oldest message in a bottle ever found finally washes up after 108 years




> The world's oldest message in a bottle to ever be found is believed to have been recovered - after 108 years at sea.
> 
> Marianne Winkler, a retired postal worker, was on holiday when she spotted the unusual bottle floating by the German island of Amrum.
> 
> She told local paper the Amrum News the clear glass bottle had a note inside bearing only the words: "Break the bottle."


----------



## ekim68

Wyss improves sepsis device




> 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.


----------



## ekim68

Why patent trolls go to East Texas, explained




> Motions to kill abstract patents have 71% win rate nationwide, 27% in ED Tex.


----------



## ekim68

India reveals world's first 100 percent solar-powered airport




> Tesla's Elon Musk has long propagated the idea that solar is the power source of the future, and tech giants like Apple and Amazon have recently been pushing to reduce their dependence on non-renewables. But Cochin, a city in the South Indian state of Kerala, has upped the ante, announcing that its international airport will now run completely on solar power from 46,150 panels laid across 45 acres.





> According to a press release, Cochin International's solar power station is expected to save 300,000 tons worth of carbon emissions over the next 25 years. That's the equivalent of planting three million trees or not driving 750 million miles.


----------



## ekim68

MIT, Harvard find 'master switch' behind obesity




> Doctors may have found a way to override the body's evolutionary habit of storing fat with a discovery of a master switch for the body's metabolism.
> 
> According to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School discovered a new genetic pathway that controls human metabolism by prompting fat cells to store or burn away fat.


----------



## ekim68

http://inhabitat.com/south-africans...concentrated-solar-thats-cheaper-than-diesel/
South Africans revolutionize small-scale concentrated solar that's cheaper than diesel




> Concentrated solar power





> , or CSP, is a pretty extraordinary technology; it uses an array of mirrors to focus the sun's energy onto a central tower, where the heat is then turned into electricity. There are some estimates that CSP could provide a quarter of the world's electricity needs by 2050. But there's one major setback: cost. Current CSP projects, such as Ivanpah in California are massive in scale and require expensive materials installed by a large skilled labor force. But a team at one South African university is hoping they can change this with the creation of "plonkable" CSP technology that is cheap and easy to install.


[/URL]
http://inhabitat.com/south-africans...concentrated-solar-thats-cheaper-than-diesel/


----------



## ekim68

Study investigates whether blind people characterize others by race




> CHICAGO -- Most people who meet a new acquaintance, or merely pass someone on the street, need only a glance to categorize that person as a particular race. But, sociologist Asia Friedman wondered, what can we learn about that automatic visual processing from people who are unable to see?


----------



## ekim68

Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail




> Does the Ted Cruz in you ever wonder whether global warming really _is_ just a hoax? Whether skeptics really _are _the Galileos of our time? Whether climate scientists really _do_ just want to make money? Well, wonder no more. A group of researchers just tried to replicate 38 peer-reviewed studies that support skeptic talking points, and surprise! They ran into some trouble.
> 
> In a paper published last week in the journal _Theoretical and Applied Climatology_, the researchers reported a number of problems with the 38 studies, including questionable physics and incomplete data sets. They also found that some of the studies were published in peer-reviewed journals that didn't specialize in climate science, and therefore probably didn't have the proper experts looking over the work.


----------



## ekim68

Why the U.S. is No. 1 -- in mass shootings




> The United States is, by a long shot, the global leader in mass shootings, claiming just 5% of the global population but an outsized share -- 31% -- of the world's mass shooters since 1966, a new study finds.
> 
> The Philippines, Russia, Yemen and France -- all countries that can claim a substantial share of the 291 documented mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 -- collectively didn't even come close to the United States.


----------



## ekim68

The Evidence Shows That "Stand Your Ground" Laws Undermine Law Enforcement and Public Safety



> Since 2005, about half of all U.S. states have passed Florida-style laws, or very similar ones. The National Rifle Association has led the charge, arguing that stand your ground laws will improve public safety and protect honest citizens.
> 
> By now, however, there is clear and compelling evidence that such laws have failed to improve public safety - and have encouraged mayhem reminiscent of America's old Wild West. Laws allowing claims of self-defense have existed for over a century, but Florida's new law and its imitators dramatically alter the law enforcement equation. According to David LaBahn of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, investigations of civilian killings are now often hamstrung by legal protections greater than those afforded police officers who use lethal force.


----------



## DaveBurnett

> Scientists try to replicate climate denier findings and fail



I wonder if they looked at the supporting papers as well??? Otherwise it is not exactly scientific itself is it??


----------



## ekim68

Americans' Views on Mobile Etiquette




> 'Always on' mobile connectivity poses new challenges for users about when to be present with those nearby or engaged with others on their screens.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/social_insecurity_are_reluctan.php#']Social Insecurity: Are Reluctant Retirees Undermining Innovation on Campus?



> Since the Great Recession, postponing retirement is becoming more common in some professions, including higher education. A new survey shows two thirds of college professors now plan to work past the age of 67. That trend comes with serious consequences.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's New Car Is So Good, It Literally Broke the Consumer Reports Scale




> This score is kind of insane.
> 
> Tesla Motors Inc.'s all-wheel-drive version of the battery-powered Model S, the P85D, earned a 103 out of a possible 100 in an evaluation by Consumer Reports magazine.
> 
> The combination of power and efficiency was so off-the-chart that the group had to recalibrate its ratings methods "to account for the car's exceptionally strong performance," according to a statement. Ultimately, the car was given a score of 100 that set a new standard for perfection.


----------



## ekim68

3D-Printed Microscopic Fish Might Cure Disease




> They might be the best fish you put into your body since Pepperidge Farms made rainbow cheddar goldfish. They're microscopic robot fish that are 3D-printed and used to remove toxins from your body or deliver medicine. And they're real.


----------



## ekim68

A Sign of Those Times.... 


How the Bush Team Crushed Clinton's FEMA




> As Bush's Texas team headed for Washington, it was clear that Joe Allbaugh had neither the experience nor the sophistication to serve as the White House chief of staff - the position he coveted. That job went to Andy Card, who had served in the senior Bush's administration. CNN quoted a "source close to the transition team" who predicted that Allbaugh would become one of two deputy chiefs of staff. Instead, he landed at FEMA.
> 
> But why there?
> 
> Some speculated that Allbaugh wanted to stay in the White House, but Rove wanted the brusque enforcer out of his way. Some of Allbaugh's friends said he had grown tired of being at Bush's beck and call and wanted to "do his own thing."
> 
> If it was a fiefdom he was after, FEMA would do nicely.


----------



## ekim68

Just read where Microsoft has 92 billion dollars sitting offshore in order not to pay taxes on what they make from the USA...Really disappointing to me and I will not buy another Microsoft Product...


----------



## ekim68

From changing your diet to partying like you're 21, here are six tips for protecting your brain from the ravages of time.



> Like any good machine, the brain needs a little care and attention as it ages to ensure it continues to run in good working order. If only there were a manual to its maintenance that could tell us how to fine-tune its circuits. Unfortunately, the available advice is often contradictory and confusing, but BBC Future has sifted through the evidence. Read on to discover the six most promising ways to sharpen your wits.


----------



## ekim68

Nearly every seabird may be eating plastic by 2050




> There's so much plastic floating in some parts of the ocean, especially in five large swirls known as "garbage patches," that each square kilometer of surface water there holds almost 600,000 pieces of debris. The often bite-sized trash can harm birds and other marine life-even those that don't go anywhere near today's "garbage patches," according to a new study. Indeed, because of the proliferation of floating trash by 2050, birds of almost every ocean-foraging species may be eating plastic.


----------



## ekim68

As energy push accelerates, battery costs set to plunge 60%




> An energy storage study claims that prices for certain battery technologies will plunge by as much as 60% over the next five years. The report was prepared by Australian consultancy AECOM and published by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
> 
> The 130-page study, originally published last month, expects all battery technologies to drop in price. However, the largest reductions are forecast for Li-ion and flow-battery technologies, which are expected to plummet by 60% and 40%, respectively by 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model S covers 452 miles on a single charge




> A Tesla Model S has reportedly been driven 452.8 miles (728.7 km) on a single charge in a feat that, according to driver Bjørn Nyland and the World Record Academy, sets a new world record for an electric production car.


----------



## ekim68

Is the World Running out of Space?



> Sometimes it's difficult to fathom that the world could actually become even more crowded than it is today - especially when elbowing through a teeming Delhi market, hustling across a frenetic Tokyo street crossing or sharing breathing space with sweaty strangers crammed into a London Tube train. Yet our claustrophobia-inducing numbers are only set to grow.
> 
> While it is impossible to precisely predict population levels for the coming decades, researchers are certain of one thing: the world is going to become an increasingly crowded place. New estimates issued by the United Nations in July predict that, by 2030, our current 7.3 billion will have increased to 8.4 billion. That figure will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050, and to a mind-boggling 11.2 billion by 2100.


----------



## ekim68

Lack of sleep puts you at higher risk for colds, first experimental study finds




> Moms and sleep researchers alike have stressed the importance of solid shuteye for years, especially when it comes to fighting off the common cold. Their stance is a sensible one-skimping on sleep weakens the body's natural defense system, leaving it more vulnerable to viruses. But the connection relied largely on self-reported, subjective surveys-until now. For the first time, a team of scientists reports that they have locked down the link experimentally, showing that sleep-deprived individuals are more than four times more likely to catch a cold than those who are well-rested.


----------



## ekim68

Citi report: slowing global warming would save tens of trillions of dollars




> Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (GPS), a division within Citibank (America's third-largest bank), recently published a report looking at the economic costs and benefits of a low-carbon future. The report considered two scenarios: "Inaction," which involves continuing on a business-as-usual path, and Action scenario which involves transitioning to a low-carbon energy mix.
> 
> One of the most interesting findings in the report is that the investment costs for the two scenarios are almost identical. In fact, because of savings due to reduced fuel costs and increased energy efficiency, the Action scenario is actually a bit cheaper than the Inaction scenario.


----------



## ekim68

Completely paralyzed man steps out in robotic exoskeleton




> Working with a team of UCLA scientists, a man with protracted and complete paralysis has recovered sufficient voluntary control to take charge of a bionic exoskeleton and take many thousands of steps. Using a non-invasive spinal stimulation system that requires no surgery, this is claimed to be the first time that a person with such a comprehensive disability has been able to actively and voluntarily walk with such a device.


----------



## ekim68

Copenhagen New Carsharing Integrated With Public Transport

*



Carsharing programs

Click to expand...





are becoming more sophisticated and eco-friendly by the minute. In the latest wrinkle, Copenhagen will be the first city to allow members of the DriveNow program to use their public transit cards to rent the vehicles.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

Earth home to 3 trillion trees, half as many as when human civilization arose




> It's a good news, bad news report. Earth today supports more than 3 trillion trees-eight times as many as we thought a decade ago. But that number is rapidly shrinking, according to a global tree survey released today. We are losing 15 billion trees a year to toilet paper, timber, farmland expansion, and other human needs. So even though the total count is large, the decline is "a cause for concern," says Tom Spies, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Corvallis, Oregon, who was not involved with the work.


----------



## ekim68

The next time someone tells you tougher gun laws don't do anything, show them this study




> A common refrain from pro-gun activists has long been that even if America _did_ enact tougher gun laws, those laws wouldn't actually bring down gun deaths.
> 
> According to a convincing new study by the magazine _National Journal_, however, the opposite is true: States with stricter gun laws, the study found, have fewer shooting-related deaths.


----------



## ekim68

New Easy-To-Clean Membrane Separates Oil From Water




> A steel mesh with a novel self-cleaning coating can separate oil and water, easily lifting oil from an oil-water mixture and leaving the water behind (_ACS Nano_ 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b03791). If the coated mesh gets contaminated with oil, it can be simply rinsed off with water and reused. The new membrane promises to be a practical technology to clean up oil spills, its developers say.


----------



## ekim68

This Company Is Still Making Audio Cassettes and Sales Are Better Than Ever




> The audiocassette tape is not dead. In fact, one Springfield, Mo., cassette maker says it has had its best year since it opened in 1969.
> 
> "You can characterize our operating model as stubbornness and stupidity. We were too stubborn to quit," said National Audio Company President Steve Stepp.
> 
> NAC is the largest and one of the few remaining manufacturers of audiocassettes in the U.S. The profitable company produced more than 10 million tapes in 2014 and sales are up 20 percent this year.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-largest-air-purifier-ever-built-sucks-up-smog-and-t-1729298355']The Largest Air Purifier Ever Built Sucks Up Smog And Turns It Into Gem Stones[/url]




> What's 23 feet tall, eats smog, and makes jewelry for fun?
> 
> In Rotterdam this week, the designer





> Daan Roosegaarde is showing off the result of three years of research and development: The largest air purifier ever built. It's a tower that scrubs the pollution from more than 30,000 cubic meters of air per hour-and then condenses those fine particles of smog into tiny "gem stones" that can be embedded in rings, cufflinks, and more.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://blog.majormega.com/looping-piano']Building an analog looping piano[/URL]

*



This is the story of our new product, "Quaver: The Multiplayer Piano". We turned an old piano into a song writing machine using magnetic pickups and a Raspberry Pi. For a less technical and more visual story, view the photo gallery on Imgur.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

Bike tail light sends alerts in case of theft or crash




> Before the Internet of Things arrived bike lights had just one job to do, but now it seems that multi-tasking is mandatory. The Fast bike light is looking to meet this brief by incorporating accident alerts and anti-theft functionality, along with some nifty optical effects.


----------



## ekim68

Solar Power Just Broke Another Record in the U.S.




> GTM Research





> and Solar Energy Industries Association (or SEIA, the national trade organization for America's solar energy industry) released its Q2 2015 report showing that the country has exceeded 20 gigawatts of solar electric capacity in the first half of 2015-enough power for 4.6 million homes.
> 
> This could make 2015 on track for another banner year. So while 2014 already smashed records, it looks like 2015 is poised for even better growth.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft is downloading Windows 10 to your machine 'just in case'

*



MICROSOFT HAS CONFIRMED

Click to expand...

*


> that Windows 10 is being downloaded to computers whether or not users have opted in.


----------



## ekim68

Hybrid solar power system combines photovoltaic and pyroelectric tech




> Sunlight can be used to generate electricity either through a photovoltaic effect, or by harnessing the heat produced by the light. There are already hybrid systems that combine both, but scientists at Korea's Yonsei University have now developed a type of hybrid setup that they claim works better.
> 
> Led by Prof. Eunkyoung Kim, the researchers placed a dye-sensitized solar cell on top of a film made from a transparent conductive polymer known as PEDOT. Beneath that film was another film made of a pyroelectric material, along with a thermoelectric device - pyroelectricity is a material's ability to generate voltage when heated or cooled, while thermoelectricity involves the conversion of temperature differences to electric voltage (and the other way around).
> 
> When exposed to sun-like full-spectrum light, the photovoltaic cell absorbed some of the light and used it to generate electricity. The light that wasn't captured by the cell, however, proceeded through to the PEDOT film, causing it to heat up. The pyroelectric film and the thermoelectric device then utilized that heat to produce _more_ electricity.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/now-you-can-help-scientists-track-animals-in-mozambique-1730297665']Now You Can Help Scientists Track Animals in Mozambique From Your Sofa[/URL]




> Everyone wants to help the environment, but all of that _actually doing stuff_ takes a lot of effort, right? Then good news as a new project has launched which will let ordinary people, with no scientific background, contribute to a scientific mission to track the recovery of the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.


----------



## ekim68

Creepy Smartwatch Spies on What You Type on a Keyboard




> Researchers have created an app that follows the micro-movements of your smartwatch and is able to detect what keys you're pressing with your left hand and thus guess what words you may be typing on a keyboard.


----------



## ekim68

Windows XP gets an unofficial Service Pack 4

*



MICROSOFT'S ONGOING MISSION

Click to expand...

*


> to kill its obsolete but still widely used Windows XP operating system has been dealt another blow, as a developer has announced his own unofficial Service Pack that rolls up all missing updates and reenables automatic updating.


----------



## DaveBurnett

The frightening bit in the above is that the largest group of users not moving(nor planning to) away from XP and PAYING HUGE FEES to MS for continued support is the public sector. 
Yes that is US the Taxpayer getting screwed from both ends.


----------



## ekim68

More on this:


Windows XP still running on a third of business, public sector PCs in some Eastern European countries


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-faa-warned-boeing-about-the-flaw-that-caused-a-777-1730504726']FAA Warned Boeing About the Flaw That Caused a 777 to Explode in Las Vegas [Updated][/URL]




> When a jetliner's engine explodes moments before take off, people ask questions. Now, less than a week after that very thing happened to a British Airways 777, answers are starting to emerge-and they're scary. (See update below.)
> 
> Turns out the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned both Boeing and General Electric, the 777's engine-maker, about a flaw in the plane's engine design that could result in the very catastrophe that took place last week at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.
> 
> What's worse is that the safety warning was issued _over four years ago_.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/feral-cats-can-destroy-the-environment-1730710563']Feral Cats Can Destroy the Environment[/URL]




> Cats kill billions of small mammals, reptiles, and birds every year. In environments where cats have natural predators, like coyotes, this isn't a problem. But left unchecked, cats can become an invasive species that damages local ecosystems.
> 
> There's no question that cats are prolific killers. A 2013 study found that between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds, and between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion wild mammals fall prey to free-ranging cats in the U.S. every year.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://io9.com/before-and-after-images-reveal-astounding-urban-growth-1730772776']Before-and-After Images Reveal Astounding Urban Growth in China[/URL]




> Since 1988, the population along China's Pearl River Delta has grown by a whopping 32 million people. Now boasting a total population of 42 million, it's the largest urban area on the planet. To put it into perspective, 42 million people is more than the population of Canada, Australia, or Argentina.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Before-and-After Images Reveal Astounding Urban Growth in China


 And we paid for it.


----------



## ekim68

I didn't....I earn minimum wage...


----------



## hewee

You still buy things made there in some way.


----------



## ekim68

A CNY college is taking a gamble by cutting its tuition 42 percent




> UTICA, N.Y. -- Utica College announced this morning that it is cutting its annual tuition by 42 percent, from $34,466 in 2016 to $19,996. The small, private college expects to lose $2 million in the first year, but it expects to more than make up the difference in the years to come.


----------



## ekim68

hewee said:


> You still buy things made there in some way.


I wonder if they buy any of our things...


----------



## ekim68

I just had to post this not only because of the promise of this procedure, but also because of the words in the title... 


*Combining epigenetic therapies with immunotherapies likely to improve cancer patient outcomes*


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> I wonder if they buy any of our things...


We sell water to them that we need.

http://www.examiner.com/article/sell-china-water-from-great-lakes

http://chemtrailsplanet.net/2015/05...ht-while-shipping-great-lakes-water-to-china/

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=shipping+water+to+china

So they can grow the food and make it more toxic from the water we need here.

How crazy can it get?


----------



## ekim68

More deaths due to air pollution

*



Every year 3.3 million people die prematurely from the effects of air pollution worldwide - a figure that could double by 2050 if emissions continue to rise at the current rate. This is the conclusion of a study carried out by a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. Surprisingly, the largest sources of air pollution are not industry and transport but small domestic fires and agriculture.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

2014 Census Data Confirm Dramatic Impact of the Affordable Care Act




> New census data released today on poverty and health care measures for 2014 provide indisputable proof that the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, is working to improve access to health care across the country.
> 
> Since these new data only cover 2014, they do not include the full second open enrollment period of the ACA's marketplaces and thus understate the full impact of the ACA. As evident from the recently released National Health Interview Survey, however, the national uninsured rate had dropped by about one-third to a historic low of 9.2 percent as of early 2015, with 15.8 million people gaining coverage since the ACA's marketplaces opened in late 2013.


----------



## ekim68

I really feel sorry for those Poor Bankers and Brokers....


The biggest 12 losers from the Fed's move




> There's no mystery about who lost by the Fed's decision to leave rates untouched: banks and brokers.


----------



## ekim68

NASA successfully tests detect-and-avoidance system for drones




> NASA's Detect-and-Avoidance (DAA) system for drones is looking mighty promising. The agency has just finished its latest phase of of test flights using a remote-controlled Ikhana aircraft equipped with DAA sensors over the Mojave desert in California. NASA's Dennis Hines says they still have to fully analyze the data they gathered from the flights -- the third in a series -- but they found that the drone successfully alerted it remote pilots and performed preprogrammed maneuvers when faced with obstacles.


----------



## ekim68

Tiny Island to Profit From Global Glut




> To see how oil traders are profiting from the longest-lasting glut in three decades, look at the tiny Caribbean island of St. Lucia.
> 
> Glencore Plc hired tanks at the island's only oil terminal to stow crude, joining Vitol Group, people familiar with the matter said last week. They're responding to the market's deepening contango, a situation where prices today are lower than those in future months, allowing traders with access to storage to lock in a profit. From St. Lucia to South Africa to Rotterdam, they're seizing the opportunity.


----------



## ekim68

China Consumes Mind-Boggling Amounts of Raw Materials




> Over the last 20 years, the world economy has relied on the Chinese economic growth engine more than it would like to admit. The 1.4 billion people living in the world's most populous country account for 13% of global GDP, which is significant no matter how it is interpreted. However, in the commodity sector, China has another magnitude of importance. The fact is that China consumes mind-bending amounts of materials, energy, and food.


----------



## ekim68

Cyclist reaches 85.71 mph on way to human-powered speed world record




> Aboard an enclosed recumbent bicycle in Nevada today, Canadian Todd Reichart has claimed the world record for human powered speed. The annual World Human Powered Speed Challenge draws cyclists from around the world seeking to push the limits of pedal-powered motion, but it was the 33-year-old who left the competition in his wake to clock a top speed of 85.71 mph (137.9 km/h).


----------



## ekim68

50 Reasons We're Living Through the Greatest Period in World History




> I recently talked to a doctor who retired after a 30-year career. I asked him how much medicine had changed during the three decades he practiced. "Oh, tremendously," he said. He listed off a dozen examples. Deaths from heart disease and stroke are way down. Cancer survival rates are way up. We're better at diagnosing, treating, preventing, and curing disease than ever before.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/australia-is-the-first-country-to-get-teslas-powerwall-1731786085']Australia is the First Country to Get Tesla's Powerwall Battery[/URL]




> That's right, Tesla's much talked about Powerwall - the battery that can power your entire house - will be available in the Australian market from late this year. Tesla, the company best known for its Model S electric sedan, is launching Tesla Energy in Australia, which will bring products including both the residential Powerwall and the industrial scaled Powerpack to our shores.


----------



## ekim68

Symantec caught issuing rogue Google.com certificates




> Today, Symantec was caught issuing rogue Google certificates. The company is one of the biggest names in security, and one of the world's most prominent certificate authorities. Issuing a rogue cert for one of the Internet's biggest companies -- a company that handles an unimaginable amount of sensitive data -- is big news.


----------



## ekim68

*http://www.slate.com/articles/busin...nd_power_was_so_plentiful_one_night_that.html*
The Night They Drove the Price of Electricity Down




> In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep. The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow. Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed.
> 
> And then a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and then went negative for several hours. As the Lone Star State slumbered, power producers were paying the state's electricity system to take electricity off their hands. At one point, the negative price was $8.52 per megawatt hour.


*
*


----------



## ekim68

Poverty Rate Drops in 34 States, DC




> New Mexico almost surpassed Mississippi last year as the state with the highest percentage of its population living in poverty, although both states were among 34 along with the District of Columbia that experienced a drop in poverty rates.


----------



## ekim68

Air Force fighters will carry laser cannons, cyber weapons by 2020




> Sometime very soon, combat aircraft may be zapping threats out of the sky with laser weapons. "I believe we'll have a directed energy pod we can put on a fighter plane very soon," Air Force General Hawk Carlisle said at this week's Air Force Association Air & Space conference in a presentation on what he called Fifth-Generation Warfare. "That day is a lot closer than I think a lot of people think it is."


----------



## ekim68

Ah, Capitalism.....


US pharmaceutical company defends 5,000% price increase




> The head of a US pharmaceutical company has defended his company's decision to raise the price of a 62-year-old medication used by Aids patients by over 5,000%.


----------



## ekim68

Oh yeah, burn them Fossil Fuels....


OECD: leading countries spend $200bn a year subsidising fossil fuels




> Rich western countries and the world's leading developing nations are spending up to $200bn (£130bn) a year subsidising fossil fuels, according to a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
> 
> The Paris-based thinktank said its 34 members plus six of the biggest emerging economies - China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa - were spending money supporting the consumption and production of coal, oil and gas that should be used to tackle climate change.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Symantec caught issuing rogue Google.com certificates


More on this:


Symantec sacks staff for issuing unauthorized Google certificates


----------



## ekim68

'Doomsday Vault' sees its first withdrawal




> The "Doomsday Vault" just got its first bit of doomsday press: coverage of its first-ever withdrawal of seeds.
> 
> The vault has since 2008 sat on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, 800 miles from the North Pole where the soil is always frozen. It's a place so cold that Reuters explains that in the event of power failure the crop seeds within the vault would be preserved for at least 200 years. That makes it an ideal location to house and safeguard the seeds in the event of catastrophe, and the first catastrophe of sorts has apparently occurred: Syria's civil war.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Ah, Capitalism.....
> 
> 
> US pharmaceutical company defends 5,000% price increase
> 
> 
> I see that the price hike of Daraprim has now been reduced. In the past I have been a staunch defender of high prices of new drugs, to allow for more research. This man Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals must be completely mad to think he could get away with this enormous rise in the price of a drug which is for a small market (toxoplasmosis in immunocompromised patients) in which there are other treatments. I would think a penny on the price of a treatment for arthritis, if they have one, would give him the same sort of profit.


----------



## ekim68

Cinema staff to patrol screenings with night-vision goggles to combat movie piracy




> Cinema staff across the country will be required to don military-style night vision goggles in order to help crack down on movie piracy ahead of the release of two of the most anticipated blockbuster smashes of the year.
> 
> The release of the latest film in the James Bond franchise, Spectre, as well as the next installment in the hugely successful Hunger Games series, Mockingjay Part 2, has meant the film industry is looking into ways to beef up security at screens in order to stop the movies leaking online.


----------



## ekim68

US rank drops to 55th in 4G LTE speeds




> The U.S. has fallen to No. 55 in LTE performance as speeds rise rapidly in countries that have leapfrogged some early adopters of the popular cellular system.
> 
> The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country's global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries enjoyed much larger gains.


----------



## ekim68

10 Cities Where You Don't Want to Get Sick




> About 440,000 people die in the United States each year as a result of a preventable hospital error. Despite the precautions hospitals take to minimize the likelihood of a mistake, many are still harming patients through avoidable missteps.


----------



## ekim68

Could triple-decker floating farms address future food issues?




> With the world's population expected to hit 9.1 billion by 2050, coupled with the growing effects of climate change on our ability to grow crops, a company out of Barcelona has proposed a solution to feeding the future world. Forward Thinking Architecture's triple-decker Smart Floating Farms would feature 2.2 million square feet (2.04 sq km) of fish farm, hydroponic garden, and rooftop solar panels to power a floating barge, which could be anchored to the beds of oceans, lakes or rivers. The company estimates that each of its floating farms could produce about 8 tons (7.3 tonnes) of vegetables and 1.7 tons (1.5 tonnes) of fish per year.


----------



## ekim68

Will Republicans Heed the Words of Pope Francis?




> One thing's become abundantly clear with Pope Francis's visit to America this week: God is most definitely _not _a Republican. As the human embodiment of God herself, Francis, in his historic address Thursday before a joint session of Congress, spoke plainly, passionately and with unfettered moral leadership on myriad hot-button issues with positions that contrast those of many staunch conservatives.


----------



## Brigham

I see that the pope is saying _"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Be nice to the jihadists perhaps and then they can behead you_


----------



## ekim68

That's rather pessimistic, eh?


----------



## Brigham

I live in England.


----------



## DaveBurnett

The population density here is already too high. I don't hear the US volunteering to take all these "refugees"
Many of the ones that I have heard interviewed admitted that they were just looking for a better life and not actually fleeing anything.


----------



## ekim68

Actually, Kerry said that over the next three years the USA would bring a couple of hundred thousand refugees here. Of course the Right Wing Republicans are opposing this....They seem to have forgotten how their heritage and relatives have displaced the Native population....


----------



## ekim68

Renewable energy outstrips coal for first time in UK electricity mix




> Renewable energy has for the first time surpassed coal in supplying the UK's electricity for a whole quarter, according to government statistics released on Thursday.
> 
> The revelation of the surge in wind, solar and bioenergy to a record 25% comes in a week when the government has been heavily criticised by business leaders and Al Gore for cutting support for clean energy.
> 
> The high performance of renewable electricity between April and June, the latest period data is available for, was due to both more wind and sun and more turbines and solar panels having been installed, compared to the same period the year before, when renewables contributed 16.4% of electricity.


----------



## ekim68

Is Cargill backsliding on its promise to end deforestation?




> A year ago, Cargill made headlines for committing to help end deforestation. It was one of many businesses that endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests. But it was the company that captured the spotlight at the U.N. deliberations on that declaration, and I singled Cargill out for special recognition because it seemed to be paying more than lip service to the goal. Cargill wasn't just saying that it supported the idea of ending deforestation in principle, I wrote; it was making the commitment to end deforestation in all its agricultural supply chains. And Cargill touches just about every agricultural supply chain.
> 
> One year later, Cargill has released an action plan, along with a policy for putting these principles into practices - and these documents have made a lot of environmental activists nervous.


----------



## ekim68

The True Cost of an Expensive Medication




> The U.S. is unique among Western countries in that it doesn't regulate drug prices. One nurse tells the story of what it's like to watch patients get sicker when they can't afford a pricey treatment.


----------



## ekim68

Now That Nielsen Can Actually Be Bothered To Track Internet Video, The Numbers For Traditional TV Are Getting Ugly




> For years, we've noted how popular TV ratings firm Nielsen has turned a bit of a blind eye to cord cutting and the Internet video revolution, on one hand declaring that the idea of cord cutting was "pure fiction," while on the other hand admitting it _wasn't actually bothering to track TV viewing on mobile devices_. It's not surprising; Nielsen's bread and butter is paid for by traditional cable executives, and really -- who wants to take the time to pull all those collective heads of out of the sand to inform them that their precious pay TV cash cow is dying?


----------



## ekim68

Europe gets $36M hydrogen infrastructure for 325 vehicles




> Fresh of its victory from installing the first publicly-accessible hydrogen refueling station in the UK, ITM Power is going after the rest of the continent, or at least nine other countries throughout Western Europe. The company, like others before it, will try to address the rather expensive chicken-or-egg issue of providing enough hydrogen refueling stations for the fuel-cell vehicles, and getting enough vehicles to make the stations worth it. The company is leading a $36-million effort to do just that.


----------



## ekim68

Neural Implant Enables Paralyzed ALS Patient to Type Six Words per Minute




> Typing six words per minute may not sound very impressive. But for paralyzed people typing via a brain-computer interface (BCI), it's a new world record.
> 
> To pull off this feat, two paralyzed people used prosthetics implanted in their brains to control computer cursors with unprecedented accuracy and speed. The experiment, reported today in _Nature Medicine_, was the latest from a team testing a neural system called BrainGate2. While this implant is only approved for experiments right now, researchers say this demonstration proves that such technology can be truly useful to quadriplegics, and points the way toward regular at-home use.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk Says Tesla Cars Will Reach 620 Miles On A Single Charge "Within A Year Or Two," Be Fully Autonomous In "Three Years"




> Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down with a Danish TV show last week and had some interesting predictions to share.
> 
> Asked, for example, when he thought the company could produce a car that can "break 1,000 kilometers" (or 620 miles) on a single charge, he said his guess would be "within a year or two," adding, "2017 for sure."
> 
> As readers might recall, a new record was established last month by one enthusiastic Model S owner, who drove a painful 24-miles-per hour to make it a stunning 452.8 miles on a single charge. (The car is advertised as having a 265-mile range.)


----------



## ekim68

Sleep may strengthen long-term memories in the immune system




> More than a century ago, scientists demonstrated that sleep supports the retention of memories of facts and events. Later studies have shown that slow-wave sleep, often referred to as deep sleep, is important for transforming fragile, recently formed memories into stable, long-term memories. Now, in a new article, researchers propose that deep sleep may also strengthen immunological memories of previously encountered pathogens.


----------



## ekim68

New Zealand's new ocean sanctuary will be one of world's largest protected areas




> New Zealand





> will create one of the largest marine protected areas in the world, spanning an area of 620,000 sq km.
> 
> The Kermadec ocean sanctuary will be one of the world's most significant fully protected ecosystems, the prime minister of New Zealand, John Key, told the UN general assembly in New York.


----------



## ekim68

Student's smart glove translates sign language into speech




> Student Hadeel Ayoub has invented a smart glove which converts sign language into text and speech.
> 
> Those with difficulties with spoken language or hearing can find communicating difficult. This problem may be intensified if others do not understand sign language, which replaces words with gestures. However, a student from Goldsmiths, University of London has decided to tackle the problem with a glove that converts these gestures into understandable text on a display or audible dialogue.
> 
> Revealed this week, the wireless SignLanguageGlove is designed to make communication easier for those with impediments or disabilities, and has already gone through three prototype stages.


----------



## ekim68

Hungry mealworms could keep Styrofoam out of landfills




> If you've ever kept mealworms as food for a pet reptile or frog, then you probably fed them fruits or vegetables. What you likely didn't know, however, was that the insects can also survive quite nicely on a diet of Styrofoam. With that in mind, scientists at Stanford University have now determined that mealworms can break the difficult-to-recycle plastic foam down into a biodegradable waste product.


----------



## ekim68

TurnCycle automatically backs up cyclists' hand signals with LED display




> Although we've already seen various illuminated turn indicators for bicycles, the fact is that cyclists should still also be using traditional hand signals. Activating an electronic indicator while also making a hand signal, however, could be a bit of a hassle. That's where the TurnCycle comes in. It uses the rider's hand signals to automatically activate a separate LED turn indicator.


----------



## ekim68

This interactive map shows the toxic sites near you




> Despite the jaunty name, Superfund sites are not actually super fun. In fact, they are the opposite. They are hazardous waste sites, and you probably don't want to raise your kids or park your bounce house near them unless you're pro-cancer. The first - and most famous - Superfund site was Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where 22,000 tons of toxic waste were buried by Hooker Chemical Company and caused illnesses, miscarriages, birth defects, and death among residents. There are currently more than 1,300 Superfund sites in the U.S., and now, thanks to media artist Brooke Singer, you can more easily find any in your area - and then decide if it's time to pack your bags and move somewhere less likely to make you grow a tail.


----------



## ekim68

Why are Iranian husbands standing up for their wives?




> Niloufar Ardalan captains Iran's indoor women's football team - her nickname is "Lady Goal". Earlier this month she was due to represent her country at a match in Malaysia, but was unable to attend - because, according to an interview she gave to Iranian media, her husband said she wasn't allowed.
> 
> The standard marriage contract signed by all newlyweds in Iran allows the husband to decide whether his wife can travel abroad, where the family will live, whether she can go to work, and whether she can ask for a divorce. In this instance, Ardalan says her husband, prominent sports journalist Mehdi Toutounchi, wanted her to be present for their son's first day at school.
> 
> But husbands can choose to waive the provisions of the marriage contract, and now, inspired by Ardalan's story, dozens of Iranian men who've done just that are sharing pictures on social media to advocate gender equality.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Breakthrough rectenna converts light into DC current




> Rectifying antennas - "rectennas" - are used as parasitic power capture devices that absorb radio frequency (RF) energy and convert it into usable electrical power. Constructing such devices to absorb and rectify at optical wavelengths has proved impractical in the past, but the advent of carbon nanotubes and advances in microscopic manufacturing technology have allowed engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to create rectennas that capture and convert light to direct electrical current. The researchers believe that their creation may eventually help double the efficiency of solar energy harvesting.


----------



## ekim68

The train that powers its station



> When I press the brakes on my Prius, the hieroglyphics on the dash tell me that I'm charging the battery - enough, I'd guess, for a few minutes in EV mode as I circle the Whole Foods parking lot. But the Tube train that rolls into London's Holborn station has a little more heft than my hybrid.
> 
> In fact, with some new technology, stopping a massive commuter train can generate enough electricity to power the whole of Holborn station for two days a week.


----------



## ekim68

'Thoughts and prayers are not enough': Why the US has so many mass shootings




> There's a disparity between overwhelming public approval for modest gun control reforms and an almost total stasis gripping Congress on the issue.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> 'Thoughts and prayers are not enough': Why the US has so many mass shootings


I agree!


----------



## DaveBurnett

The quotation "the right to bear arms" is completely misinterpreted by most people.
It does NOT mean people have the right to carry/use guns.
It means that citizens have the right to join the armed forces.


----------



## ekim68

Hindsight....


Ben Bernanke: More execs should have gone to jail for causing Great Recession




> With publication of his memoir, _The Courage to Act_, on Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, "but it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm."


----------



## ekim68

Proterra Catalyst XR electric bus delivers 258-mile range results




> One of the biggest limitations of electric buses is range. Now, though, a US company has eked out over 250 miles (402 km) from one of its electric buses. The Proterra Catalyst XR is said to afford the best efficiency rating ever for a 40-ft (12-m) transit bus, at 22 mpg (12.8 l/l00 km) equivalent.
> 
> Electric buses are already in use in, or due to roll out to, a number of major cities around the world, including Gothenburg and London. Despite this, the technology is still relatively embryonic and so continues to be developed apace.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-startup-wants-to-plant-one-billion-trees-a-year-us-1734660215']This Startup Wants To Plant One Billion Trees a Year Using Drones[/URL]




> Deforestation downs 10 billion trees around the globe annually. Replanting trees by hand is slow, expensive, and barely puts a dent in reversing the damage. But one startup wants to use drones that can reforest our increasingly tree-strapped Earth, on a big enough scale to replace slow and expensive hired humans.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Big U.S. firms hold $2.1 trillion overseas to avoid taxes: study




> The 500 largest American companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes and would collectively owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes if they repatriated the funds, according to a study released on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

SolarCity claims world's most efficient solar panel, made in USA




> SolarCity rose to prominence leasing solar panels, not making them.
> 
> Now the San Mateo company does both. At an event Friday morning in New York, SolarCity will lay claim to one of the solar manufacturing world's top titles - Most Efficient Rooftop Panel on Earth.
> 
> And in a shift for an industry that relies on imported hardware, those panels will be made in the United States.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Big U.S. firms hold $2.1 trillion overseas to avoid taxes: study


----------



## ekim68

Memory is dirt cheap at a time when it should be expensive

*



If you were looking to stock up on memory, now would be a good time.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

I used a robot to go to work from 3,500 miles away




> I have to start this review with a brief confession: I don't really know any of my colleagues. I started working at _The Verge_ in December last year, but as I live in London, I've only ever met the members of our UK team. All two of them. There's been a few group Skype calls with the New York and San Francisco offices, but for the most part I either talk to people on Slack or over email. This isn't unusual for a job in the media of course, but my bosses decided that it was time for me to get a little more involved. To have some of that good old-fashioned human interaction. Their solution? They gave me a robot, of course.


----------



## ekim68

Rookie Dongle warns parents when their kids are driving too fast




> Dongle Apps, a Belgian tech company, has introduced a new system which alerts a car owner if the vehicle's driver is breaking the speed limit.
> 
> The 'Rookie Dongle', founded by engineer Paul Janssens and automotive expert Christophe Neyt, connects to the vehicle's on-board diagnostics (OBD II) port, used by garage staff to identify issues and assess speed, mileage and performance in all modern cars.


----------



## ekim68

Good news: Global health is actually improving. Huzzah, civilization!




> Reading the news often leaves me with the sense that people are getting less healthy, but that's just not the case. An article recently published in _The Lancet_ offers a look at global health trends, and the news is pretty darn good.
> 
> "Worldwide, from 1990 to 2013, life expectancy at birth rose by 6.2 years," the authors write. An extra six years of life per person, in a little more than two decades!


----------



## ekim68

US says no to encryption law - for now




> The US government has decided not to call for new legislation to force tech companies to decode the encrypted communications of their customers - for now at least.
> 
> Police and intelligence agencies have become increasingly concerned about the use of end-to-end encrypted communications services by criminals because it is all but impossible to decode the conversations.
> 
> With more traditional methods of communication there is usually a way for the service provider to allow police - with a warrant - access to the data. But end-to-end encryption means the only place the message is unscrambled is on the smartphone itself.


----------



## ekim68

How Analog Tide Predictors Changed Human History




> If you're completely landlocked like I am, you may dream of ocean waves lapping at the shore, but you probably don't think much about the tides. The movement of the ocean tides is actually quite important to many groups of people, from fishermen to surfers to coastal zone engineers. The behavior of the tides over time is helpful data for those who study world climate change.
> 
> Early tide prediction was based on observed changes in relation to the phases of the Moon. These days, tide-predicting is done quickly and with digital computers. But the first purpose-built machines were slow yet accurate analog computation devices that, as they were developed, could account for increasing numbers of tidal constituents, which represent the changes in the positions of tide-generating astronomical bodies. One of these calculating marvels even saved the Allies' invasion of Normandy-or D-Day- in World War II.


----------



## ekim68

2 economists tried to replicate a bunch of published economic studies, and the results were disturbing




> A new economics paper





> is making the rounds this week, and it has some pretty damning conclusions for the state of the whole subject.
> 
> The result is shocking: Without the help of the authors, only a third of the results could be independently replicated by the researchers. Even _with _their help, only about half, or 49%, could.
> 
> Federal Reserve economists Andrew Chang and Phillip Li set about researching how many of the results published in top economics journals could be replicated - repeating the study and finding the same results.
> 
> They looked at 67 papers in 13 reputable academic journals.


----------



## Brigham

When theory and practice differ, theory changes! I remember this quote but not the quoter.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Well that is the point of a theory in the first place.

A theory is only a theory until it is proven when it becomes a law.
If proven to be false it is just dropped or changed.


----------



## ekim68

How Video Games Are Becoming University-Approved Sports




> When 800 video gamers arrived at the University of Cincinnati's basketball arena on Saturday morning, 8,000 feet of extension cords and 11,000 feet of Ethernet cables awaited them. Check-in was at 9 a.m., and they had a lot to carry: laptops, desktops, TV monitors, GameCube controllers. They set up beneath the championship banners and retired jerseys hanging on the walls.
> 
> During the two-day tournament, held by the university's League of Legends club, teams from across the country competed in Super Smash Bros. and League of Legends, among other games. Some 14,000 people watched online, making this one of the largest collegiate e-sports events.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon's Zombie Cookie Gets New Life




> Verizon is giving a new mission to its controversial hidden identifier that tracks users of mobile devices. Verizon said in a little-noticed announcement that it will soon begin sharing the profiles with AOL's ad network, which in turn monitors users across a large swath of the Internet.
> 
> That means AOL's ad network will be able to match millions of Internet users to their real-world details gathered by Verizon, including - "your gender, age range and interests."


----------



## ekim68

In a first, Chinese hackers are arrested at the behest of the U.S. government




> The Chinese government has quietly arrested a handful of hackers at the urging of the U.S. government - an unprecedented step to defuse tensions with Washington at a time when the Obama administration has threatened economic sanctions.
> 
> The action came a week or two before President Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington late last month. The hackers had been identified by U.S. officials as having stolen commercial secrets from U.S. firms to be sold or passed along to Chinese state-run companies.


----------



## ekim68

New sensor detects water contamination in real time




> Currently, if you want to check water supplies for the presence of toxic bacteria, you have to take a water sample and then culture it in a lab over several days. In the meantime, it's impossible to say if the water source is safe to use. A group of students from the Technical University of Denmark, however, have created a sensor that they say can detect bacteria in water instantly, on the spot.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I hope that one works out.!


----------



## ekim68

The Man Who Builds Luxury Bomb Shelters for Paranoid One Percenters




> As we roll down US Highway 41 in Terre Haute, Indiana , my guide insists I give him my iPhone. Then he tosses me a satin blindfold. The terms of our trip were clear-I wasn't to know where we were going or how we got there. That's because we're on our way to the undisclosed location of an underground bunker designed *t*o survive the end of the world, whatever form that apocalypse takes.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

A definite 'Sign of the Times'...


Jimmy Carter's Solar Panels: A Lost History That Haunts Today




> The glass, aluminum, and stainless steel panels reclined at low angles and basked in the sun as the men in suits and ties, flanked by reporters, took to the West Wing roof to look at what they thought was the future. That day, June 20, 1979, was clear enough for the sun to bring out a bright reflection on the panels, and for shadows of those on the roof to be drawn dark and tight around them.
> 
> For President Jimmy Carter, it had been nearly three years of tough fighting for clean energy.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown presses for action on bill to lower drug prices




> CLEVELAND, Ohio -- U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown stood in the corner of a Cleveland supermarket Tuesday and launched a broadside on the pharmaceutical industry.
> 
> He argued prices for prescription drugs are out of control, and that the businesses responsible are offering scant justification for sudden increases.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's batteries to power two dozen Calif. office buildings




> A California real estate development company plans to install Tesla batteries in up to two dozen of its highest profile offices in the Los Angeles area.
> 
> The Irvine Company, a Newport Beach-based developer that is a dominant landlord in Orange County, said the deal with Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), will save it as much as $1 million a year in energy expenses.


----------



## ekim68

German publisher Axel Springer bans adblocking users from Bild website




> Axel Springer SE, among the largest of Europe's online publishers, has instituted a block on viewers who are using adblocking software for its flagship news website, Bild.de. Adblocking readers who browse to the Bild site now are presented with a page which blocks the site's content and asks the reader to either switch off the adblocker or subscribe to the publication for 2.99 Euros (£2.23 | $3.40) per month.
> 
> In a statement (German language) at the Axel Springer blog a spokesperson for the company said that journalism must be financed by the 'two known revenue pillars' of advertising or sales. The print edition of Bild has a daily circulation of 2,500,000.


----------



## ekim68

A Fresh Take on Fake Meat




> For some, the pleasure of eating meat comes served with a side of guilt. Raising animals for food contributes to climate change, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Governmental dietary recommendations and social campaigns like Meatless Monday pepper us with messages to eat less meat, particularly red meat. But for meat lovers, come dinnertime, alternative protein sources, like beans or soy-based meat substitutes, are no match for the experience of eating a burger. Taking a bite, the meat feels dense, it rebounds as you chew, and juices squirt into your mouth. Consumers crave it, and global demand for meat is projected to skyrocket.
> Now scientists are using food science, biotechnology, and tissue engineering to develop new meat substitutes with the taste, texture, and appearance of meat-to deliver the pleasure, without the environmental consequences.


----------



## Brigham

When "quorn" appeared, I tried it. It was nothing like meat. I would eat meat substitute if it really tasted like meat but I won't deny myself the pleasure of real meat until then.


----------



## valis

I gotta ask; why would you leave meat for something that tastes like it? The natural meat has to be better for you. We evolved as the apex predator for a reason, namely we eat them more than they eat us.


----------



## ekim68

I think that the industry to imitate meat is neccesary for the future. Think Eleven Billion People on this Earth by 2050.....How many animals to sustain that, eh? I'm a meat eater but not like I used to be. With so many variables in all the Food Groups these days, I can barely keep up the Recipes, and yes I'm still experimenting with Cooking and Baking.....


----------



## valis

I am 50 or so, and wholly realize life is finite. But meat is meat; again, we ARE the top predator, and we didnt get there eating salad. Heck, evolution realized the shark and crocodile were perfect, no need for improvement for a few million years. Who can say what **** sap sap will use for food? As long as it doesnt say 'soylent' on it I am cool.


----------



## ekim68

So what is your bestest meat? A steak, or hamburger, or chicken?


----------



## poochee

valis said:


> I am 50 or so, and wholly realize life is finite. But meat is meat; again, we ARE the top predator, and we didnt get there eating salad. Heck, evolution realized the shark and crocodile were perfect, no need for improvement for a few million years. Who can say what **** sap sap will use for food? As long as it doesnt say 'soylent' on it I am cool.


----------



## ekim68

So are you a meat eater poochee?


----------



## ekim68

IS hacker charged with stealing U.S. military data identified as Kosovo student Ardit Ferizi



> The Islamic State hacker detained at Bukit Aman, Kuala Lumpur, has been identified as 20-year-old Kosovo student Ardit Ferizi.
> 
> Ferizi, leader of the hacker squad 'Kosovo Hacker's Security', was also known by his moniker 'Th3Dir3ctorY.' He was arrested following a provisional warrant from the U.S. Department of Justice, which accused Ferizi of providing materials to support IS operations.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> So are you a meat eater poochee?





ekim68 said:


> So are you a meat eater poochee?


Yep!


----------



## ekim68

Harper's race card gambles with women's safety to win votes




> It's unprecedented in modern times for a Canadian leader to turn citizen against citizen, and race against race with the ugliness we've seen emerge in the 2015 election. Stephen Harper set torch to a Pandora's tinderbox of hatred, and the fire is spreading.
> 
> Last Tuesday, just days after the federal leaders' French language debate inflamed passions about the niqab, two teenage boys set upon a pregnant Muslim woman on a Montreal street, grabbing her headscarf and knocking her to the ground. Now we learn that a man accosted a Canadian-born, niqab-wearing mother out with her young daughters at a Toronto mall, blocking her way and driving his elbow into her.


----------



## ekim68

In Face of Harsh Austerity, UK's Hunger Crisis Sparks First Student-Led Food Bank




> Nestled in the Manchester Universities' Catholic Chaplaincy off Oxford Road is Manchester Central Foodbank, the UK's first student-led food bank. In 2015, this welcoming café-like sanctuary has offered warmth, a listening ear - and most importantly, it has handed out more than 2,700 food parcels to people of differing backgrounds and ages who are all part of the hunger crisis that is reshaping Britain.
> 
> The number of people relying on emergency food aid at food banks is on the rise in the UK, as recent figures released by the Trussell Trust - which overseas more than 400 food banks nationwide - found a 19 percent spike over the last year. But the rise didn't happen in a vacuum. According to a _British Media Journal_ report, "Austerity, Sanctions and the Rise of Foodbanks in the UK," the growth in food banks has been a direct result of the Conservative government's austerity regime.


----------



## ekim68

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-a...ies-week-rand-paul-gets-unhinged-about-bernie
America's Greenest Cities: Where Does Your City Ra


> An analysis to find out just how green America's 100 most populous cities are yields some surprising results.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> America's Greenest Cities: Where Does Your City Ra


I think you got the wrong link?


----------



## Brigham

Nestled in the Manchester Universities' Catholic Chaplaincy off Oxford Road is Manchester Central Foodbank, the UK's first student-led food bank. In 2015, this welcoming café-like sanctuary has offered warmth, a listening ear - and most importantly, it has handed out more than 2,700 food parcels to people of differing backgrounds and ages who are all part of the hunger crisis that is reshaping Britain.

The number of people relying on emergency food aid at food banks is on the rise in the UK, as recent figures released by the Trussell Trust - which overseas more than 400 food banks nationwide - found a 19 percent spike over the last year. But the rise didn't happen in a vacuum. According to a _British Media Journal_ report, "Austerity, Sanctions and the Rise of Foodbanks in the UK," the growth in food banks has been a direct result of the Conservative government's austerity regime.

My daughters best friend uses foodbanks regularly. She also spends over £50 a week on cigarettes, and has wine with her dinner at the weekend. She also has a 50" TV. Some poverty!! Oh, by the way she hasn't worked for years.


----------



## ekim68

hewee said:


> I think you got the wrong link?


You're right Harry. This Chromebook is slightly different in the 'copy and paste' functions than my PC so I'll have to be more selective. BTW, your Calendar of Updates link in your signature works now and I'm curious as to who Donna Buenaventura was...


----------



## ekim68

Brigham said:


> Nestled in the Manchester Universities' Catholic Chaplaincy off Oxford Road is Manchester Central Foodbank, the UK's first student-led food bank. In 2015, this welcoming café-like sanctuary has offered warmth, a listening ear - and most importantly, it has handed out more than 2,700 food parcels to people of differing backgrounds and ages who are all part of the hunger crisis that is reshaping Britain.
> 
> The number of people relying on emergency food aid at food banks is on the rise in the UK, as recent figures released by the Trussell Trust - which overseas more than 400 food banks nationwide - found a 19 percent spike over the last year. But the rise didn't happen in a vacuum. According to a _British Media Journal_ report, "Austerity, Sanctions and the Rise of Foodbanks in the UK," the growth in food banks has been a direct result of the Conservative government's austerity regime.
> 
> My daughters best friend uses foodbanks regularly. She also spends over £50 a week on cigarettes, and has wine with her dinner at the weekend. She also has a 50" TV. Some poverty!! Oh, by the way she hasn't worked for years.


Is it because she can't work or she won't work?


----------



## Brigham

Is it because she can't work or she won't work?

She always has an excuse why she can't attend work interviews, or as she says herself, she "blows" the interview.


----------



## DaveBurnett

She needs to be careful because if the SS investigates she could (and will) be taken to court for fraud.
Believe you me it is not a pleasant position to be in since I faced and was investigated by the SS when I was claiming. The investigation was based on a false premise (I suspect a malicious neighbour who has now moved), but they really do dig into everything; getting warrants for banks, building societies, insurance policies, questioning friends and relatives, tapping phones.
It all blew quietly over and when I asked what had been happening, all I was told was "no further action will be taken". No apologies or anything, though I believe the person who pushed the investigation in the SS was "relieved of duty" or as close to being sacked as ever will be for a civil servant.


----------



## ekim68

I'm curious as to what the retirement age is in England. Is there something like our Social Security after a certain age?


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> I'm curious as to what the retirement age is in England. Is there something like our Social Security after a certain age?


When I retired I did it at the required age 65. Women used to retire at 60. Now because of financial considerations and better fitness in the elderly, the retirement age has already, or will shortly increase by a couple of years. This will apply to men and women.


----------



## ekim68

Church threatens to sue D.C. over bike lane - because of religious freedom




> Christianity is well-known for denouncing things like gay marriage, divorce, and dancing, and now, one Washington, D.C. church is adding something new to the ban list: bike lanes.
> 
> D.C.'s United House of Prayer has objected to the construction of a bike lane in front of its property based on the church's "constitutionally protected rights of religious freedom and equal protection of the laws."


----------



## DaveBurnett

Those ages are for the State Pension and retirement age.
I have always paid into private company pension schemes as well as the state ones so I was able to give up full time work somewhat earlier.
As it happens that was a good job because I have not really been fit enough to go out to work anyway. 
I will get my state pension later this year, under the old rules.
My wife who is a few years younger will get hit by the new rules - whatever they are - so she will have to wait later than her 60th birthday.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> You're right Harry. This Chromebook is slightly different in the 'copy and paste' functions than my PC so I'll have to be more selective. BTW, your Calendar of Updates link in your signature works now and I'm curious as to who Donna Buenaventura was...


That will goof you up. New site has been up for about 3 months. Not as nice as the older CoU site but Donna died and the one who was still Admin we never heard from and site went down for not paying. So the Calendar for the Updates still has not been made.

Donna Buenaventura was a great lady who was very smart and also got so many people together. She made the site and many other security sites. 
http://blogs.msmvps.com/donna/2012/02/08/announcement-in-memory-of-donna-buenaventura/

Your see she was known all over the place.

https://www.google.com/search?sclie...7.3&ei=BjYlVqXPF8TxoASJ-YboCg&emsg=NCSR&noj=1

https://www.google.com/search?sclie....1.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..1.1.318.AI1T8koXwO8

She was loved by many and could get people together. Like all the contest she would have because she get all together to give out free software.

She was too young to die. 
https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/users/1784/7419/avatar92.jpg?1318534518
She did all this with a slow internet from some small part of China or something. May be wrong but remember she moved and internet was slow so bet many things was done offline.


----------



## hewee

Hey you never fixed the links.


----------



## ekim68

hewee said:


> Hey you never fixed the links.


Sorry about that, here is the link


----------



## ekim68

Thanks for the information about Donna. Sounds like she was a great person...


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Sorry about that, here is the link


Thanks

Wow not doing so good here in Sacramento, CA but I knew that.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Thanks for the information about Donna. Sounds like she was a great person...


She was a great person and I also help her at the COU site and she was great to work with. A very caring person and very smart too.


----------



## ekim68

On my Birthday Wish List....


Xiaomi brings Segway to the masses with $315 Ninebot mini




> We'd be throwing money at our screen right now, if we could. Chinese company Xiaomi has launched a small Segway device, the Ninebot mini, for a mere $315 (£203), on the same day it revealed a $790, 60-inch 4K TV. If you'll recall, Xiaomi is a major investor in Ninebot, the China-based company that recently purchased Segway. This is the first device the companies have launched since the acquisition, and while the self-balancing scooter looks a bit like the original, it costs less than a twentieth the price.


----------



## ekim68

Brigham said:


> When I retired I did it at the required age 65. Women used to retire at 60. Now because of financial considerations and better fitness in the elderly, the retirement age has already, or will shortly increase by a couple of years. This will apply to men and women.


In our Social Security you can retire at 62 and receive a percentage of what you receive as a result of paying into the Government Insurance Plan rather get the full amount when you reach 70...It's something we pay into for all our Working days and to me it's like a Big Vacation at the end of the day, or days... A lot of Conservatives and especially the Tea Party wackos in my Country say that Social Security is a Benefit, when in Reality it's an Insurance Program, and a rather successful one at that...:up:


----------



## hewee

Social Security would be a lot better if not SSI because the States only pay half of the SSI payout and you pay the rest because they get it from the Social Security fund.


----------



## ekim68

State shuts 33 wells injecting oil wastewater into aquifers




> California regulators on Thursday closed 33 oil company wells that had injected wastewater into potentially drinkable aquifers protected by federal law.
> 
> The new closures bring to 56 the number of oil-field wastewater injection wells shut down by the state after officials realized they were pumping oil-tainted water into aquifers that potentially could be used for drinking or irrigation.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> State shuts 33 wells injecting oil wastewater into aquifers


God to hear because I heard they was doing this and also selling the water to farmers for less then they can buy water from State. So lets hope selling it to farmers stop also and they fine the oil company's big time and also farmer that buy it should get fine too.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/oil-wastewater-fruits-vegetables-farms

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/08/organic-crops-can-be-irrigated-fracking-wastewater

Lots on it too.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=oil+wastewater+on+crops


----------



## ekim68

Global Warming's Hurricane Tab in U.S.: $14 Billion and Counting




> Climate change has added billions to the toll of hurricane strikes on the U.S., according to a study that challenges the prevailing scientific view that the rising cost is mainly because more buildings, towns and businesses are in the way.
> 
> Stronger, more frequent storms may have accounted for as much as $14 billion of hurricane damage in 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. The cost, as much as 12 percent of total U.S. damage that year, is over and above what can be explained by coastal development alone, the scientists said.


----------



## ekim68

US to clean up Spanish radioactive site 49 years after plane crash




> Nearly 50 years after a US air force B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Palomares in south-east Spain, Washington has finally agreed to clean up the radioactive contamination that resulted from the crash.


----------



## valis

interesting.....a bit scary, as the source is still unknown, but interesting nonetheless.

http://gizmodo.com/carbon-nanotubes-found-in-human-lungs-for-the-first-tim-1737754483


----------



## ekim68

Well we are Carbon Beings so-to-speak and maybe there's a semi-natural process going on...(I know I'm grasping at straws.. )


----------



## valis

as long as they aren't nanotube straws, should be okie doke.


----------



## ekim68

Japan should restart more nuclear power plants




> In August, a Japanese utility company restarted the Sendai nuclear power plant, sparking controversy and protests. Like the rest of the country's nuclear power generators, Sendai was shut down following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, in which a powerful earthquake and tsunami caused three reactors to melt down. Sendai is the first and so far only nuclear plant to reopen, and with memory of the catastrophe still fresh, the public outcry is hardly surprising. Applications by other plants to relaunch are also facing legal challenges.
> 
> Restarting Japan's nuclear power plants is, however, the right decision, provided they can pass strict new safety checks instituted since Fukushima.


----------



## ekim68

Real time Sign of the Times....

Pumpkins


----------



## ekim68

Oslo wants to ban cars from city center and divest billions from fossil fuels



> There goes Norway making the rest of the world look like crap again.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Real time Sign of the Times....
> 
> Pumpkins


----------



## ekim68

Self-driving car guides itself through 2,400 km journey across Mexico




> A self-driving vehicle developed by researchers in Germany has undertaken a monster 2,400 km (1,500 mi) journey from the US/Mexico border at Nogales to Mexico City without any guidance from a human hand. While the lengthy road trip took place mostly on highways, the AutoNOMOS car also had to contend with potholes and city streets before safely pulling into Mexico City to complete the longest trip ever completed by an autonomous vehicle in Latin America.


----------



## ekim68

A Good Gig if you can get it....Especially the Bonuses that they give themselves....


70% of CEOs' effect on company performance can be attributed to random chance




> Texas A&M Professor of Management Markus Fitza used a technique called variance decomposition to evaluate the extent to which the performance of companies can be attributed to astute leadership versus the random chance, and concluded that in 70% of cases, CEOs can't be shown to add any value to the companies they run.


----------



## ekim68

Drug with rage-inducing >5,000% price-hike now has $1/pill competitor




> Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that last month raised the price of the decades-old drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750, now has a competitor.
> 
> Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company based in San Diego, announced today that it has made an alternative to Daraprim that costs about a buck a pill-or $99 for a 100-pill supply.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

:up:


----------



## Brigham

Great!!! While pharmaceutical companies need a decent profit to carry on their research, what that idiot did in hiking up the price like that, gives the whole industry a bad name. Mind you, I did think that there was more to it. That sort of price rise was just too stupid.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Probably some Marketing Manager ready for retirement trying to go out with a bang while his company was the only one.


----------



## ekim68

Culture Shock: Chinese Ministry Slammed on Not-so-Social Media




> With China's guardians of taste cracking down on everything from televised cleavage to the lyrics of Taiwanese rapper MC Hotdog, Chinese Internet users were provided with alternate entertainment this week: watching the country's culture ministry get eviscerated on social media.
> 
> The Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for the protection and promotion of Chinese traditional culture, launched its official account on the popular social-media platform Weibo Thursday and almost immediately it found itself drenched by a firehose of vitriol. Three messages posted to the feed since Thursday afternoon had attracted over 100,000 comments a day later, most of them unfavorable or outright hostile.


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> Probably some Marketing Manager ready for retirement trying to go out with a bang while his company was the only one.


Nope, he is a Hedge Fund Guy who help buy the Company and decided that he could determine the Price because He Was Special....Butthead that he is...


----------



## ekim68

Russian cyberspies targeted the MH17 crash investigation[/SIZE]




> A Russian cyberespionage group that frequently targets government institutions from NATO member countries tried to infiltrate the international investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17).
> 
> MH17 was a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that crashed in eastern Ukraine close to the Russian border on 17 July, 2014. All 283 passengers and 15 crew members lost their lives.


----------



## ekim68

America's Infrastructure Is Not Improving, And That's A Real Problem




> Our once great nation is falling behind the rest of the developed countries in many areas. One of those areas is our infrastructure. In fact, globally the U.S. ranks 16th in quality of infrastructure. America went from having the world's most modernized roadways and highways in the mid-1900s to an outdated and hazardous infrastructure today. In 2013 we were ranked 19th and last year we went up 3 spots, not because we have improved our infrastructure but because other countries' infrastructures worsened.


----------



## ekim68

Township in New Jersey partners with Uber and BeMyDD to cut its DUI numbers




> Evesham Township in New Jersey had a problem-record numbers of people were driving home drunk. The township of 45,000 people was "on track to reach 250 DUI arrests in 2015," according to Reuters. So it started a pilot program in September in which shuttles were provided to transport the inebriated around after hours.
> 
> Just like that, the number of DUI arrests per month went down from an average of 23 per month to just eight.


----------



## ekim68

Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat

*



North America's biggest commercial oil storage hub is already on guard against terrorism, but quakes could prove the bigger risk.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## DaveBurnett

How many bears have been murdered in the last 24 hours in Florida??


----------



## poochee

I read 295.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I read that figure as just being one area and that they called it all off early because rules were being broken and too many were likely to be culled well before the licensed time was up.


----------



## poochee

That's all I have seen.


----------



## ekim68

DaveBurnett said:


> I read that figure as just being one area and that they called it all off early because rules were being broken and too many were likely to be culled well before the licensed time was up.


We're a ruthless lot over here across the Pond. At least a minority ruthless lot of our Population.... They probably stopped the Bear Invasion now so they're Safe.. (Not the Bears...! ) (Almost like going after Iraq when they didn't bomb the buildings...! ) Did I say we were Ruthless?


----------



## ekim68

Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project



> The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara desert and the centre of the north African country's "Ouallywood" film industry it has played host to big-budget location shots in Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones.
> 
> Now the trading city, nicknamed the "door of the desert", is the centre for another blockbuster - a complex of four linked solar mega-plants that, alongside hydro and wind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco's electricity from renewables by 2020 with, it is hoped, some spare to export to Europe. The project is a key plank in Morocco's ambitions to use its untapped deserts to become a global solar superpower.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Yes the military do like the term "collateral damage". 
It is a common saying among British soldiers that they let the US soldiers go first - and not because they fear the enemy. In this case I rather suspect that it is because the Americans are more relaxed around guns and therefore more ready to use them without thinking, whoever is in front.


----------



## ekim68

Looks like EU is bought out just like the USA...


European Parliament votes against net neutrality amendments




> The European Parliament has voted against a set of rules intended to safeguard "net neutrality" in the EU.
> 
> A series of amendments to a regulation on how internet traffic is managed in Europe were all rejected by MEPs.
> 
> Proponents of net neutrality, who demand that web traffic be treated equally by networks, have already criticised the move.
> 
> The existing legislation, which was accepted, will be developed into regulations.


----------



## ekim68

Thank you for cheating, Volkswagen




> The automaker's emissions scandal could end up being a boon if it pushes governments and the industry to reassess diesel's impact more honestly and move away from it altogether.


----------



## ekim68

Anonymous to reveal identities of 1,000 Ku Klux Klan members on 1st anniversary of Ferguson protests




> Anonymous hacktivists are planning to reveal the identities of 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) on the first anniversary of the Ferguson protests which erupted on 24 November 2014. Operation KKK, or #OpKKK, will also aim to shut down websites and other social media accounts affiliated with the KKK.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Anonymous to reveal identities of 1,000 Ku Klux Klan members on 1st anniversary of Ferguson protests


That should be interesting news.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Would they be defrocked or unmasked?


----------



## ekim68

Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?




> What I'm discussing is a barbecue on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn't require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone's front page. It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here's a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.


----------



## ekim68

Move Over, Kale, The New Super Vegetable Comes From The Sea.




> Eat Kelp. It's chock-full of nutrients, it mitigates climate change by sequestering carbon, improves oceans by soaking up excess nitrogen and phosphorus, and has potential as a valuable fertilizer and biofuel.
> 
> It's also delicious.


----------



## ekim68

25 years of IMDb, the world's biggest online movie database




> The year 2015 heralded a number of notable Internet milestones - the humble .com domain name reached 30 years of age, while both eBay and Amazon reached the grand old age of 20. That the Internet Movie Database, a gargantuan film and TV show encyclopedia better known as IMDb, began 25 years ago as a pre-Web hobby project and is now one of the top 50 most visited websites on the Internet is a notable achievement.


----------



## Brigham

My wife and I watch a lot of old films from our youth. I am continually looking up IMdB to see all the details of these films. Unfortunately a lot of the old actors are now no longer with us. It is amazing how many died from lung or other cancers, and many of them so young too.


----------



## ekim68

Annie Dookhan And The Massachusetts Drug Lab Crisis




> In August 2012, Massachusetts officials closed the Hinton state drug lab in Jamaica Plain because a then-obscure chemist allegedly "failed to follow testing protocols" while testing drugs related to criminal cases. That chemist is no longer obscure: Annie Dookhan is now frequently mentioned by lawyers, judges, police and criminal defendants who refer to the cases she handled as "Dookhan cases."
> 
> Dookhan has been criminally charged with deliberately manipulating drug tests at the lab, compromising at least 34,000 cases. Authorities allege:
> 
> 
> that Dookhan did not test all drug samples (yet claimed she had);
> that she deliberately tainted drug evidence;
> that she mixed evidence so it would test positive for drugs when it was actually clean;
> and that she forged signatures on drug testing paperwork.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Yep..


----------



## ekim68

'Tractor beam' grabs beads with sound waves




> Engineers in the UK have developed a system that can grab, hold and move small objects without touching them, using "holograms" made of sound waves.
> 
> It offers the kind of remote control that naturally draws comparison with the "tractor beams" of science fiction.
> 
> So far the team has tested the design on small pea-sized objects, which they can manipulate from 30-40cm away.


----------



## steppenwolf

ekim68 said:


> 'Tractor beam' grabs beads with sound waves


so if Christians are raptured the damned will say"good scientists got rid of the undesirables"?


----------



## ekim68

Scientists announce progress toward better battery to power cars




> Scientists have created a battery whose technology in principle could power electric cars and other energy-hungry devices far better than current lithium-ion batteries, but it remains years away from commercial use.
> 
> Researchers at the University of Cambridge on Thursday announced the creation of a laboratory demonstration model of a lithium-oxygen battery that overcomes many of the barriers that have held back the development of this technology.
> 
> They said the battery boasts very high energy density, is about 93 percent efficient - better than previous efforts - and can be recharged more than 2,000 times.


----------



## ekim68

Kaspersky announces death of CoinVault, Bitcryptor ransomware, releases all keys




> Over 14,000 keys used to unlock files encrypted by CoinVault and Bitcryptor have been released, signaling the death of the ransomware variants.


----------



## ekim68

Anti ad-block firm PageFair becomes cyberattack victim, distributes malware




> Over 500 websites using the company's analytics software were compromised over the weekend and spewed out Trojans in order to infect Windows machines.


----------



## ekim68

Beijing's covert radio network airs China-friendly news across Washington, and the world




> BEIJING/WASHINGTON - In August, foreign ministers from 10 nations blasted China for building artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea. As media around the world covered the diplomatic clash, a radio station that serves the most powerful city in America had a distinctive take on the news.
> 
> Located outside Washington, D.C., WCRW radio made no mention of China's provocative island project. Instead, an analyst explained that tensions in the region were due to unnamed "external forces" trying "to insert themselves into this part of the world using false claims."
> 
> Behind WCRW's coverage is a fact that's never broadcast: The Chinese government controls much of what airs on the station, which can be heard on Capitol Hill and at the White House.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Here's the keys to the vault. Just put your money in there and bring the keys back.


----------



## ekim68

One in five pediatricians reject unvaccinated patients




> DENVER, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- Slightly more than one out of every five U.S. pediatricians has dismissed families because parents refused to vaccinate their children, according to a recent study.
> 
> The American Academy of Pediatricians advises against turning families away for nonvaccination, but doctors have come under pressure not to treat children who have not been vaccinated because of recent communicable disease outbreaks -- especially the measles outbreak at Disneyland in California.


----------



## ekim68

Why is hi-tech Japan using cassette tapes and faxes?




> Japan has a reputation for being fascinated by robots and hi-tech gadgets - a nation at the forefront of manufacturing innovation.
> 
> But the technological reality in many offices is strikingly different.
> 
> This is a country that uses people to do the work of traffic lights and where big-name companies running 10-year-old software is the norm.
> 
> There are even tape cassettes for sale in the ubiquitous convenience stores for office use, along with fax machines - remember them? Even tech visionaries like Sony still use a fax.


----------



## ekim68

Texas Case Mulls if Home-school Kids Have to Learn Something




> Parents are accused of not teaching their children, because they were waiting to be "raptured"


----------



## ekim68

New UK spy powers will force companies to remove encryption




> The UK government wants companies to remove encryption on demand to help the authorities intercept data.
> 
> The new draft powers bill unveiled Wednesday by the UK home secretary, the biggest shake-up to the country's surveillance powers in the past decade, combines existing legislation with new statutes, in an effort to modernize powers for police and intelligence agencies.


----------



## DaveBurnett

They only will be allowed to force decryption with a specific warrant against specified accounts.
Without that they will still only be allowed to decrypt source and target addresses.
They will be allowed to presume a warrant for a limited period, in certain critical cases, but if that is either not forthcoming, or those powers are abused, that right will be withdrawn.
They are NOT being given blanket powers. ANYONE found abusing these powers will face criminal prosecution.
I think this is a temporary thing and will be modified/ratified by Europe (haha!)
It is an attempt to get SOME modern laws on the books before the EU pre-empt them with theirs.


----------



## ekim68

I'm curious as to why you say this:



> It is an attempt to get SOME modern laws on the books before the EU pre-empt them with theirs.


Aren't you going by EU laws now?


----------



## ekim68

Climate change is forcing people to migrate and the world doesn't have a plan to handle it




> How should governments treat people who are forced to migrate due to climate change? That question is on the working agenda for the upcoming Paris climate talks, at least sort of - and that's a good thing. As it stands, there's no clear definition of what, exactly, a forced climate migrant is; nor is there an international legal framework to deal with the mass movement of people (and, sooner than you might think, entire nations) displaced because of global warming. Paris could go a long way toward further recognizing the phenomenon, as well as helping to shape how to deal with it. If it doesn't, some of the world's most vulnerable people will remain in a bizarre legal and political limbo.


----------



## Brigham

Aren't you going by EU laws now?[/QUOTE]

Having to abide by EU laws is one of the reasons we may pull out of the EU.


----------



## DaveBurnett

England is not a full member of the EU, yet our government have "ratified" more EU directives than most full EU members especially where those directives are contrary to existing laws in the country.


----------



## ekim68

I keep hearing different opinions about the UK pulling out of the EU. How likely is it really? I've also heard that Immigration is a big part of the reason to pull out.


----------



## DaveBurnett

The increase in illegal immigrants into Europe is a sore point in England because there are already many illegal immigrants trying to get in from other European states because our benefits (which we have paid for with deductions from salary) are higher and broader than most other European countries. To "force" us to take a share from outside in addition does not go down well with the general public.
By benefits I mean things like the NHS as well as financial benefits that I am only just beginning to find out about myself having just achieved official retirement age.
There are all sorts of silly little things like free bus passes, reduced dentist charges, free prescriptions, free parking in lots of places (but NOT Hospitals??), lots of free or reduced licences, lower standing charges for power and gas(cooking not road fuel). There will be others that I've yet to discover.

Many councils are putting immigrants ahead of local people on the lists for many things like affordable rented council housing - there are plans to build 1500 council houses for immigrants on land near me that had been refused planning permission for private housing builds on the grounds that the existing public facilities like schools and doctors could not support them.

Remember that the UK is already the most densely populated country in Europe.


----------



## ekim68

Thanks for your input Dave. I didn't know that the UK was the most densely populated country in Europe.. (Did I tell you that I'm just a Small Town guy with a limited view of the World? )


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/economists-surprising-prediction-about-climate-change-1740765259']Economists' Surprising Prediction About Climate Change: Less Sex and Fewer Babies[/URL]




> Three researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research have published a working paper showing how increasing temperatures over the next century could mean fewer babies born-because, to paraphrase Cole Porter, it'll be too darn hot.
> 
> Did you know that just _one_ day over 80 degrees is correlated with a .4 percent decrease in birthrates nine months later? Yep-just a moderately hot day can have a "large and statistically significant" effect on rates of birth, say Tulane University's Alan Barreca, UC Santa Barbara's Olivier Deschenes, and the University of Central Florida's Melanie Guldi. Together, the trio are working on extrapolating that known effect into our super-heated future climate in a working paper called Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates.


----------



## DaveBurnett

The UK is a small country (in area) that punches far above its weight in the international community. I think the main reason is because it IS a fairly small island country that had to build an efficient navy in order to trade and defend itself and that trade. 
Therefore there is an English influence dating back many centuries all over the World


----------



## ekim68

And to think this guy is running for the President of the USA.....*sigh*


Ben Carson: Egyptian pyramids were grain stores, not pharaohs' tombs




> Egypt's pyramids were built by the biblical Joseph to store grain and were not, as archaeologists believe, tombs for pharaohs, Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson has said.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious




> Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious services all have declined modestly in recent years.
> 
> But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the "nones" - the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith.


----------



## ekim68

Tolkien's annotated map of Middle-earth discovered inside copy of Lord of the Rings




> A recently discovered map of Middle-earth annotated by JRR Tolkien reveals The Lord of the Rings author's observation that Hobbiton is on the same latitude as Oxford, and implies that the Italian city of Ravenna could be the inspiration behind the fictional city of Minas Tirith.


----------



## ekim68

Get instant translations from Cortana, your personal digital assistant in Windows 10




> Microsoft Translator provides translations whenever and wherever you need them. Translator is available in a number of apps for smartwatches, phones, tablets, and PCs. It is also integrated into a number of products such as Microsoft Office and Skype Translator.
> 
> To make translation even more convenient, the Cortana team has launched native translation support to *Windows 10 in its US and Chinese editions.*


----------



## ekim68

Energy storage advance readies concentrated solar power for the smart grid




> The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources is a huge burden on the power grid, making flexible and economical energy storage an essential step to a greener future. Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of Florida have now devised a way to conveniently store and release energy harvested through concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, improving on the cost and energy density of previous systems and preparing this technology for the smart grid.


----------



## ekim68

Who Owns Molecular Biology?




> But the questions are more fundamental than who will collect the money. Do molecular entities have inventors, and can they be owned? Is it ethical for academic scientists to sell ownership or otherwise regulate access to new techniques? And, if it is acceptable to sell this sort of biological discovery, what are the implications for progress in medicine and science-and for the public that funds this work?


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Who Owns Molecular Biology?


What motivation is there for research. I contend that it is an altruistic satisfaction in helping mankind, and money. Why take one incentive away?


----------



## ekim68

Muzzled Canadian scientists now free to speak with media




> The muzzles are coming off for federal scientists.
> 
> For years, scientists who worked for the federal government were silenced by strict rules that made them seek departmental approval before speaking to the press. On Friday, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains said that scientists are free to speak to the media about their work.


----------



## ekim68

CIA Email Hackers Return With Major Law Enforcement Breach




> Hackers who broke into the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan have struck again.
> 
> This time the group, which goes by the name Crackas With Attitude, says it gained access to an even more important target-a portal for law enforcement that grants access to arrest records and other sensitive data, including what appears to be a tool for sharing information about active shooters and terrorist events, and a system for real-time chats between law enforcement agents.


----------



## ekim68

Brigham said:


> What motivation is there for research. I contend that it is an altruistic satisfaction in helping mankind, and money. Why take one incentive away?


Not sure what your take is on this John....It was this phrase that caught my attention....


> The patent war for DNA-editing technology


Seems to me that the people that do the innovating should be the main receivers of the wealth created by their work. Ah Capitalism.....:down:


----------



## ekim68

Instagram tips police to suspected school shooting plot




> Three Michigan teens face murder conspiracy and other charges for an alleged school rampage plot first discovered on Instagram, Argentine Township police said Sunday.


----------



## ekim68

Websites can keep ignoring "Do Not Track" requests after FCC ruling




> Websites will not be forced to honor consumers' "Do Not Track" requests as the Federal Communications Commission today dismissed a petition that would have imposed new requirements on companies like Google and Facebook.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Not sure what your take is on this John....It was this phrase that caught my attention....
> 
> Seems to me that the people that do the innovating should be the main receivers of the wealth created by their work. Ah Capitalism.....


Yes of course the innovators shouldget their share. If they don't. No more innovators!!


----------



## ekim68

Banking Giants Learn Cost of Preventing Another Lehman Moment




> Seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers jolted the global economy, the world's biggest banks may need to raise as much as $1.2 trillion to meet new rules laid down by financial regulators.
> 
> After years of work, the Financial Stability Board, created by the Group of 20 nations in the aftermath of the crisis, published its plan for making sure giant lenders can be wound down and recapitalized in an orderly way, without taxpayer bailouts.


----------



## ekim68

Global Coal Consumption Heads for Biggest Decline in History




> Coal consumption is poised for its biggest decline in history, driven by China's battle against pollution, economic reforms and its efforts to promote renewable energy.
> 
> Global use of the most polluting fuel fell 2.3 percent to 4.6 percent in the first nine months of 2015 from the same period last year, according to a report released Monday by the environmental group Greenpeace. That's a decline of as much as 180 million tons of standard coal, 40 million tons more than Japan used in the same period.


----------



## ekim68

After Pulling In 5.6M Viewers, Twitch Is Keeping Bob Ross On The Air




> Twitch





> , the Amazon-owned video game streaming site, stumbled into an incredible source of new traffic when it kicked off the launch of its "Twitch Creative," section at the end of last month with the debut of an all-episodes marathon of Bob Ross' "The Joy of Painting." Yes, the "happy little trees" guy. The channel was an immediate success, and today Twitch reports that it attracted 5.6 million unique viewers who watched Ross paint his iconic landscape scenes. In addition, Twitch has decided to capitalize on this interest further, and has decided to keep Ross around by streaming a season of "The Joy of Painting" every Monday, starting today.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge




> In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America.


----------



## ekim68

How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service




> Faced with a local ISP that couldn't provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their _own_ network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It's a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.


----------



## ekim68

China smog reaches 50 times WHO recommendations




> A swathe of China was blanketed with acrid smog Monday after levels of dangerous particulates reached around 50 times World Health Organization maximums, in what environmental campaigners said were the highest figures ever recorded in the country.
> 
> Pictures showed smog so thick that buildings in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province in the northeast, were rendered invisible.


----------



## ekim68

Autumn in the UK


----------



## poochee

Beautiful!


----------



## ekim68

Which are the world's healthiest countries?




> Singapore is the world's healthiest country, according to a ranking that uses data from the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.
> 
> To identify the healthiest countries in the world, Bloomberg Rankings created health scores and health-risk scores for countries with populations of at least 1 million. It determined the countries' rank by subtracting the risk score from the health score.


----------



## ekim68

Who Keeps Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Flowing to For-Profit College?




> For-profit universities have had another rough year, with big players facing federal scrutiny for everything from predatory loans to outright fraud.
> 
> Now attention is turning to the schools' accreditors.
> 
> Accreditors are supposed to make sure that schools provide students with a quality education. They are not government agencies, but wield enormous power: Schools need accreditors' stamps of approval to maintain access to the government's annual $170 billion in federal student aid.


----------



## ekim68

New flu tracker uses Google search data better than Google




> With big data comes big noise. Google learned this lesson the hard way with its now kaput Google Flu Trends. The online tracker, which used Internet search data to predict real-life flu outbreaks, emerged amid fanfare in 2008. Then it met a quiet death this August after repeatedly coughing up bad estimates.
> 
> But big Internet data isn't out of the disease tracking scene yet.
> 
> With hubris firmly in check, a team of Harvard researchers have come up with a way to tame the unruly data, combine it with other data sets, and continually calibrate it to track flu outbreaks with less error. Their new model, published Monday in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_, out-performs Google Flu Trends and other models with at least double the accuracy. If the model holds up in coming flu seasons, it could reinstate some optimism in using big data to monitor disease and herald a wave of more accurate second-generation models.


----------



## ekim68

Whoops....


Russian TV stations broadcast secret nuclear torpedo plans




> The Kremlin has admitted that Russian television accidentally showed secret plans for a nuclear torpedo system on air.
> 
> Two Kremlin-controlled channels, NTV and Channel One, showed a military official looking at a confidential document containing drawings and details of a weapons system called Status-6, designed by Rubin, a nuclear submarine construction company based in St Petersburg.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

The Scientific Reason Why Airplane Food Tastes Bad




> Why does airline food taste so lousy? A new study from CornellUniversity has come up with an answer, and it ain't bad cookin'.
> 
> Turns out, the noisy environment inside a claustrophobic airplane cabin may actually change the way food tastes.
> 
> In the study, 48 people were handed a variety of solutions that were spiked with the five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (basically, a Japanese word for the savory flavor found in foods like bacon, tomatoes, cheese, and soy sauce). First, the testers sipped in silence, then again, while wearing headsets that played about 85 decibels of noise, designed to mimic the hum of jet engines onboard a plane.


----------



## poochee

Interesting theory.


----------



## ekim68

Actually more than a theory.....


----------



## ekim68

Highest CO2 concentrations on record comprise Earth's new "permanent reality"




> It can't really be a surprise to discover that CO2 levels have reached an all-time high. Record concentrations of carbon dioxide are prompting United Nations experts to urge world leaders to take swift action to curb emissions. In projections, the Earth's atmospheric CO2 level is on track to reach a point equivalent to 143 percent of pre-industrial times. This milestone, which is expected to be reached next year, has the head of the UN's weather agency calling for immediate action to cut carbon emissions in an attempt to steer away from a new "permanent reality" in which the Earth is irreparably scarred from the effects of climate change.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Did they test with the recycled engine exhaust - sorry air as well??


----------



## ekim68

Fury and fear in Ohio as IT jobs go to India




> The employees were warned that speaking to the news media meant loss of severance. Despite their fears, they want their story told. They want people to know what's happening to IT jobs in the heartland. They don't want the offshoring of their livelihoods to pass in silence.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I know EXACTLY how they feel.
The same happened to me some years ago (in the UK would you believe) but by an IT company that had been taken over by a large US bank.


----------



## ekim68

Maybe they should Outsource or rather Robosource jobs for CEO's too. I recently came across this....


Even the CEO's job is susceptible to automation, McKinsey report says

(Think of all the money that could be saved by automating this precocious bunch..  )


----------



## DaveBurnett

The really annoying thing is that most of the senior managers that are retained are actually less use to the company than those that are sacked.


----------



## ekim68

Brazil's slow-motion environmental catastrophe unfolds



> Nine people are now confirmed dead, and a further 19 remain unaccounted for as a slow-motion environmental catastrophe continues to unfold following the collapse of two mining dams in Brazil's mineral-rich state of Minas Gerais.
> 
> Eight days after the town of Bento Rodrigues was swept away by 50m cubic metres of toxic mud, a slow-moving tide of toxic iron-ore residue is oozing downriver, polluting the water supply of hundreds of thousands of residents as it makes its way to the ocean.
> 
> Brazil's national water agency, ANA, has warned that the presence of arsenic, zinc, copper and mercury now present in the Rio Doce make the water untreatable for human consumption. Already the lack of oxygen and high temperatures caused by the pollutants has killed off much of the aquatic life along a 500km stretch of the river.


----------



## ekim68

Why drug companies and Hollywood love the TPP




> In 1998, the United States Congress granted a 20-year extension of copyright terms - from the life of the author plus 50 years to the life of the author plus 70 years. Economists like Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman were incredulous, arguing that such long terms couldn't possibly increase the incentive to produce creative works.
> 
> Now, through the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the US is trying to force nations ranging from New Zealand to Vietnam to do the same.
> 
> And it's not just copyright terms. The US also has legal protections for digital rights management technologies that are designed to prevent piracy of movies and music. These protections, though, are loathed by the open source movement, and have had a wide variety of unintended consequences, from restricting cellphone unlocking to limiting people's rights to repair their own cars. Nevertheless, the TPP requires other countries to adopt similar provisions.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Nobody takes any notice of those laws anyway - especially the authorities most of the time.
It is only when the movie industry take out private prosecutions that any action occurs, and even then it is reluctantly.


----------



## ekim68

Doctors urge feds to nix mergers between giant health insurers




> The American Medical Association, the largest association of doctors in the US, wants federal antitrust enforcers to smack down two proposed mergers between big health insurance companies: the combining of Aetna and Humana, and of Anthem and Cigna. The two mergers, if approved, would shrink the number of major national health insurers from five to three.


----------



## ekim68

Republicans think America is doing terribly, but it isn't




> Anyone watching the fourth Republican debate would be excused for thinking America is mired in a deep recession - that the economy is shrinking, foreign competitors are outpacing us, more Americans are uninsured, and innovators can't bring their ideas to market.





> They would be surprised to find that unemployment is at 5 percent, America's recovery from the financial crisis has outpaced that of other developed nations, the percentage of uninsured Americans has been plummeting even as Obamacare has cost less than expected, and there's so much money flowing into new ideas and firms in the tech industry that observers are worried about a second tech bubble.


----------



## ekim68

Fossil Fuel Subsidies Top $450 Billion Annually, Study Says




> The governments of the world's 20 largest economies spend more than $450 billion annually subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, a new analysis has concluded, four times more than what they spend on renewable energy.


----------



## ekim68

Experimental drug targeting Alzheimer's disease shows anti-aging effects




> LA JOLLA-Salk Institute researchers have found that an experimental drug candidate aimed at combating Alzheimer's disease has a host of unexpected anti-aging effects in animals.
> 
> The Salk team expanded upon their previous development of a drug candidate, called J147, which takes a different tack by targeting Alzheimer's major risk factor-old age. In the new work, the team showed that the drug candidate worked well in a mouse model of aging not typically used in Alzheimer's research. When these mice were treated with J147, they had better memory and cognition, healthier blood vessels in the brain and other improved physiological features, as detailed November 12, 2015 in the journal _Aging_.


----------



## ekim68

After Years Of Insults, US Conservatives Now Express Solidarity With France



> Twelve years ago, as the United States launched a war in Iraq, France  opposed the conflict, citing fears that such aggression would destabilize the Middle East and incite terrorism against the West. That stance drew the ire of American conservatives, who derided France in terms typically reserved for enemies, turning "French" into a synonym for cowardly and disloyal.
> 
> As the world now absorbs the spectacle of a lethal series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night, many experts say the tragedy essentially affirms the very fears that prompted the French government to stay out of Iraq: Inchoate revulsion toward the U.S. and its allies and the perception they are waging war against Islam has crystallized into a jihadist movement capable of killing scores of people inside a city that stands as a monument to liberal Western traditions.
> 
> And just as France contends with the brunt of the militants' fury, many American conservatives now depict the country as a courageous and honorable vanguard in the face of that terrorist onslaught.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. trade body cannot block Internet transmissions: appeals court




> A U.S. trade agency does not have power to regulate digital data, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday in a case involving a dental brace company's effort to block a rival's electronic transmissions from entering the country. The appeals court decision negates a U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) ruling last year in favor of Align Technology, Inc, the San Jose, California-based maker of the popular Invisalign plastic braces. Align Technology shares slid 2 percent.


----------



## ekim68

After Endless Demonization Of Encryption, Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinated Via Unencrypted SMS




> In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week encryption has continued to be a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports were quickly circulated suggesting that the terrorists used incredibly sophisticated encryption techniques, despite no evidence by investigators that this was the case.


----------



## ekim68

More Mexicans leave than enter USA in historic shift




> For the first time in more than four decades, more Mexican immigrants are returning to their home country than coming to the United States, according to a report released Thursday.
> 
> From 2009 to 2014, an estimated 870,000 Mexicans came to the United States while 1 million returned home, a net loss for the United States of 130,000, according to the report from the Pew Research Center. That historic shift comes at a time when immigration has become a contentious focal point in the 2016 presidential race, as Republicans and Democrats argue over how best to modernize the nation's immigration system.


----------



## ekim68

30 years of Windows




> When Windows 1.0 arrived 30 years ago, it hardly seemed like a juggernaut. Apple had beaten Microsoft to the punch with the Mac OS, and Windows was mostly a shell on top of MS-DOS. Here's a record of three decades of successes and missteps that took us from Windows 1.0 to Windows 10.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook can block content without explanation, says U.S. court




> A U.S. court has ruled that Facebook can block any content posted to its site without explanation, after a Sikh group legally challenged the company for taking its page offline.
> 
> The San Francisco court ruling followed a lawsuit filed against the social media giant by 'Sikhs For Justice' (SFJ), which claimed that Facebook had blocked its page in India for advocating Sikh separatism, particularly its campaign against the "persecution of Sikhs and for promoting a Sikh referendum in the Indian state of Punjab." The Indian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the national government have already tried to block the page for displaying 'objectionable content.'
> 
> On November 13th, U.S. Northern District of California Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the U.S. based rights group's encouragement of religious discrimination is illegal under the Communications Decency Act, which protects 'interactive computer services' providers by preventing courts from treating them as the publishers of the speech created by their users.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-uk-is-shutting-down-all-its-coal-power-stations-1743221173']The UK Is Shutting Down All Its Coal Power Stations[/URL]




> The British Government has announced that it plans to shut down all of its coal-powered fire stations by 2025, with restrictions put on their use as early as 2023.
> 
> The UK's 15 remaining coal power stations currently account for 28 percent of the nation's energy production. The country's Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd, however, explains that "it cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the UK to be relying on polluting, carbon intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations."


----------



## DaveBurnett

Don't believe everything you see in the press. 
The government said it would LIKE to shut them down.
Omitted words can be as much a lie as altered and added ones.


----------



## ekim68

Satellite wars




> A new arms race in our skies threatens the satellites that control everything from security to communications


----------



## ekim68

Eight more years of leap-second problems loom as governments punt decision to 2023




> Tick. Tick. Tick. Clang! That was the sound of an intergovernmental conference kicking the leap-second can down the road. Sysadmins will be dealing with the consequences for the next eight years.
> 
> Just as adding an extra day in leap years helps us keep our calendars in step with the rotation of the earth around the sun, adding occasional leap seconds to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) allows us to keep this time reference in step with the earth's gradually slowing rotation. Without adjustment, there would be about a minute's difference between the two by 2100.
> 
> Leap seconds are great if you're using your time reference to note exactly when the sun should be directly overhead, or when certain stars should be in view, but for keeping a bunch of servers or Internet routers in sync around the world, continuity matters more than your place in the universe.


----------



## ekim68

In electrifying advance, researchers create circuit within living plants




> Talk about flower power. Researchers have crafted flexible electronic circuits inside a rose. Eventually such circuitry may help farmers eavesdrop on their crops and even control when they ripen. The advance may even allow people to harness energy from trees and shrubs not by cutting them down and using them for fuel, but by plugging directly into their photosynthesis machinery.


----------



## ekim68

Patreon users threatened by Ashley Madison scammers




> Over the last few days, the group responsible for extortion attempts and death threats against Ashley Madison users has turned to a new set of targets - Patreon users.
> 
> The group sending the messages has claimed to be DD4BC, and they have a history of extortion and DDoS attacks. They surfaced in 2014, and until recently they've kept their efforts below the radar.


----------



## ekim68

UK suspects arrested for helping malware bypass antivirus protection




> Two people from the United Kingdom have been arrested on suspicion of helping malware developers evade antivirus software.
> 
> A joint investigation between the UK National Crime Agency (NCA)'s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) and cybersecurity firm Trend Micro resulted in a 22 year-old man and a 22-year-old woman from Colchester, Essex being arrested and detained under suspicion of running a website which allowed malware developers to test whether their creations can evade modern, up-to-date antivirus software.


----------



## ekim68

China and the US create a 'space hotline' to avoid conflicts




> The Kremlin and the White House famously established a hotline between each other during the Cold War to avoid annihilating each other by mistake, and history is repeating itself now that China is a powerhouse. China and the US have set up a "space hotline" to prevent orbital mishaps and misunderstandings from leading to conflicts. They previously had to go through each other's diplomatic channels -- a big problem when there's an imminent satellite collision or rocket test. Now, they should know the truth right away.


----------



## ekim68

*3D printing can recreate your vascular system for pre-op practice*




> Aneurysms, which are tiny blood-filled bulges in the wall of a blood vessel, are responsible for nearly 500,000 deaths a year worldwide when they burst before being treated.
> 
> Part of the problem in treating them, particularly brain aneurysms, is that they're located among a complex maze of vessels that can be difficult to navigate even with the most modern technology.
> 
> With that in mind, physicians and researchers in Buffalo have worked with 3D printer maker Stratasys to develop a method of printing out a patient's complete vascular system in just 24 hours in order to practice navigating it prior to actual surgery.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists produce graphene 100 times cheaper than ever before




> Since first being synthesized by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov at the University of Manchester in 2004, there has been an extensive effort to exploit the extraordinary properties of graphene. However the cost of graphene in comparison to more traditional electronic materials has meant that its uptake in electronic manufacturing has been slow. Now researchers at the University of Glasgow have discovered a way to create large sheets of graphene using the same type of cheap copper used to manufacture lithium-ion batteries.


----------



## ekim68

The Big Problem With Electric Cars: They're Too Reliable




> Matt Richtel has an intriguing article today in the _New York Times_ about electric cars. The question is: why aren't they selling better? Is it because they have weak performance? Because they can only go a hundred miles on a charge? Because they're expensive?
> 
> Those are all issues.1 But it turns out that people who want to buy an electric car anyway have a hard time getting dealerships to sell them one:


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/science/electric-car-auto-dealers.html


----------



## ekim68

2015 to be the hottest year ever says world climate body




> World Meteorological Organisation says man-made global warming and El Niño has also made 2011-2015 the warmest five-year period on record.


----------



## ekim68

Wearable tech to decode sign language




> The communication barrier between deaf people who use sign language and those that don't understand it may be coming to an end thanks to a new wearable technology being developed at Texas A&M University.
> 
> The device incorporates a system of sensors that records the motion of hand gestures, as well as the electromyography or EMG signals produced by muscles in the wrist when signing.


----------



## ekim68

Paris climate activists put under house arrest using emergency laws




> At least 24 climate activists have been put under house arrest by French police, accused of flouting a ban on organising protests during next week's Paris climate summit, the Guardian has learned.
> 
> One legal adviser to the activists said many officers raided his Paris apartment and occupied three floors and a staircase in his block.
> 
> French authorities did not respond to requests for comment but lawyers said that the warrants were issued under state of emergency laws, imposed after the terror attacks that killed 130 people earlier this month.


----------



## ekim68

Security experts warn against Hello Barbie doll that uses wi-fi to talk to your kids




> Group says it is able to extract wi-fi network names and MP3 files from the interactive doll.


----------



## ekim68

Las Vegas Moves Closer To 100% Renewable Energy Thanks To NV Energy Partnership




> Las Vegas is a few legal steps away from having its entire retail load served by renewable energy, thanks to a partnership with NV Energy.
> 
> According to the City of Las Vegas, which announced news of the partnership on Tuesday, the proposed deal would likely see a portion of the electricity produced by a local solar facility dedicated to Las Vegas city operations. This, in turn, would see the entirety of Las Vegas' retail load served by renewable energy.


----------



## ekim68

New type of 'flow battery' can store 10 times the energy of the next best device




> Industrial-scale batteries, known as flow batteries, could one day usher in widespread use of renewable energy-but only if the devices can store large amounts of energy cheaply and feed it to the grid when the sun isn't shining and the winds are calm. That's something conventional flow batteries can't do. Now, researchers report that they've created a novel type of flow battery that uses lithium ion technology-the sort used to power laptops-to store about 10 times as much energy as the most common flow batteries on the market. With a few improvements, the new batteries could make a major impact on the way we store and deliver energy.


----------



## ekim68

Banks are seriously discussing negative interest rates for normal people's savings




> The concept of earning interest on money in the bank is so deeply ingrained into economic life that few people even know that the opposite can happen too: Banks can _take_ a percentage of cash from your account in the form of negative interest rates, under certain conditions.


----------



## ekim68

Foreign law professors condemn space mining provisions of commercial space act




> The Commercial Space Launch Act, which includes provisions allowing American companies the right to keep resources that they mine in space, was recently signed into law by President Barack Obama. While the act has been hailed as groundbreaking in the United States, the space mining title has gotten an angry reaction overseas. In a Friday article in Science Alert, Gbenga Oduntan, Senior Lecturer in International Commercial Law, University of Kent, condemned the space mining provisions as environmentally risky and a violation of international law. Ram Jakhu, a professor at Canada's McGill University's Institute of air and space law, adds that space mining is a violation of the Outer Space Treaty and should not be allowed.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Banks are seriously discussing negative interest rates for normal people's savings


First they make the trouble we are in so we got no money then they want to take more money from us that we do not have.


----------



## ekim68

hewee said:


> First they make the trouble we are in so we got no money then they want to take more money from us that we do not have.


Yep, they have too much control and they don't care about the Little People...


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Yep, they have too much control and they don't care about the Little People...


I do not want to bank online or sign up so I get statements online each month so now I got to PAY them $2.00 a month to get a paper statement each month.
Why?
They should be happy that others do go online and that saves them money but they should not make the others pay.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Why are they doing it?? Because they can.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/paris-is-covered-in-fake-ads-that-mock-the-climate-talk-1745462608']Paris Is Covered In Fake Ads That Mock the Climate Talks' Corporate Sponsors[/URL]




> UK-based activist group Brandalism has peppered the streets of Paris with 600 fake outdoor ads meant to expose the hypocrisy of COP21 Climate Conference corporate sponsors.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/11/seattle-chicago-los-angeles-min-wage-lies-travel/']Seattle. Chicago. Los Angeles. Min Wage Lies Travel.[/URL]




> The AEI's Mark Perry has taken his nonsense - his Lies About Geography and Minimum Wage Tour - on the road, changing venues from Seattle to Los Angeles. It's more of the same purposely misleading, intellectually dishonest* dissembling about the minimum wage.


----------



## ekim68

China's vacuum-cleaner artist turning Beijing's smog into bricks




> His idol is Subcomandante Marcos, the masked Mexican rebel; his weapon of choice a 1,000-watt vacuum cleaner.
> 
> Meet Nut Brother, the Chinese activist-artist attempting to vanquish toxic smog by sucking it up through a black plastic nozzle..
> 
> As the latest coal-fuelled "airpocalypse" engulfed northern China this week and world leaders gathered in Paris to debate the fight against climate change, Nut Brother hit the streets of Beijing hoping to raise awareness of his country's deadly smog crisis.


----------



## ekim68

Phishing blast uses Dropbox to target Hong Kong journalists




> Researchers at FireEye have disclosed an ongoing Phishing campaign that's using Dropbox as a delivery platform.
> 
> The campaign is ran by a group that researchers have named "[email protected]" and it's targeting media organizations in Hong Kong that publish pro-democracy materials.
> 
> The attacks are using basic emails trapped with documents that deliver a malware payload called LowBall - which abuses Dropbox storage services as a command and control (C2) hub.


----------



## ekim68

The brains of men and women aren't really that different, study finds




> In the mid-19th century, researchers claimed they could tell the sex of an individual just by looking at their disembodied brain. But a new study finds that human brains do not fit neatly into "male" and "female" categories. Indeed, all of our brains seem to share a patchwork of forms; some that are more common in males, others that are more common in females, and some that are common to both. The findings could change how scientists study the brain and even how society defines gender.


----------



## hewee

It is the Spirit in made from God then.


----------



## ekim68

New process produces hydrogen from methane, without emitting CO2




> Natural gas accounts for over 28 percent of US energy consumption. Its main component, methane, is a widely-used fossil fuel but also a major contributor to rising CO2 levels, and thus climate change. To address this issue, researchers from the Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a process that extracts the energy content of methane, in the form hydrogen, without producing carbon dioxide.
> 
> In a process called "methane cracking," the molecular components of methane - hydrogen and carbon - are separated at temperatures of over 750° C (1,382° F), without harmful emissions. The concept of methane cracking has been around for several decades, but was limited by low conversion rates and carbon clogging.


----------



## ekim68

DHS Giving Firms Free Penetration Tests




> The *U.S. Department of Homeland Security* (DHS) has been quietly launching stealthy cyber attacks against a range of private U.S. companies - mostly banks and energy firms. These digital intrusion attempts, commissioned in advance by the private sector targets themselves, are part of a little-known program at DHS designed to help "critical infrastructure" companies shore up their computer and network defenses against real-world adversaries. And it's all free of charge (well, on the U.S. taxpayer's dime).


----------



## ekim68

Republicans line up to crush gun control efforts in wake of San Bernardino




> All four GOP senators running for president vote against extending FBI checks to every firearm sold and banning sale to individuals on terror watchlists


----------



## ekim68

A city built on fire: India's coal rush - in pictures




> India's announcement of an 'international solar alliance' at the Paris climate talks is belied by PM Narendra Modi's plans to produce double the amount of coal by 2020. Back home in the coal-mining heartland near the city of Dhanbad, fires rage underground and poisonous air puts health and livelihoods at risk.


----------



## ekim68

Greening Colo: Equinix Pursues a More Sustainable Internet

*



SAN JOSE, Calif. -

Click to expand...

*


> The four rows of silver cubes glimmer in the afternoon sun, sitting inconspicuously behind a data center in the southern end of Silicon Valley. These Bloom Energy Server fuel cells, powered entirely by methane biogas, are a symbol of a much larger vision for an Internet powered by sustainable energy.
> 
> Equinix, the world's largest provider of colocation services, plans to shift its entire global data center network to run on clean and renewable energy. It's an ambitious goal, and will require years of work and a variety of new approaches to energy management.


----------



## ekim68

The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing




> EBEYE, Marshall Islands - Linber Anej waded out in low tide to haul concrete chunks and metal scraps to shore and rebuild the makeshift sea wall in front of his home. The temporary barrier is no match for the rising seas that regularly flood the shacks and muddy streets with saltwater and raw sewage, but every day except Sunday, Mr. Anej joins a group of men and boys to haul the flotsam back into place.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-bandage-glows-green-when-youre-infected-1746337995']This Bandage Glows Green When You're Infected[/URL]




> It isn't easy to diagnose wound infections before they've progressed into a nasty, purulent mess, and many doctors prefer to play it safe by doling out antibiotics early. But a clever new bandage that glows bright green at its first whiff of bad bacteria could help change that.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Uber is now more valuable than Ford, GM, and a bunch of huge public companies



> Uber is reportedly shopping itself to investors for another round of funding, and this time it's seeking a valuation of $62.5 billion.
> As this chart from Statista shows, that means Uber is now more valuable than the major U.S. car companies Ford and GM, more than media giants like Fox and Time-Warner Cable, and almost twice as much as eBay.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I predict it will collapse rather spectacularly!!!!


----------



## ekim68

It boggles my mind where wealth is created these days...Seems to me that the people who do the least amount of work make the most money...In my younger days a product or service was made/done and was paid for with Money. Nowadays some people snap their fingers and Money appears..


----------



## ekim68

Coal is king among pollution that causes heart disease, study says




> Exposure to emissions from coal-fired power plants over a long period of time is significantly more harmful to the heart than other forms of carbon pollution, a new study says.
> 
> The risk of death from heart disease, including heart attacks, was five times as high for people who breathed pollution from coal emissions over 20 years than for those who were exposed to other types of air pollution, according to the study's findings. The burning of coal releases fine particles with a potent mix of toxins, including arsenic and selenium.


----------



## ekim68

Opinion: A climate solution from the moon




> Scientists believe that a gas known as helium-3 can produce abundant energy from nuclear fusion without simultaneously creating any radioactive waste. Yet helium-3 is rarely if ever mentioned in the same breath with the approved trinity of solar, wind, and hydroelectric power.
> 
> It is true that helium-3, a lightweight isotope of the gas that fills children's birthday balloons, is rarely found on Earth. Our planet's thick atmosphere and magnetic field block out rays coming from the sun that carry the element. But our nearest neighbor, the airless moon, turns out to be saturated with the stuff. In 1985, engineers from the University of Wisconsin discovered that lunar soil samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions contained unexpectedly high concentrations of it.


----------



## ekim68

'90 deaths a day': US doctors call for end to ban on gun violence research




> A group of US doctors has called on Congress to lift a decades-long ban that prohibits the use of federal money for gun violence research. The move comes as mass shootings in the US are on a rise, with estimated 90 people dying daily in gun-related violence.


----------



## hewee

I remember when reading and a death a year in LA back in about 1971 and glad I was not living in that City. 
But I still say guns do not kill but people kill. 
People that want to do a crime and want a gun will get them no matter what.
Even the cops are crazy with guns now days. Look how many with a gun can be taken down with a shot in the arm or leg but get shot 20 times or more.
I got a friend who used to be a cop and he says he knows so many other ways to take someone down.
Even more so if they have a knife a cop can take them down very easy with a night stick but cops take the easy way out and just shoot and then get time off with pay. 

Cops protect themselves and cover things up. I seen that happen years ago with cops covering things up and they had me help out too. A home was broken into on housing track I worked on. Kids too gun, and pot and I knew the lady at the home who was out of town. But had keys to all the homes so went in to try and clean up the rolling papers, pot seeds etc all over the floor. Cops come and knew the lady. They got a bag of pot from one of the kids that broke into her home. More cops came and then we had 4 or 5 cop cars at the place. Then another cop car was coming and the cops ask each do you know who this cop is and they did not. So cop gives me the bag of pot and say hide this or put it away so now I got the pot and took it home and I gave it back to owner a week later.

So the cops are just like anyone else but they can get away things and I seen it happen and was even part of it. This happen back about 1978. All this scared me because I went after the kids and my heart was pumped up the rest of the day from all this. I was shocked what they did but also glad because I knew the lady because she was one of the sales ladies of all the homes at the housing track. 

So crimes are done by everyone and just think what ones that are worse then that one the cops cover up. 
Also I was told all cops have that other gun to help protect them if they shot someone then they can say that the other guy had a gun so I had to shoot him. Not that they just shoot them but they think they do so they shoot first and then find out they did not have a gun. Now that is not something a cop wants to happen so you bring out that other gun to cover up what you did wrong. 

So the say call good guys (cops) react to fast now days and they call in so many other cops on things and shot goes off and they all fire. No good


----------



## ekim68

Beijing Issues First-Ever Red Alert for Hazardous Smog




> Beijing's residents have long wondered: Just how bad do the capital's skies have to get before the government issues an emergency red alert?
> 
> The serially 'airpocalypse'-stricken city has in the past resisted issuing such an alert, which requires that authorities implement a series of smog-combating measures. Among other steps, under a red alert half of the city's cars are ordered off the streets, the government recommends that schools be shuttered and outdoor construction must come to a halt. Such alerts are - in theory at least - to be issued when authorities forecast an air-quality index of above 300 for at least three consecutive days.
> 
> China's air-quality index has a maximum reading of 500, or what the government calls "severely polluted."


----------



## ekim68

The Shame of Tax Havens




> Tax havens cost the world's governments hundreds of billions of dollars a year, promote corruption, and undermine the rule of law. They are part of a larger worrisome pattern in which the world's corporations outrun the governing capacity of states. A tax haven is a nation that refuses to cooperate with major countries in order to lure multinational corporations and investors to nominally book transactions in its locale. These transactions can be outright illegal, or borderline, but beyond the reach of legitimate tax authorities.


----------



## ekim68

Q-carbon: A new phase of carbon so hard it forms diamonds when melted




> Carbon boasts the ability to exist in different forms and phases, and now researchers have discovered Q-carbon, a distinct new solid phase of carbon with the potential to make converting carbon into diamonds as easy as making toast (if you make toast with a high powered laser beam). It's early days yet, but researchers are already claiming that Q-carbon is magnetic, electro-conductive, glows in the dark, is relatively inexpensive to make and has stolen the crown of "world's hardest substance" from diamond.


----------



## ekim68

When Undercover Credit Card Buys Go Bad




> I recently heard from a source in law enforcement who had a peculiar problem. The source investigates cybercrime, and he was reaching out for advice after trying but failing to conduct undercover buys of stolen credit cards from a well-known underground card market. Turns out, the cybercrime bazaar's own security system triggered a "pig alert" and brazenly flagged the fed's transactions as an undercover purchase placed by a law enforcement officer.


----------



## ekim68

Eric Schmidt proposes 'hate spell-checker' to suppress radical and terrorist content




> Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. (aka Google), has proposed the creation of automated tools to limit 'the empowerment of the wrong people, and the wrong voices' on the internet, in a putative concerted effort across digital industries to limit hate-speech, radicalisation and terrorist recruitment.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Sponge injection could save the lives of domestic gunshot victims




> As mass shootings continue to make headlines and gun sales surge nationwide, a sponge-injecting device designed to patch life-threatening bullet wounds in war is making a domestic debut.


----------



## ekim68

Powered Exoskeletons Could Replace Wheelchairs One Day




> When you hear the word exoskeleton, you probably think of an insect's hard carapace or Iron Man's suit-a sort of body-sheath that lends its wearer superhuman powers. But for years, Ekso Bionics has crafted their own exoskeletons, wrap-around metal braces with motors and a CPU backpack that allow paraplegics to walk again. (Their other suits, designed for construction, help skinny journalists heft 40-pound tools with ease.)
> 
> Matt Tilford spent three years in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident. Now, he's a test pilot for one of Ekso's suits. His exoskeleton provides him with external support, but allows him to use his own bones to stand up and hold his weight. When Tilford presses a button, the suit replicates muscle movement by lifting his legs for him, so he can get around on his own two robo-assisted feet.


----------



## ekim68

Chubb to offer UK 'troll insurance' policy




> Insurance group Chubb will start offering the UK's first cyber-bullying policy - 'troll insurance' - through which it will accept claims of up to £50,000 to cover counselling and relocation costs, as well as time spent out of work.
> 
> Chubb, a household name for its locks and safety equipment, will provide its personal insurance policy customers the option to claim expenses ensued from online abuse. Cyberbullying is defined by the insurer as 'three or more acts by the same person or group to harass, threaten or intimidate [paywalled] a customer.'
> 
> Chubb introduced the new policy following a survey conducted among its target audience and brokers. Tara Parchment, private clients manager for the UK and Ireland, explained that the troll insurance would aim to help customers re-establish their lives after suffering a cyber incident that has caused physical harm to their home or person.


----------



## ekim68

French PM Seems To Realize Banning Encrypted Comms Could Hurt Economy, Security




> Recently, French law enforcement suggested that Tor and free public Wi-Fi should be banned to help it fight terrorism more easily. The country's Prime Minister, Manual Valls, has now stated that "a ban on Wi-Fi is not a course of action envisaged," and he's not in favor of banning Tor, either.
> 
> The Prime Minister added that "Internet is a freedom, is an extraordinary means of communication between people, it is a benefit to the economy." He also noted that whatever measures are taken to fight terrorism have to be "effective."


----------



## ekim68

Drone squad to be launched by Tokyo police




> A drone squad, designed to locate and - if necessary - capture nuisance drones flown by members of the public, is to be launched by police in Tokyo.
> 
> The police unit will patrol important buildings such as the prime minister's office.
> 
> If a suspicious drone is detected, the operator will be warned via loudspeakers on the ground.
> 
> But if he or she fails to respond, police will launch drones equipped with nets to bring down the device.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Germany fires up bizarre new fusion reactor




> On 10 December, Germany's new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium-an unreactive gas-so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Germany fires up bizarre new fusion reactor


I often wonder if one day a sudden breakthrough might occur, and at a stroke, render all fossil fuels redundant.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Whoops it is a bit more reactive than we................... !


----------



## ekim68

UK citizens may soon need licenses to photograph some stuff they already own




> Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That's the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25 years after they were first marketed to 70 years after the creator's death. In most cases, that will be well over a hundred years after the object was designed. During that period, taking a photo of the item will often require a licence from the copyright owner regardless of who owns the particular object in question.


----------



## ekim68

The world wastes a shocking amount of food. This could change that




> Ugly is in. At least when it comes to what we eat.
> 
> That's the hope of Nicolas Chabanne, a French businessman who thinks we could solve a significant portion of our food waste problem if we'd just be less picky about what our food looks like. _The New York Times_ reports that Chabanne is the creator of Gueules Cassées, or Ugly Mugs, a campaign to eliminate food waste by getting farmers and growers to charge less for ugly produce. Food producers affix Ugly Mugs labels to their unsightly goods and promise to sell them for at least 30 percent less than the pretty stuff.
> 
> And there is a _lot_ of ugly food out there. Ugly Mugs says that 40 percent of food produced on the planet never gets eaten.


----------



## ekim68

Revolutionary steel treatment paves the way for radically lighter, stronger, cheaper cars




> Back in 2011, we wrote about a fascinating new way to heat-treat regular, cheap steel to endow it with an almost miraculous blend of characteristics. Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape while cold without thinning or cracking. It's now being tested by three of the world's five largest car manufacturers, who are finding they can produce thinner structural car components that are between 30-50 percent lighter and cheaper than the steel they've been using, while maintaining the same performance is crash tests. Those are revolutionary numbers in the auto space.


----------



## ekim68

Cable providers still have no answer for Netflix as cord-cutting accelerates




> While cable providers over the past few decades have grown fat off of exorbitant cable packages that overcharge and under-deliver, the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video are finally righting the ship and shifting the balance of power towards the consumer. Clearly, the cable industry is in the midst of a transition.


----------



## hewee

I still like my cable and corded phone.


----------



## ekim68

Looks like I'm gonna have to register my Birthday gift.....


Get Ready To Register Your Drone With The FAA On December 21


----------



## ekim68

Audi Exec: Autonomous Cars Will Disrupt Travel Industry




> We all know that electric cars will disrupt the automobile industry. In fact, cars like the Tesla Model S have already done so. But few people realize that the synergy between electric cars and autonomous driving technology may disrupt the travel industry as well.
> 
> Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at Audi, thinks that within 20 years, autonomous cars could radically alter how people travel. Let's face it, air travel today is about as much fun as a colonoscopy. We stand in line, waiting to disrobe and be groped electronically by TSA minions, only to be squeezed into undersized seats with no leg room. For this, we pay exorbitant prices and receive almost no food or water during the journey. Who wouldn't want to see that model disrupted?


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gawker.com/the-middle-class-is-now-a-minority-1747290888']The Middle Class Is Now a Minority[/URL]




> The Middle Class, a popular figure in American folklore, died this week after a long battle with capitalism. Its passing has been expected since the recent death of its partner, The American Dream.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The Middle Class Is Now a Minority


...


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> The Middle Class Is Now a Minority


Well they started this in the 1960's and when Reagan killed the unions in the 1980's all really went downhill. Then we lose jobs for cheaper labor because we made less so we spend less.


----------



## ekim68

Class warfare breaks out over private Mars colonies




> The odor of class warfare has broken out over the notion of a commercial Mars colony. It started when Elon Musk, who is said to be planning to retire on the Red Planet, mused that World War III could ruin his plans to settle Mars by destroying the Earth or at least damaging civilization sufficiently that space exploration has to be put off indefinitely, Newsweek, taking up the theme of another sort of planetary disaster, accused Musk and other space-minded billionaires of plotting to abandon the planet to the ravages of global warming while they go to Mars to live the good life.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix will re-encode its entire catalogue in 2016 to save bandwidth




> After spending four years on the project, video-streaming behemoth Netflix is set to roll out a new video-encoding system which promises a significant cut in general internet traffic, and which will involve the re-encoding of the company's petabyte of streaming data.
> 
> The new system will encode from the raw source material more intelligently, considering whether or not the material itself can really benefit from higher bit-rates, or whether identical quality can be maintained with less space and bandwidth.


----------



## ekim68

UK unemployment rate falls to 5.2%, lowest in nearly 10 years



> The UK unemployment rate fell to the lowest for nearly 10 years at 5.2% in the three months to October.
> 
> It was the lowest jobless rate since the three-month period to January 2006, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

San Diego Passes Strongest City-Wide 100% Clean Energy Law in America




> As world leaders return from an historic universal climate agreement in Paris, San Diego has pledged to make major strides in cutting carbon pollution by going all-in on clean energy. Today the city announced it is pledging to get 100 percent of its energy from clean and renewable power with a Climate Action Plan that sets the boldest city-wide clean energy law in the U.S.
> 
> With this announcement, San Diego is the largest U.S. city to join the growing trend of cities choosing clean energy. Already, at least 13 U.S. cities, including San Francisco, California; Burlington, Vermont; and Aspen, Colorado, have committed to 100 percent clean energy.
> 
> And once again showing that clean energy and climate action isn't just a push from the left: San Diego is led by a Republican Mayor.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook, Google, Twitter agree to delete hate speech in 24 hours: Germany




> Germany said on Tuesday that Facebook, Google and Twitter have agreed to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours, a new step in the fight against rising online racism following the refugee crisis.
> 
> The government has been trying to get social platforms to crack down on the rise in anti-foreigner comments in German on the web as the country struggles to cope with an influx of more than 1 million refugees this year.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/12/chinese-investment-in-africa/']Chinese Investment in Africa[/URL]




> While the United States wastes billions on ill-advised foreign adventures and destabilizing wars of choice, CHian has slowly been accumulating a massive amount of resources around the world. Here is their investments in Africa:


----------



## ekim68

Nevada ranchers collect drought subsidies while denying the drought




> By denying the severity of the drought - and by claiming that "rogue" federal bureaucrats threatened them with economic ruin* - *the ranchers won the day. But even as the conflict played out, some of these same ranchers were collecting drought subsidies from the federal government.
> 
> On one hand, they denied the drought. On the other hand, they embraced it.
> 
> According to records obtained by Reveal, two ranching families at the center of the Battle Mountain protests received $2.2 million from a federal drought disaster relief program.


----------



## ekim68

HeLi-on flexible solar panel rolls up to portable power party




> Compact solar panels have been around for some time, but in a trade-off with portability many are too small to generate practical amounts of electricity over short periods. New designs, such as the Yolk Solar Paper, are capable of generating more electricity while maintaining a slim profile, but the HeLi-on further expands on the idea of portable power generation with a flexible solar cell that rolls out from a compact package to soak up more rays.


----------



## ekim68

Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent




> Despite fizzling out within months, Occupy Wall Street succeeded in changing the terms of political discussion in America. Inequality, the concentration of wealth, the one percent, the new Gilded Age-all became fixtures of national debate thanks in part to the protesters who camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Even the Republican presidential candidates have felt compelled to address the matter. News organizations, meanwhile, have produced regular reports on the fortunes of the wealthy, the struggles of the middle class, and the travails of those left behind.
> 
> Even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality, however, the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view. On all sides, billionaires are shaping policy, influencing opinion, promoting favorite causes, polishing their images-and carefully shielding themselves from scrutiny. Journalists have largely let them get away with it.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/move-over-graphene-the-latest-super-material-is-borop-1748663333']Move Over, Graphene: Borophene Could Be the Strongest Material Ever[/URL]




> Graphene is the best-known two-dimensional material, with its atom-thick layers proving plenty of fascinating material properties. But now a team of scientists has developed a new material with a similar structure that they're calling borophene.
> 
> The new two-dimensional sheet, developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy, is made up from atoms of boron. While boron is non-metallic semi-conductor in most of its normal three-dimensional arrangements, the researchers have found that it in fact has some metallic properties when it's stretched out into a two-dimensional sheet.


----------



## ekim68

Smallest color picture ever printed fits inside a human hair




> Scientists have created a picture that only fleas could truly appreciate. That's because the inkjet-printed image takes up an area no larger than the cross-section of a human hair. The picture of a few clownfish in their sea anemone home measures just 80 µm x 115 µm for a total area of 0.0092 square mm.


----------



## DaveBurnett

A mere drop........ ?


----------



## ekim68

I remember when the inkjet printers first came out and I read the specs on them. As an old typewriter repair guy I was skeptical about their claims for resolutions. It appears as though I was wrong... (Not the first time.. )


----------



## DaveBurnett

I thought there was a minimum possible droplet size as well!!

You don't let that one dry out!!


----------



## ekim68

Femto Fairy Lights - Touchable Holograms



> A Japanese team has manage to create a 3D volumetric display that you can actually touch by zapping the air until it glows using a laser - sounds dangerous or is it?


----------



## ekim68

Mobile gaming giant calls for longer product life cycles




> South Korean gaming firm Nexon has vowed to release mobile games with longer life cycles, focusing on attracting users for at least 10 years rather than relying on fad sales.
> 
> The company argued that developing a sustainable ecosystem in the mobile gaming industry was more important than generating immediate sales, according to local reports.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/stupid-drone-1749351841']Stupid Drone [/URL]




> Four-time World Cup champion skier Marcel Hirscher was doing his thing in a slalom race in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy today, minding his own business, when he was almost smoked by a news drone.


----------



## DaveBurnett

I like his comment that he was warned about heavy snow!!


----------



## ekim68

DHS: Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones




> The drug cartels aren't just buying golden Uzis anymore. As the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, or CBP, has upped its drone patrols along America's Mexican border, narcotics traffickers have responded with expensive technology of their own.
> 
> "The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems."


----------



## ekim68

*Sigh*.......A Sign of earlier Times....


Exxon's Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/23/poland-miners-coal-christmas/']Poland's coal miners get coal for Christmas[/URL]




> It's not easy being a coal miner.
> 
> You work underground for hours with no natural light or fresh air, you breathe unhealthy air that can cause "black lung" disease. There's risk of explosions, and of accidents.


----------



## ekim68

The Justice Department just shut down a huge asset forfeiture program




> The Department of Justice announced this week that it's suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers.
> 
> The "equitable-sharing" program gives police the option of prosecuting asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize -- even if the people they took from are never charged with a crime.


----------



## ekim68

ORNL achieves milestone with plutonium-238 sample




> OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 22, 2015 - With the production of 50 grams of plutonium-238, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have restored a U.S. capability dormant for nearly 30 years and set the course to provide power for NASA and other missions.
> 
> Plutonium-238 produces heat as it decays and can be used in systems that power spacecraft instruments. The new sample, which is in the same oxide powder form used to manufacture heat sources for power systems, represents the first end-to-end demonstration of a plutonium-238 production capability in the United States since the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina ceased production of the material in the late 1980s.


----------



## ekim68

China passes law requiring tech firms to hand over encryption keys




> Apple may have said that it opposes the idea of weakening encryption and providing governments with backdoors into products, but things are rather different in China. The Chinese parliament has just passed a law that requires technology companies to comply with government requests for information, including handing over encryption keys.


----------



## ekim68

In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears




> STOCKHOLM - Parishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote "Money, Money, Money," considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins.
> 
> Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic.


----------



## DaveBurnett

That puts my little tale to shame.
Some years ago I had reason to pay a flying visit to Norway and was approached by a tramp begging for money for cigarettes. He spoke perfect accentless English and said he preferred Dollars or English Pounds.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/milan-bans-cars-to-combat-horrible-smog-1749938293']Milan Bans Cars to Combat Horrible Smog[/URL]




> Beijing and Delhi are both planning major initiatives to kick cars off their streets, at least part of the time. Now even cities that aren't famous for their pollution are taking drastic measures to clean up their air. Today, Milan's streets are filled with bikes and pedestrians as part of three-day car ban.


----------



## ekim68

Why Engineers Can't Stop Los Angeles' Enormous Methane Leak




> One of the biggest environmental disasters in US history is happening right now, and you've probably never heard of it.
> 
> An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company.


----------



## ekim68

IMF: Saudi Arabia running on empty in five years




> Gulf kingdom could deplete financial assets within five years as it struggles with slumping oil prices.


----------



## ekim68

Switzerland Wants a Single, Universal Phone Charger by 2017




> Switzerland is moving forward with a plan for a single, universal phone charger across the country, standardizing phone chargers across the board. While the exact standard hasn't been mentioned yet, it wouldn't be hard to guess the standard: Micro USB, used across phone platforms, most especially Android, which has a gigantic chunk of the cell phone market worldwide.


----------



## ekim68

We Are Astonishingly Safe From Terrorism




> Steven Rattner has collected 10 charts to describe 2015,





> but the most interesting one is actually for 2014: It shows terrorist deaths in Western nations versus the rest of the world. For all the fear that terrorism inspires in us, the entire Western world accounted for only 0.1 percent of all terror fatalities in 2014.


----------



## ekim68

After A Decade Of Waiting For Verizon, Town Builds Itself Gigabit Fiber For $75 Per Month




> Like many broadband black holes, Western Massachusetts has spent years asking regional duopolies for broadband. Towns like Leverett, Mass. literally took to hanging signs around town begging Verizon to install even the slowest DSL. Of course Verizon not only refused to install Western Massachusetts, they froze deployment of effectively all FiOS fiber upgrades, leaving a large number of towns and cities (including Boston, Baltimore, Alexandria, Buffalo) without next-gen broadband -- or in some cases broadband at all.
> 
> But, unlike many areas, Western Massachusetts decided to do something about it. In 2012 Leverett voters approved borrowing $3.6 million -- or roughly $1,900 per resident -- to deliver fiber to 800 premises.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Artificial Intelligence Is Starting To See Things Now



> Artificial intelligence projects have gotten more attention over the past few years as some major milestones have been achieved and point to a promising future for AI (or cognitive computing or whatever we want to call it now). Software is getting better and better at recognizing what we're writing and saying... and now it's getting better at seeing what we're up to. Check out a few of these projects where computers are identifying visual images and correctly identifying a wide variety of things.


----------



## ekim68

New York is finally installing its promised public gigabit Wi-Fi




> The full network will install more than 7,500 public hubs throughout the city, each replacing a pre-existing phone booth. Once completed, the hubs will also include USB device charging ports, touchscreen web browsing, and two 55-inch advertising displays. The city estimates that ads served by the new hubs will generate more than $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years.


----------



## ekim68

The dark side of the coming chatbot revolution




> For many, messaging app-based chatbots will replace search engines and virtual assistants. And friends.


----------



## ekim68

Copyright of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf expires




> For the first time in 70 years, Adolf Hitler's Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf is to be available to buy in Germany.
> 
> Reprinting the anti-Semitic book was banned after WW2 by Bavaria's regional government, which held the copyright.


----------



## ekim68

How the Internet changed the way we read




> As a professor of literature, rhetoric, and writing at the University of California at Irvine, I've discovered that one of the biggest lies about American culture (propagated even by college students) is that Americans don't read.
> 
> The truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancien régime, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Cell Service Could Snare All the Major Carriers




> Operated by Google and available to a limited number of users on Google's flagship Nexus phones in the US, Project Fi lets you automatically move back and forth between two US cellular services: T-Mobile and Sprint. But this switching is hidden from you, the phone owner. You pay Google for service, while Google handles the technical and financial relationships with T-Mobile and Sprint. The carriers fade into the background, and you get a better signal from a reasonably inexpensive service that you can cancel at any time.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/new-3d-printing-method-creates-ceramic-strcutures-that-1750877894']New 3D Printing Method Creates Ceramic Structures That Withstand 2,500°F[/URL]




> Ceramics are amazing materials-strong, light and with amazing thermal properties. Now, researchers have developed a new way to 3D print the materials more effectively than in the past, and the results can withstand temperatures of 2,500°F.


----------



## ekim68

The War on Women Is About to Get a Whole Lot Worse




> Between the shooting deaths of three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court's decision to hear its first abortion-related case in nine years, and the more than 50 new abortion restriction laws enacted by state governments, abortion access was one of the most important issues of 2015. With presidential politics and ongoing legal challenges in the states, abortion rights will continue to be under fire in 2016.


----------



## ekim68

In pictures: Preparations for Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival 2016




> The annual Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival takes place in China's north-eastern province of Heilongjiang and is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people to see the sculptures.


----------



## ekim68

Physicists come up with a way to make cleaner fuel cells




> An international group of scientists from Russia, France, and Germany have developed ion-exchange synthetic membranes based on amphiphilic compounds that are able to convert the energy of chemical reactions into electrical current. The new development described in the journal _Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics_ could potentially be used in fuel cells, and in separation and purification processes. The study was conducted by MIPT's Laboratory of Functional Organic and Hybrid Materials, which was opened in 2014.


----------



## ekim68

Intel launches x-ray-like glasses that allow wearers to 'see inside' objects




> Intel





> has launched a set of glasses built into a helmet that give x-ray-like vision using its RealSense 3D camera.
> 
> The glasses-cum-hardhat was unveiled at CES in Las Vegas and has been co-developed with augmented reality company Daqri using Intel's latest processor and camera technology. It has taken concepts - like those of Microsoft's Hololens - and produced a real product.
> 
> Unlike devices such as HoloLens or Google Glass, which have been marketed as consumer devices, the Daqri Smart Helmet is designed with industrial use in mind. It will allow the wearer to effectively peer into the workings of objects using real-time overlay of information, such as wiring diagrams, schematics and problem areas that need fixing.


----------



## ekim68

2015 was deadliest year for domestic extremist violence in two decades, report says




> The mass killings that erupted last year seemed linked by little more than a hail of gunfire. Their locations became etched in public memory, the terror and bloodshed drawing our attention to a church in Charleston, S.C., military facilities in Chattanooga, Tenn., and most recently, a holiday gathering in San Bernardino, Calif.
> 
> But together, these violent rampages contributed to a grim statistic: At least 52 people in the United States were killed by domestic extremists in 2015, the highest number in two decades, according to a report released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-material-could-soak-up-sunlight-then-release-heat-1751541361']This Material Can Soak Up Sunlight Then Release Heat on Demand[/URL]




> Imagine clothes, houses or cars that soaked up heat during the day and then released it on demand when things turned cold. That's exactly what a new material made at MIT could provide in the future.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> This Material Can Soak Up Sunlight Then Release Heat on Demand


...


----------



## ekim68

Oklahoma hit with 70 quakes in a week



> A swarm of more than 70 small earthquakes has rattled Oklahoma in the past week, raising concerns that the state's quake problem is getting worse.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

California gas leak is so bad that governor declares emergency



> California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency Wednesday in response to the methane leak that has been spewing foul-smelling and toxic gas into the Porter Ranch area of Los Angeles for months. Thousands of local residents - some of whom have experienced vomiting, nosebleeds, headaches, and dizziness - have already left the area, and more plan to follow suit.
> 
> NPR reports that the Southern California Gas Company "acknowledges that the odorant in natural gas is 'unpleasant' but maintains the leak 'does not pose an imminent threat to public safety.'" Tell that to the dizzy, vomiting, now-homeless locals.


----------



## ekim68

American cable giants go bananas after FCC slams broadband rollout




> A big fight has broken out between ISPs and their regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in the US.
> 
> The FCC's annual Broadband Report will be published shortly, and late Thursday, chairman Tom Wheeler put out a "factsheet" about its main finding: that broadband is "not being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to all Americans."


----------



## ekim68

Walmart sued in Philly in sale of ammo used in killings




> Robert Jourdain had been drinking for hours before he walked into a Walmart store early in the morning of July 5 and bought a box of .38-caliber ammunition, court papers say.
> 
> Shortly before 3 a.m., Jourdain, then 20, left the Northampton Crossings shopping center in Lower Nazareth Township and got into the white Mercedes Benz sport utility vehicle where Todd West was waiting with a Smith & Wesson revolver. Within an hour, West allegedly used the bullets to kill three people in a random shooting spree on the streets of Easton and Allentown.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/01/how-did-the-u-s-stock-market-become-so-intertwined-with-china/']How Did the U.S. Stock Market Become So Intertwined With China?[/URL]




> Yesterday, Wharton Finance Professor Jeremy Siegel appeared on CNBC to make a prediction that the S&P 500 index would experience a 10 percent upside by the end of this year. You might want to evaluate that prediction against what Professor Siegel also believes to be the U.S. situation with China. In answer to a question as to why the economic situation in China won't weigh on the U.S., Siegel said: "We export very little to China" (see second video at this link). That statement, in fact, is false. According to detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, China is our third largest source of exports, at $106.1 billion through November - behind only Canada and Mexico.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-says-a-tesla-should-drive-itself-coast-to-coa-1752108176']Coast To Coast In A Tesla With No Driver Within 24 To 36 Months, Says Elon[/URL]




> On Saturday, we learned of the new v7.1 software release on the Tesla Model S-an update allowing owners to summon the car like a well-trained dog and make it park itself. But it's not that weird, according to Tesla head honcho Elon Musk. He says we could see fully autonomous cars in a matter of two to three years.


----------



## ekim68

FTC Fines Software Maker over False Data Encryption Claims




> The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined a software vendor for lying about its product's encryption capabilities, despite being publicly warned by US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) not to do so.


----------



## ekim68

Why Do Americans Work So Much?




> The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn't exactly how things have played out.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Purchases AI company Emotient to read users' expressions




> In its first acquisition of 2016, Apple has purchased an artificial intelligence company called Emotient for an undisclosed amount.
> 
> Emotient, a San Diego-based company, presents themselves as 'the leader in emotion detection and sentiment analysis', which can be used to help organizations understand audience reactions to their products, services, and marketing.


----------



## ekim68

China Bans New Coal Mines: Why Hasn't U.S. Done the Same?




> China





> has taken a bold step to address pollution and oversupply issues plaguing the country's energy market: a three-year ban on new coal mines.
> 
> Starting this year, the country will suspend all new permit applications for coal mines for the next three years. In addition, officials also announced that they plan to close approximately 1,000 coal mines throughout the country, taking away more than 60 million metric tons of excess coal supply-unneeded as China moves to decrease its reliance on coal.


----------



## ekim68

Is the Schengen dream of Europe without borders becoming a thing of the past?




> With Sweden and Denmark reintroducing border controls in a new Europe of razor-wire fences, fear of mass immigration and homegrown terror, obituaries are already being written.


----------



## ekim68

Stanford scientists build battery that won't overheat




> PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Scientists at Stanford have designed a lithium-ion battery that doesn't overheat. The battery shuts itself off when temperatures get too high, and powers back on once it's sufficiently cooled.
> 
> Researchers say the new technology will help prevent battery fires in electronics like laptops and hoverboards.


----------



## ekim68

TransCanada: If we can't build Keystone, we want $15 billion




> TransCanada isn't taking no for an answer. In November, President Obama rejected the company's plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline. Now the company is fighting that decision, just as it had threatened to do: It's suing America and seeking $15 billion in damages.


----------



## DaveBurnett

It sounds as though even greasing palms didn't work!!


----------



## ekim68

That's a slick way to put it...


----------



## ekim68

Sharing ransomware code for educational purposes is asking for trouble




> Trend Micro may still be smarting from the revelation that there was a serious vulnerability in its Password Manager tool, but today the security company warns of the dangers of sharing ransomware source code.
> 
> The company says that those who discover vulnerabilities need to think carefully about sharing details of their findings with the wider public as there is great potential for this information to be misused, even if it is released for educational purposes. It says that "even with the best intentions, improper disclosure of sensitive information can lead to complicated, and sometimes even troublesome scenarios".


----------



## ekim68

Solar and Wind Just Did the Unthinkable




> The sun and the wind continue to defy gravity.
> 
> Renewables just finished another record-breaking year, with more money invested ($329 billion) and more capacity added (121 gigawatts) than ever before, according to new data released Thursday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.


----------



## ekim68

More people in Europe are dying than are being born




> Texas A&M Professor of Sociology Dudley Poston, along with Professor Kenneth Johnson, University of New Hampshire, and Professor Layton Field, Mount St. Mary's University, published their findings in _Population and Development Review_ this month.
> 
> The researchers find that 17 European nations have more people dying in them than are being born (natural decrease), including three of Europe's more populous nations: Russia, Germany and Italy. In contrast, in the U.S. and in the state of Texas, births exceed deaths by a substantial margin.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Investors Snub Money Managers for Market Clones




> More investors are losing faith in old-school money managers as financial markets sputter.
> 
> Clients yanked $207.3 billion in 2015 from U.S.-based mutual funds that hand pick their positions while pouring $413.8 billion into funds that mimic broad indexes for a fraction of the cost, according to new data from research firm Morningstar Inc.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://tribune.com.pk/story/1027742/settled-matter-bill-aiming-to-ban-child-marriages-shot-down/']Bill aiming to ban child marriages shot down[/URL]

*



ISLAMABAD:

Click to expand...

*


> Another move to ban child marriages in Pakistan has fallen at the first hurdle. The bill to prohibit underage marriages has been withdrawn after the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) declared it un-Islamic.


----------



## ekim68

Drone pilots beware: You may have to get insurance, leave info after accident




> Two California lawmakers have introduced two separate bills this week that would further regulate drones in America's most populous state.
> 
> If passed, one of the new state laws would require "tiny physical or electronic license plates" and inexpensive insurance, among other requirements. A second bill would compel drone pilots who are involved in incidents that damage property or injure people to leave their contact information-similar to what drivers must do following auto accidents.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T chooses Ubuntu Linux instead of Microsoft Windows




> While Linux's share of the desktop pie is still virtually nonexistent, it owns two arguably more important markets -- servers and smartphones. As PC sales decline dramatically, Android phones are continually a runaway market share leader. In other words, fewer people are buying Windows computers -- and likely spending less time using them -- while everyone and their mother are glued to their phones. And those phones are most likely powered by the Linux kernel.


----------



## ekim68

Weak electrical field found to carry information around the brain




> In a development that could lead to improved understanding of memory formation and epilepsy, scientists have discovered a new way information may be traveling throughout the brain. The team has identified slow-moving brainwaves it says could be carried only by the brain's gentle electrical field, a mechanism previously thought to be incapable of spreading neural signals altogether.


----------



## ekim68

Richest 1% Now Wealthier Than the Rest of the World, Oxfam Says




> The richest 1 percent is now wealthier than the rest of humanity combined, according to Oxfam, which called on governments to intensify efforts to reduce such inequality.
> 
> In a report published on the eve of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the anti-poverty charity cited data from Credit Suisse Group AG in declaring the most affluent controlled most of the world's wealth in 2015. That's a year earlier than it had anticipated.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/wind-power-generated-nearly-half-of-denmarks-electricit-1753589112']Wind Power Generated Nearly Half of Denmark's Electricity in 2015, Sets World Record[/URL]




> The Scandinavian nation is setting the global bar for harnessing wind energy: It's been announced that Denmark broke a world energy record, using wind turbines to generate 42% of the country's electricity in 2015.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

This Small Japanese Town is Modeling Zero Waste for the World


> What would a Zero Waste world look like and how do we get there?
> 
> One small Japanese town is showing the world that Zero Waste begins with a community-wide commitment to reduce waste.
> 
> Kamikatsu, a town of 1,700, wants to become the country's first Zero Waste community by 2020. At this point, it's well on its way, recycling 80 percent of its waste, with the remaining 20 percent going to a landfill.
> 
> The town has no garbage trucks, so residents bring their recyclables and waste to a facility where they separate them into 34 different categories including paper, plastics, bottles, caps and much more. When possible, items are repurposed, upcycled or shared. There's even a factory where goods, such as old clothing, are made into new teddy bears, bags and new clothing.


----------



## poochee




----------



## hewee

I like that because all is made so we waste so much.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Prime Air: Drones to carry 5lb packages over 10 miles in 30 minutes




> In an interview with Yahoo News, Amazon has revealed a little more about its forthcoming drone-based delivery system. Paul Misener, Amazon's vice president for global public policy, said that the company has very specific targets for "Prime Air."
> 
> "So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com," he told Yahoo News. "The goals we've set for ourselves are: The range has to be over 10 miles. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they'll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds. It turns out that the vast majority of the things we sell at Amazon weigh less than five pounds."


----------



## ekim68

NASA's New Office Will Try to Protect Us From Death by Asteroid




> In what sounds like the opening of a sci-fi blockbuster with a big explosions budget, NASA has created a new office -- the Planetary Defense Coordination Office -- that will track asteroids and comets that pass near the Earth's orbit.
> 
> The office will also issue warnings of potential close calls, and in the case of a possible collision is responsible for coordinating emergency plans with the Department of Defense and FEMA, the agency said.


----------



## ekim68

Overfishing causing global catches to fall three times faster than estimated




> Landmark new study that includes small-scale, subsistence and illegal fishing shows a strong decline in catches as more fisheries are exhausted


----------



## ekim68

Adblock Plus blocked from attending online ad industry's big annual conference




> Adblock Plus, an adblocker with some 400 million downloads and counting, has been blocked from attending the Interactive Advertising Bureau's big annual conference. The IAB is the online advertising industry's main business organisation, and the conference is where all of the top dogs go to talk about the state of the industry.
> 
> According to a post on the Adblock Plus blog, the company had bought a ticket for the IAB conference, which takes place in Palm Desert, California at the end of January. The ticket was not cheap: they start at about £1,750 for members, scaling up to £2,600 for non-members.
> 
> Then, last week, Adblock Plus received an e-mail from the IAB stating: "We are returning your registration fee and cancelling your registration for the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting." That was the entire content of the communication; according to Adblock Plus, there was no reason given for the cancellation.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Expeditions Could Transform How Children Learn About The World




> Google announced the Expeditions Pioneer Program, a virtual tour system designed with the help of teachers. Expeditions is a series of 360-degree images and video content, curated by teachers, to be used in guided school lessons.
> 
> Google said there are over 100 Expeditions prepared for the pilot program that cover a range of topics. The company said there are museum tours from partners such as the American Museum of Natural History and a trip to outer space from the Planetary Society. David Attenborough is also contributing content for the program, along with many other unnamed partners.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Google's Expeditions Could Transform How Children Learn About The World


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/our-brains-can-store-10-times-more-information-than-we-1754255335']Our Brains Can Store 10 Times More Information Than We Thought[/URL]




> New research shows the brain's memory capacity is ten times greater than previous estimates. That means it's in _the petabyte range_-which puts it close to World Wide Web territory.


----------



## 2twenty2

Does that mean I'm 10 times smarter than I thought I was?


----------



## ekim68

I don't know if storage is related that way to intelligence, but...................


----------



## ekim68

Plastic could outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050, study warns




> The nightmare issue of plastic dumping in the ocean has been given a doomsday date: 2050.
> 
> By that year, plastic garbage is expected to outweigh fish in the ocean unless drastic measures are taken to recycle the material, a new report warned.


----------



## ekim68

Inside Costa Concordia - in pictures


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2016/01/19/china-emissions-likely-fell-in-2015/']China's CO2 emissions likely fell 3% in 2015 - and that trend looks set to continue[/URL]




> Economic and industrial data released today by the Chinese government's statistical agency indicates the country's carbon emissions likely fell by around 3% - with the contraction of key heavy industry sectors and the continued expansion of renewable energies driving a wedge between total energy demand and coal use.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/all-five-naked-eye-planets-are-up-at-dawn-to-greet-you-1753957148']All Five Naked-Eye Planets Are Up at Dawn to Greet You[/URL]




> Are you awake before dawn? Good. Go outside. Look east. Bask in the astronomical wonder of seeing all the brightest planets out at the same time, pinpricks of worlds drifting up from the horizon. Missed it? Try again any morning for the next month.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.gizmag.com/machine-learning-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria/41452/']Machine-learning could tackle antibiotic-resistant bacteria[/URL]




> A team of researchers is using a potent machine-learning system to study an infection that's highly resistant to antibiotic therapies. With the work already yielding positive results, it could lead to improved understanding of bacterium, and ultimately the discovery of new treatments.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

poochee said:


> ...


----------



## ekim68

DOJ and 4 states want $24 billion in fines from Dish Network for telemarketing




> Four states and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) are seeking up to $24 billion in fines from Dish Network after a judge ruled that the company and its contractors made more than 55 million illegal telemarketing calls using recorded messages and phoning people on do-not-call lists. The trial to decide whether Dish was aware that it was breaking the law and whether the company is responsible for calls made by its subcontractors began yesterday.


----------



## ekim68

Desperate for slumber in Delhi, homeless encounter a 'Sleep Mafia'




> Does any city have a more stratified sleep economy than wintertime Delhi? The filmmaker Shaunak Sen, who spent two years researching the city's sleep vendors for a documentary, "Cities of Sleep," discovered a sprawling gray market that has taken shape around the city's vast unmet need for shelter. In some places, it breeds what he calls a "sleep mafia, who controls who sleeps where, for how long, and what quality of sleep."


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/taser-pulse-a-compact-electroshock-weapon-for-consumers-1753735187']Taser Pulse Is a Compact Electroshock Weapon For Consumers[/URL]




> Taser, the company that's sold electroshock weapons to some 18,000 law enforcement organizations all over the world for years, has made its smallest weapon ever. And it's not for cops-it's for regular people like you and me.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Taser Pulse Is a Compact Electroshock Weapon For Consumers


----------



## ekim68




----------



## ekim68

Ransomware Author Blackmails Security Researcher Who Refuses to Give In




> The author of the Magic ransomware strain has agreed to release all decryption keys for free, if Utku Sen, a Turkish security researcher, takes down his Hidden Tear open-source ransomware project from GitHub.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://laredcubana.blogspot.com/']The Internet in Cuba[/URL]

*



Cuban infrastructure investment -- China won the first round

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

DeLoreans coming Back to the Future




> Check your calendar -- and your bank accounts. Plans are underway to start building and selling DeLoreans next year for the first time in more than 30 years.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.gizmag.com/lithium-oxygen-air-batteries/41510/']Lithium-oxygen breakthrough clears the air for boosted batteries[/URL]




> Boasting an energy density similar to that of gasoline, lithium-air (or lithium-oxygen) batteries may one day prove the panacea for the range-anxiety associated with electric vehicles. But first there are a number of challenges that need to be overcome, one of which is the unwanted buildup of lithium peroxide on the electrode which hampers this type of battery's performance. Scientists have now figured out a way that this mess might be avoided - an advance they say could lead to batteries with five times the energy density of those currently available.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> DeLoreans coming Back to the Future


I almost got one in 1983 when after DeLorean got busted the prices can way down to $12,000 but I got new truck I needed for work. Wish I had gotten it back then. $12,000 was the asking sticker price so could of got it for even less. Was a Ford dealer sell them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_DMC-12


----------



## ekim68

So many 'Almosts' in my life too Harry, but that would have been a very good deal....


----------



## ekim68

Researchers use CRISPR to repair genetic defect that causes blindness




> In what has been claimed to be the first use of gene editing technique CRIPSR for replacement of a defective gene associated with a sensory disease, researchers have repaired a genetic defect that causes blindness.
> 
> The research that led to successful editing of defective genes responsible for retinitis pigmentosa (RP) - an inherited condition that causes the retina to degrade and leads to blindness in at least 1.5 million cases worldwide - in stem cells derived from a patient's tissue was carried out by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and University of Iowa.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> So many 'Almosts' in my life too Harry, but that would have been a very good deal....


So very true.


----------



## ekim68

Was there ever a time when so few people controlled so much wealth?




> Two things are clear: radical new ways of getting rich have been invented, and things have probably never been this unequal since before the second world war.


----------



## ekim68

High-Speed Firms Now Oversee Almost All Stocks at NYSE Floor




> Global Trading Systems LLC agreed to purchase Barclays Plc's business at the New York Stock Exchange floor, meaning high-speed trading firms now manage buying and selling of nearly all securities there.


----------



## ekim68

VGA In Memoriam




> The reports of the death of the VGA connector are greatly exaggerated. Rumors of the demise of the VGA connector has been going around for a decade now, but VGA has been remarkably resiliant in the face of its impending doom; this post was written on a nine-month old laptop connected to an external monitor through the very familiar thick cable with two blue ends. VGA is a port that can still be found on the back of millions of TVs and monitors that will be shipped this year.
> 
> This year is, however, the year that VGA finally dies. After 30 years, after being depreciated by several technologies, and after it became easy to put a VGA output on everything from an eight-pin microcontroller to a Raspberry Pi, VGA has died. It's not supported by the latest Intel chips, and it's hard to find a motherboard with the very familiar VGA connector.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.gizmag.com/wepod-first-driverless-robotic-drone-shuttle-public-road-netherlands/41578/']Dutch driverless shuttle first to hit public roads[/URL]




> A driverless electric shuttle took its first load of passengers a few hundred meters down a route in a rural section of the Netherlands this week. Wepod shuttle is hoping to operate a fleet of the robotic vehicles in the area in the coming years.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Was it red?
The Rot has set in!!
Sorry that's Germany!


----------



## ekim68

Lebanon returns Israeli vulture cleared of spying




> A huge vulture detained in Lebanon on suspicion of spying for Israel has been returned home after UN peacekeepers intervened, Israeli officials said.
> 
> The bird, which has a 1.9m (6ft 5in) wing span, flew over the border from an Israeli game reserve and was caught by Lebanese villagers on Tuesday.
> 
> They became suspicious as the griffon vulture had a tracking device attached to its tail.
> 
> It is part of a conservation project to reintroduce raptors to the Middle East.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Lebanon returns Israeli vulture cleared of spying


----------



## ekim68

Cable lobby is really mad about FCC's set-top box competition plan




> Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed their displeasure with a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market, which could help consumers watch TV on different devices and thus avoid paying cable box rental fees.
> 
> FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules that would force pay-TV companies to give third parties access to TV content, letting hardware makers build better set-top boxes. Customers would be able to watch all the TV channels they're already paying cable companies for, but on a device that they don't have to rent from them. The rules could also bring TV to tablets and other devices without need for a rented set-top box. The system would essentially replace CableCard with a software-based equivalent.


----------



## ekim68

Google Chrome Will Mark HTTP Sites as Insecure with a Big Red X




> Changes are planned for future Google Chrome releases, which will potentially add a big shiny red cross in the URL bar if the website you're accessing is not using HTTPS.


----------



## ekim68

EasyJet to trial hydrogen fuel cells




> Low-cost airline easyJet is discussing plans to install hydrogen batteries as part of a proposed zero emission fuel system, which would power its aircraft during taxiing.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is launching new Powerwall home batteries in 2016




> Tesla's Powerwall was a big success from the moment that Elon Musk launched it last year. In fact, the device is sold out until mid-2016, and may have already hit $1 billion in sales. It turns out there was a lot of pent-up demand -- if you have solar panels, the device's giant battery lets you run your house after dark, and if you don't, it provides a reliable, long-lasting backup. Even though the first-gen Powerwall only started shipping a few months ago, Musk admitted at a private function (in the video below) that "we are coming up with the version two of the Powerwall probably around July or August of this year."


----------



## ekim68

ISPs Are Trampling Net Neutrality While The FCC Sits Boxed In By Lawsuits, Upcoming Election




> While the public successfully forced the FCC to adopt net neutrality rules last year, one glaring omission may be coming back to haunt consumers and the commission alike. The FCC's open Internet rules contain three "bright-line" restrictions: no blocking, no throttling apps or traffic, and no "paid prioritization" of apps or content. Unlike neutrality rules in Japan, The Netherlands, Slovenia, and Chile however, the FCC refused to outright ban zero rating (exempting content from usage caps), instead opting to determine on a "case-by-case basis" if a carrier is violating the "general conduct" portion of the rules.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.gizmag.com/mit-hyperloop-competition/41589/']MIT engineers win Hyperloop pod competition, will test prototype in mid-2016[/URL]




> The Hyperloop's journey from audacious concept to a functional, superfast transport system went up a gear over the weekend with more than 115 engineering teams descending on Texas A&M University to present passenger capsule designs in SpaceX's Hyperloop Pod Competition. An MIT team took out first place in the contest, and along with 22 other top designs it will now build human-scale prototypes to test out at SpaceX HQ later in the year.


----------



## ekim68

Strong, Stretchable Carbon Nanotube Films Surpass Kevlar And Carbon Fiber




> Carbon nanotubes





> are exceptionally strong and stretchy. To take advantage of these properties, scientists have been trying to make thin sheets from nanotubes that could be used as structural coatings for vehicle or aerospace parts or for protective military and sports gear. But nanotube films' mechanical properties have so far come nowhere close to those of individual nanotubes. Researchers now report a simple fabrication method to make carbon nanotube films that are five times as strong as those made before-and stronger than films made from Kevlar or carbon fiber.


http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/web/2014/05/Spinning-Super-Stretchy-Graphene-Oxide.html


----------



## ekim68

US electricity industry's use of coal fell to historic low in 2015 as plants closed




> The biggest source of climate pollution dropped to 34% of US electricity generation and co-author of a new report says: 'These are permanent changes'


----------



## DaveBurnett

And there are still new coal fired power stations??
Wasn't one recently opened slap bang in the middle of a city??


----------



## ekim68

Where are you referring to? None that I've heard of in our Country....

It's my opinion that we shouldn't burn up our Atmosphere with Fossil Fuels and use the Energy already available...


----------



## ekim68

And that's why this is cool/good....


Porsche completes photovoltaic pylon




> Porsche announced today that it has completed work on its first photovoltaic pylon. The structure, which is 25 meters high and comprises 7,776 solar cells, can reportedly generate up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.


----------



## ekim68

The Dalai Lama's Hard Hitting Message for World Leaders About The Reality of War




> Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The Dalai Lama's Hard Hitting Message for World Leaders About The Reality of War


----------



## ekim68

Watch out, corporations: Space detectives are watching you ruin the planet




> Hey, corporations destroying the planet: If you've been getting away with illegally logging forests, dumping waste, or overfishing, you might want to reconsider your actions. A new generation of high-tech detectives has traded in their spyglasses for surveillance that's, shall we say, a little more 21st century - and they think they can catch you red-handed.
> 
> Fast Company reports that "A growing number of startups … are operating [satellite] fleets that send back imagery from all corners of the planet, taking pictures sharp enough that you can see a manhole cover, though not a face or a license plate."
> 
> Without high-enough resolution, satellite images can't provide good evidence for crimes like murders, burglaries, or stealing cookies from the cookie jar - but they are _great_ for spotting large-scale environmental damage, especially in remote or unpopulated places.


----------



## ekim68

Stem cells used to regrow skull and face bones




> Scientists have used stem cells for everything from regrowing corneas to inducing the heart to repair itself, and it might even be possible to use them to heal damaged lungs. Now, researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center have, for the first time, successfully identified a population of stem cells capable of inducing the repair of bones in the skull and face.


----------



## ekim68

Driving Robocallers Crazy With the Jolly Roger Bot




> Robocalls are among the more annoying modern inventions, and consumers and businesses have tried just about every strategy for defeating them over the years, with little success. But one man has come up with a bot of his own that sends robocallers into a maddening hall of mirrors designed to frustrate them into surrender.
> 
> The bot is called the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, and it's the work of Roger Anderson, a veteran of the phone industry himself who had grown tired of the repeated harassment from telemarketers and robocallers. Anderson started out by building a system that sat in front of his home landlines and would tell human callers to press a key to ring through to his actual phone line; robocallers were routed directly to an answering system. He would then white-list the numbers of humans who got through.


----------



## ekim68

Study finds sleep deprivation increases Facebook usage




> A recent study of sleep-deprived students at the University of California Irvine showed a direct correlation between chronic fatigue, crankiness and Facebook browsing.
> 
> There have been numerous studies on how technology, and specifically social-media browsing affects sleep patterns and habits. For example, in a press release last week researchers from the University of Pittsburgh announced the results of a study of the social media habits of 1788 adults aged 19-32. This study showed that people who check social media most frequently had three times the likelihood of sleep disturbances; and those who spent the most time on social media had twice the risk of serious sleep problems as well.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Driving Robocallers Crazy With the Jolly Roger Bot


----------



## ekim68

World's smallest optical switch uses a single atom




> The rapid and on-going development of micro-miniature optical electronic devices is helping to usher in a new era of photonic computers and light-based memories that promise super-fast processor speeds and ultra-secure communications. However, as these components are shrunk ever further, fundamental limits to their dimensions are dictated by the wavelength of light itself. Now researchers at ETH Zurich claim to have overcome this limitation by creating both the world's smallest optical switch _using a single atom_, and accompanying circuitry that appears to break the rules by being smaller than the wavelength of the light that passes through it.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's next great idea? An electric jet that can take off and land vertically




> Elon Musk





> is changing the world one idea at a time. First, with Tesla, the man so many people call the real life Tony Stark has done an incredible job of bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream. Second, Musk has been doing an impressive job over at SpaceX in the realm of space travel. And third, Musk's effective rough draft of a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop is being contemplated and conceptualized in a very real way by some extremely smart people.


----------



## ekim68

13 ways the cloud has changed (since last you looked)

*



New services and pricing models make cloud computing more powerful, complex, and cheaper than it was a few short years ago

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

See how painfully slow 4G LTE is in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world




> It turns out T-Mobile is a one-eyed man in the land of the blind. In a recent study conducted on a massive scale, T-Mobile was found to have the fastest 4G LTE network in America, narrowly beating Verizon. But here's the bad news: 4G LTE networks in America are painfully slow to begin with. OpenSignal released new data on Thursday showing that the average LTE download speed in the United States is less than one-third as fast as the top-ranked nation.


----------



## ekim68

Implantable device translates thought into action for people with spinal injuries




> Researchers in Australia have built an implantable brain-machine interface (BMI) that may give people with spinal cord injuries the ability to walk again using the power of their own thoughts. Consisting of a stent-based electrode, known as a "stentrode", implanted within a blood vessel of a patient's brain, along with a power supply and transmitter inserted under the skin in front of the shoulder, the new system creates a minimally invasive BMI that is capable of translating thoughts into action.


----------



## ekim68

Carbon dioxide from the air converted into methanol




> The danger posed by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide has seen many schemes proposed to remove a proportion it from the air. Rather than simply capture this greenhouse gas and bury it in the ground, though, many experiments have managed to transform CO2 into useful things like carbon nanofibers or even fuels, such as diesel. Unfortunately, the over-arching problem with many of these conversions is the particularly high operating temperatures that require almost counterproductive amounts of energy to produce relatively low yields of fuel. Now researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) claim to have devised a way to take CO2 directly from the air and convert it into methanol using much lower temperatures and in a correspondingly simpler way.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast begs Atlanta customers not to switch to Google Fiber

*



Comcast touts more on-demand video, voice remote; leaves out price and data caps.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

Terabit satellites to supercharge remote internet access




> Despite the growth of fiber and mobile networks, satellite broadband is now more important than ever. Google and Facebook already plan to beam internet connectivity to remote parts of the globe and airlines are in the process of upgrading their equipment to provide faster WiFi aboard flights.
> 
> While there are roughly 400 commercial satellites orbiting the earth, output is limited. US communications firm ViaSat believes it can change that, so it's teamed up aerospace giant Boeing to launch three new satellites that will deliver twice the total combined network capacity of all the connected satellites already in space.


----------



## ekim68

What you need to know about Hyperloop




> Elon Musk has a plan for humanity that covers clean energy, electric cars and spreading out amongst the stars. The billionaire also wants to do away with the tired and slow railways of the past in favor of pushing people around like parcels in a mail tube. That's what Hyperloop is: a series of vacuum tubes that'll enable travelers to get from A to B in _minutes_ rather than hours. But Musk himself didn't have the time to develop the concept beyond his original idea, so in 2013 he open-sourced the project for anyone to have a go. Less than three years later, the first strides toward a global network of near-supersonic travel tubes are being taken.


----------



## ekim68

US can't ban encryption because most of it comes from overseas




> If the US government tried to ban or outlaw unbreakable encryption, it could harm American businesses, whose customers would simply look for secure products abroad, a group of researchers have said.
> 
> Because the majority of encrypted products today are developed abroad, any effort by the US government to strong-arm companies away from providing secure products would put them "at a competitive disadvantage in the information security market," concluded the Harvard report, written by security researchers Bruce Schneier, Kathleen Seidel, and Saranya Vijayakumar.
> 
> The report's stark conclusion is that any law "regulating product features are national, and only affect people living in the countries in which they're enacted."


----------



## ekim68

Company Takes Two Years to Remove Hard-Coded Root Passwords from IoT Thermostat




> In another case of "I'm a smart device manufacturer, but I don't give a damn about security," Trane managed to fumble three security bugs discovered by Cisco's researchers for about two years, before finally delivering the much-awaited patch that plugged its firmware's security holes.


----------



## ekim68

Russia to Ban Windows from Government PCs




> The Russian government is famous for not being so open to foreign technologies. And now, Russia wants to take it a step further, as its government allegedly plans to ban Windows from government computers. In Addition, the country wants to increase taxes to foreign companies, like Google and Apple.


----------



## ekim68

"Unhackable" RFID chip to keep your credit cards safe




> Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips have made cashless payments commonplace and opened the way to automatic inventory control. However, they've also made it possible for credit card details and other private information to be stolen wirelessly. To make things a bit more secure, MIT and Texas Instruments are developing an "unhackable" RFID chip that's designed to fend off information-stealing attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers improve efficiency of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by almost 12%




> With increasing awareness about climate change and carbon emissions from fossil fuels, consumer attraction towards hybrid electric vehicles is increasing and more and more companies are bringing out plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) for their customers.
> 
> As with any new technology, there is scope for improvement in case of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) as well and researchers at the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have shown that it is possible to increase the efficiency of current PHEVs by almost 12 per cent.


----------



## ekim68

'Rogue scientists' could exploit gene editing technology, experts warn




> Senior geneticist and bioethicist have agreed with the US spy chief's claim that genetic engineering could be a serious threat if put to nefarious ends


----------



## ekim68

Cities Unleash Secret Underground Weapon to Become Clean Energy Powerhouses




> Companies are tapping into cities' underground networks of steam pipes as a source of clean energy.
> 
> "Green steam," as it's called, "recaptures and reuses thermal energy previously lost to the environment, utilizing advanced cogeneration technology," according to Paris-based Veolia, which operates a dozen of these networks in North American cities including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Montreal.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists: air pollution led to more than 5.5 million premature deaths in 2013




> More than half of the deaths were in India and China, and researchers compared air pollution problem to the conditions under centuries of industrial revolution


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Scientists: air pollution led to more than 5.5 million premature deaths in 2013


..


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/a-new-technique-makes-gps-accurate-to-an-inch-1758457807']A New Technique Makes GPS Accurate to an Inch[/URL]




> GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it's increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.
> 
> Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations-increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.


----------



## ekim68

New Polymer



> University of Rochester researchers have announced the development of a new polymer, capable of supporting 1,000 times its own mass. The supple material may also be bent using the warmth from a human hand, traits that could lead to a wide variety of uses.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung Warns Customers To Think Twice About What They Say Near Smart TVs




> In a troubling new development in the domestic consumer surveillance debate, an investigation into Samsung Smart TVs has revealed that user voice commands are recorded, stored, and transmitted to a third party. The company even warns customers not to discuss personal or sensitive information within earshot of the device.


[/URL]


----------



## poochee




----------



## DaveBurnett

Turn the feature off immediately; or even better, don't buy into it. I said as soon as I heard about these devices some time ago that they should be banned.
It is the single most dangerous security leak that has ever been proposed and just goes to show what extents marketing people will go to get sales.

Mind you the security agencies must love them for the effort they save in getting warrants.


----------



## ekim68

Why American Students Are Flocking to Germany - and Staying




> BONN, Germany - How do you say "sign me up" in German?
> 
> The number of Americans studying in Germany has risen sharply, recent figures show, driven in part by the low cost of higher education compared to the United States.
> 
> More than 10,000 U.S. students are presently enrolled in the country's higher education programs, according to data from the Institute for International Education. It's an increase of almost 9 percent compared to the previous academic year, and 25 percent more than in 2008-2009.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/optical-data-storage-squeezes-360tb-on-to-a-quartz-disc-1759359652']Optical Data Storage Squeezes 360TB on to a Quartz Disc-Forever[/URL]




> The team has now written a series of major works to small glass discs- including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Newton's _Opticks_, the Magna Carta and the Kings James Bible. The density of the data aboard these discs suggests that they could squeeze a total of 360 terabytes onto a single piece of quartz. They also point out that the data is extremely stable: It could endure for as long as 13.8 billion years at temperatures up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.


----------



## ekim68

Electrical engineers develop device to diagnose cancer rapidly at the cellular level, improve early detection




> The key to fighting cancer in many cases is early detection, and earlier detection at the cellular level could mean survival for many cancer patients.
> 
> A University of Texas at Arlington electrical engineer has developed a novel cancer cell detection method that will improve early diagnosis through a tool that tracks cellular behavior in real time using nanotextured walls that mimic layers of body tissue.


----------



## ekim68

Historical Perspective on the Minimum Wage Debate




> In 1992, New Jersey's minimum wage had increased from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour; Card and Krueger looked at the impact of the law by surveying 410 fast food restaurants near the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, before and after the rise in the wages.
> 
> The conclusion was surprising to what the dominant economic theory at the time predicted _should have _happened: That raising the cost of labor would reduce job growth. Yet the opposite happened, and job growth was much stronger on the side of the border where the minimum wage increased. Lots of subsequent studies confirmed this conclusion, and (for the most part) it has stood the test of time and numerous other challenges.


----------



## ekim68

Team discovers groundbreaking semiconducting material that could lead to much faster electronics




> University of Utah engineers have discovered a new kind of 2D semiconducting material for electronics that opens the door for much speedier computers and smartphones that also consume a lot less power.
> 
> The semiconductor, made of the elements tin and oxygen, or tin monoxide (SnO), is a layer of 2D material only one atom thick, allowing electrical charges to move through it much faster than conventional 3D materials such as silicon.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Historical Perspective on the Minimum Wage Debate


----------



## ekim68




----------



## ekim68

Pollen-based electrodes could boost battery storage




> Bee pollen could hold the answer to next generation battery research, according to a new study led by scientists at Purdue University, Indiana.
> 
> The team has been exploring how the unique microstructures found in allergen pollen grains could be used to provide a more energy efficient type of energy storage.


----------



## ekim68

Energy Efficiency Standard Effective This Week Affects Virtually All of Us




> A measure took effect this week that will affect virtually everyone in the United States. While it drew little public notice, it will cut your energy bill and reduce harmful pollution.
> 
> What was it? Eagerly awaited national energy efficiency standards for the little black boxes on the cords that connect many of our electronics--such as smartphones, computer laptops and electric toothbrushes--to wall outlets. Known as external power supplies, or the less elegant term "wall warts," these power adapters may be small, but they consume a lot of energy.


----------



## ekim68

New Delhi Car Ban Yields Trove of Pollution Data




> New Delhi may be the world's most polluted city, but it's making an effort to relinquish that title. With pollution from particulate matter at potentially lethal levels early last December, city officials took a drastic step: they announced that they would temporarily restrict the use of private vehicles by allowing owners to drive only on alternate days, based on the sequence of their number plates.


----------



## ekim68

Broadband Industry Getting Nervous That The FCC Might Actually Protect User Privacy




> Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that broadband services didn't need additional consumer privacy protections because "public shame" would keep the broadband industry honest. But in late 2014, Verizon found itself at the center of a privacy scandal after security researchers discovered the company was embedding stealth tracking technology in every packet sent by the company's wireless users. These "stealth cookies" were being used by Verizon for two years before they were even discovered, and it took another six months of public and press outrage for Verizon to let users opt out.
> 
> In other words, public shame didn't work, because even security researchers _weren't able to detect_ what Verizon was doing.


----------



## DaveBurnett

It is always the case, and always will be, that self regulation never works.


----------



## ekim68

Macroscopic quantum entanglement achieved at room temperature




> In quantum physics, the creation of a state of entanglement in particles any larger and more complex than photons usually requires temperatures close to absolute zero and the application of enormously powerful magnetic fields to achieve. Now scientists working at the University of Chicago (UChicago) and the Argonne National Laboratory claim to have created this entangled state at room temperature on a semiconductor chip, using atomic nuclei and the application of relatively small magnetic fields.


----------



## ekim68

These will be the world's 10 biggest cities in 2050 - and you probably haven't heard of some of them



> The human population is growing at an alarming rate. By 2050, there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet.
> 
> We've been hearing this for years, but where is the most growth happening?


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Army testing 3D-printed mission-specific drones




> The U.S. Army has selected a proposal for incorporating 3D printed, mission-specific drones in its next round of field experimentation. Annually, the Army conducts Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments, or AEWE, to conduct technology demonstrations in a live, observable test event. The idea is to put technology that the government is considering for deployment into the hands of the end user in a test situation for 'live, credible' feedback.


----------



## ekim68

Global wind power capacity tops nuclear energy for first time




> The capacity of wind power generation worldwide reached 432.42 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2015, up 17 percent from a year earlier and surpassing nuclear energy for the first time, according to data released by global industry bodies.


----------



## ekim68

Russia's moon and Mars exploration ambitions hobbled by a lack of money




> Friday, PhysOrg reported





> that the ambitions of the Russian Space Agency continue to exceed its financial wherewithal to carry them out. A Russian rocket is due to launch the first element of the European ExoMars program, which consists of the Trace Gas Orbiter and the Italian-built Schiaparelli lander in March. Both are due to arrive at Mars in October. After that, Russia's space exploration plans are a bit hazy, hobbled by a lack of money.


----------



## ekim68

Protests planned across US to back Apple in battle with FBI



> SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Protesters are preparing to assemble in more than 30 cities to lash out at the FBI for obtaining a court order that requires Apple to make it easier to unlock an encrypted iPhone used by a gunman in December's mass shootings in Southern California.
> 
> The protests organized by the Internet rights group Fight for the Future are scheduled to occur Tuesday outside Apple stores in the U.S., the U.K., Hong Kong and Germany.


----------



## ekim68

In this key ranking, the U.S. is dead last




> Americans are educated to view life in the U.S. as a road to opportunity, but when it comes to workplace benefits the country can be more like a dead-end street.
> 
> The U.S. ranks dead last behind European countries in providing workplace benefits and leave, according to a new study from employment site Glassdoor. The report, which was completed with Llewellyn Consulting, finds that the U.S. is the least generous country on nine out of 12 issues, including sick days and maternity leave, while ranking among the least generous countries for the three other benefits.


----------



## ekim68

High-energy laser effector tested on German warship




> BERLIN, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Rheinmetall and the German armed forces have completed a recent test of their high-energy laser effector on a German warship.
> 
> During the test, a 10-kilowatt high-energy laser, or HEL, was mounted on a MLG 27 light naval gun. The HEL was then used to track potential targets, which included unmanned aerial vehicles and stationary land targets.


----------



## ekim68

MasterCard rolls out 'selfie' verification for mobile payments




> MasterCard has announced plans to invest in facial recognition technology in the UK, in a push to reduce false decline transactions and increase security for mobile payments.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/tesla-powerwalls-just-got-a-gorgeous-competitor-1760781612']Tesla Powerwalls Just Got a Gorgeous Competitor[/URL]




> The Orison home battery comes in two flavors. First is a traditional wall-mounted device similar to Tesla's Powerwall. The other is a stylized tower that resembles an expensive design hi-fi speakers. No matter its form factor, the battery packs in 2.2 kWh with a constant flow of 1.8 kWh. That's enough to to power an AC Unit, a laptop, and a television set for six hours, as well as a refrigerator for 24 hours a day. A simple online tool helps you figure out how many home batteries you should install to fit your needs.


----------



## ekim68

America's second-worst charity agrees to shut down




> Remember Cancer Fund of America?
> 
> It came in at No. 2 on the list of America's Worst Charities in 2013, when the Tampa Bay Times, The Center for Investigative Reporting and CNN teamed up to find the most wasteful charities in the country.
> 
> Back then, here's what we said about the charity:
> 
> _While Cancer Fund provides care packages that contain shampoo and toothbrushes, the people in charge have personally made millions of dollars and used donations as venture capital to build a charity empire. Less than 2 cents of every dollar raised has gone to direct cash aid for patients or families, records show._
> 
> _For years, Cancer Fund founder James T. Reynolds Sr. and his family have obscured that fact with accounting tricks, deceptive marketing campaigns and lies._


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> America's second-worst charity agrees to shut down


----------



## ekim68

Internet by light promises to leave Wi-Fi eating dust




> Barcelona (AFP) - Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp -- that is the promise of Li-Fi, featuring Internet access 100 times faster than Wi-Fi with revolutionary wireless technology.
> 
> French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video.
> 
> The big advantage of Li-Fi, short for "light fidelity", is its lightning speed.


----------



## DaveBurnett

Big disadvantage...... shadows!!


----------



## ekim68

Are you familiar with how the spinning prisms in the older printers and copiers used to work, Dave?


----------



## ekim68

Solar is so hot right now. Check out the latest numbers




> The solar energy industry is absolutely crushing it right now. For the first time ever, more solar power capacity was installed in the U.S. last year than natural-gas capacity.


----------



## ekim68

Army researchers patent self-destructing bullet designed to save lives




> Researchers from the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center recently patented a new type of bullet capable of self-destructing after traveling over a predetermined distance.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Urge American Geophysical Union to Cut Ties With Exxon Over Climate Denial




> More than 100 geoscientists are calling on the American Geophysical Union to drop ExxonMobil as a sponsor of its annual earth science conference in response to the company's years of spreading climate denial views. The call appeared in an open letter posted Monday morning on a science website called The Natural History Museum.


----------



## ekim68

How an Army of Pharma Lobbyists in Washington Have Locked in One of the Biggest Corporate Ripoff Schemes in America




> Pharma is creaming tens of billions out of the federal government in a variety of schemes.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/02/25/0110246/researchers-claim-success-in-removing-hiv-from-living-cells']Researchers Claim Success In Removing HIV From Living Cells[/URL]

_



A recent publication from German researchers claims success in removing the HI-Virus from living cells, showing a way to completely cure AIDS rather than just suppressing its symptoms (by lowering the amount of viruses) by permanent medication:

Click to expand...

_


----------



## ekim68

New York City's nuclear power plant leaking 'uncontrollable radioactive flow' into Hudson River




> New York governor Andrew Cuomo recently called for an investigation after Indian Point, a nuclear power plant on the Hudson River, reported a leak of radioactive material flowing into the groundwater. Now, new samples taken from the local groundwater show that contamination levels are 80% higher than previous samples, prompting experts to claim this leak is spreading in "a disaster waiting to happen" and calling for the plant to be shut down completely. The Indian Point nuclear power plant is located just 25 miles north of New York City, and it's a crucial source of of power for over 23 million people living in the greater NYC metropolitan region.


----------



## ekim68

EVs will be cheaper than gasoline-powered cars by mid-2020s




> Continuing drops in lithium-ion battery prices mean that electric vehicles (EVs) will be less expensive to own than gas or diesel-powered vehicles as soon as the 2020s, according to a new report.
> 
> The report, by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, calculated that EVs' total cost of ownership will become cheaper on an unsubsidized basis than that of internal combustion engine cars by the mid-2020s. This will occur even if gas-powered cars continue to improve their average mileage per gallon by 3.5% per year.


----------



## ekim68

Porn Clicker Android malware hits Google Play hard




> In a little over seven months, cybercriminals using click-jacking mobile malware to earn affiliate income have managed to push over 340 instances of the malware into Google Play.
> 
> The "Porn Clicker," as ESET researchers have dubbed the threat, does not steal user information or download additional malware - it simply clicks on ads generated by the attackers' servers and shown on pornographic websites. The user is none the wiser, as the malicious app does so covertly.


----------



## poochee

Informative articles in this thread.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://thehackernews.com/2016/02/china-hacker-malware.html']Chinese ISPs Caught Injecting Ads and Malware into Web Pages[/URL]




> China has gained a considerable global attention when it comes to their Internet policies in the past years; whether it's introducing its own search engine dubbed "Baidu," Great Firewall of China, its homebrew China Operating System (COP) and many more.
> 
> Along with the developments, China has long been criticized for suspected backdoors in its products: Xiaomi and Star N9500 smartphones are top examples.
> 
> Now, Chinese Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been caught red-handed for injecting Advertisements as well as Malware through their network traffic.


----------



## ekim68

JOHN MCAFEE: The NSA's back door has given every US secret to our enemies




> Deng Xiaoping, in 1979 - his second year as supreme leader of China - perceived a fundamental truth that has yet to be fully grasped by most Western leaders: Software, if properly weaponized, could be far more destructive than any nuclear arsenal.
> 
> Under Deng's leadership, China began one of the most ambitious and sophisticated meta- software development programs ever undertaken.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus Patents Adjustable Seats For People Of Every Size, In-Seat Storage That Eliminates All Legroom




> Airbus - the company that patented the concept of stacking passengers on top of each other in a crowded tube flying at hundreds of miles per hour thousands of feet above the ground - has recently applied for a pair of airplane seat patents that simultaneously look to increase customer comfort while stripping away what little room remains.
> 
> Let's deal with the more passenger-friendly patent first: an airplane seat that could accommodate humans of just about any size.


----------



## ekim68

Chernobyl's Reindeer

(Living with the Radiation..)


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Chernobyl's Reindeer
> 
> (Living with the Radiation..)


...


----------



## ekim68

Devices on public buses in Maryland are listening to private conversations




> "What [the Maryland Transit Administration] is doing is a mass surveillance," Zirkin said.
> 
> "I find it outrageous," he said. "I don't want to overstate it, but this is the issue of our generation. As technology advances, it becomes easier and easier to encroach on people's civil liberties."


----------



## ekim68

Solar cells as light as a soap bubble




> Imagine solar cells so thin, flexible, and lightweight that they could be placed on almost any material or surface, including your hat, shirt, or smartphone, or even on a sheet of paper or a helium balloon.
> 
> Researchers at MIT have now demonstrated just such a technology: the thinnest, lightest solar cells ever produced. Though it may take years to develop into a commercial product, the laboratory proof-of-concept shows a new approach to making solar cells that could help power the next generation of portable electronic devices.


----------



## ekim68

These photos of India's overcrowded railways will make you grateful for your commute




> India has the second largest rail network in the world. That, combined with the fact that 23 million passengers a day ride its rails, help to explain why its trains are so overcrowded that you can often see passengers hanging out the side.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> These photos of India's overcrowded railways will make you grateful for your commute


...


----------



## ekim68

Scientists may have found molecular gatekeeper of long-term memory




> For a long-term memory to form in our noggins, a complex chain of cellular events needs to kick into action. It starts with chemical cues set off by a behavior or experience that make their way to specific nerve cells in the brain. Upon arrival to those cells, the chemical signals are ferried from the outer waiting area of the cell to the nucleus-a cell's command center where the genetic blueprints are kept. In the nucleus, the molecular messenger can persuade the cell to switch on or off genes-which can strengthen nerve connections and, ultimately, lock down a memory for long-term recall.
> 
> While those general steps are clear, the details are still a bit fuzzy. For instance, researchers don't know how exactly the molecular signals get shuttled to the command center, which generally has tight security. But a new study may finally have that answer.


----------



## ekim68

No coal: Solar, wind, gas dominate new US generating capacity in 2016




> Today, the US Energy Information Administration released data on planned additions to the US power grid this year. The year is notable because it will see the first new nuclear plant brought online in 20 years, contributing 1.1 GigaWatts to the grid. But that contribution will be dwarfed by renewable power sources, which together will account for nearly two-thirds of 2016's new capacity. And these numbers only count utility-scale solar, ignoring commercial and residential installations.
> 
> Part of the boom in renewables came because the tax incentives for their installation were in danger of expiring, so utilities rushed to get projects through the pipeline ahead of the end of the year. (The incentives have since been extended in the most recent budget deal.) This led to a phenomenal boom in solar, with 9.5GW of capacity expected to come online-more than the past three years combined.


----------



## ekim68

AAA: 75% Of Drivers Say They Wouldn't Feel Safe In An Autonomous Vehicle




> A future where we're all tooling around in self-driving cars with our feet up on the dash, hands behind the head, relaxing at the wheel is still far away. But while technology companies and car manufacturers alike are rushing to test their own autonomous vehicles, the average American driver doesn't feel quite comfortable with the idea of riding in a driverless car just yet, according to the results of a recent AAA survey.


----------



## poochee

I'll buy that!


----------



## DaveBurnett

I rather think the point is that people WON'T buy them! 
I seldom feel safe with another driver, so I certainly wouldn't trust a computer which is likely to crash even without driving!!


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## ekim68

There were over 32,000 people killed in car accidents in our country in 2014, and that's about the average for a year. Talk about something crashing...
I wonder if computers would have that rate...And I think that computers would at least follow more of the rules and have better vision than the people around here... And besides, I've been driving for about 50 years and I'm not fond of it so much and I could get used to giving orders to my Car..


----------



## DaveBurnett

I would like to bet that that 32,000 would be only a vary small number compared to the number of computer software crashes over the same period and population.
Don't forget that the vast majority of software crashes won't even be noticed by normal users. Even I am sometimes surprised at the number of dumps on my system from software crashes that I've not noticed because the recovery was sufficient to take me back to where I was.


----------



## hewee

DaveBurnett said:


> I would like to bet that that 32,000 would be only a vary small number compared to the number of computer software crashes over the same period and population.
> Don't forget that the vast majority of software crashes won't even be noticed by normal users. Even I am sometimes surprised at the number of dumps on my system from software crashes that I've not noticed because the recovery was sufficient to take me back to where I was.


Good point Dave.
I know if we think all is okay but look at the events etc we see somany things that are not right but never knew it.
On the Apple iPhone I started seein the battery go dead faster and then it got so bad it go dead in about 8 hour and I mean so dead you have to charge it some to even get it to turn on.
I looked around and seen Diagnostics & Usage and lookedat it. Most were very long and I did not really know what they was on. But now last one was 5 days looked the same and I seen Raley's on each one and they had short logs. But they were showing up each day I had the trouble.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raleys.app.android
I uninstalled it and all the battery trouble went away. 
It started after it updated and I never had trouble like that before. 
It was listed as "LowBatteryLog-2016-05-06...etc"

So was so glad to get that taken care of.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Quietly Removes Encryption Support from its Gadgets




> While Apple is fighting the FBI in court over encryption, Amazon quietly disabled the option to use encryption to protect data on its Android-powered devices.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Have Created Batteries Using Carbon Dioxide From The Atmosphere Which Could Replace Phone And Electric Car Batteries




> Carbon dioxide





> in the atmosphere is a major driver of global warming. While climate change talks progress on how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, an interdisciplinary team of scientists has worked out a way to reduce carbon dioxide already existing in the atmosphere.
> 
> The focus is on the batteries used by electric automobiles. The researchers found out that the graphite electrodes in the lithium-ion batteries could be replaced with carbon electrodes sourced from atmospheric carbon dioxide.


----------



## ekim68

Rimac Concept S megawatt supercar and 55-mph bike showcase high-powered electric motoring




> Now that Rimac has a production car ready to go, there seems to be no holding it back. It's put together the most electrifying booth in Geneva, quite literally speaking. Next to the 1,088-hp Concept One supercar is the even faster, more powerful Concept S, the One's "evil twin," along with a matching, unleashed version of the Greyp G12S electric bike. All in all, close to 2,500 horses with current-spiked manes are dashing around Rimac's booth.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon to restore encryption to Fire tablets after complaints




> Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) said it plans to restore an encryption feature on its Fire tablets after customers and privacy advocates criticized the company for quietly removing the security option when it released its latest operating system.
> 
> "We will return the option for full-disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring," company spokeswoman Robin Handaly told Reuters via email on Saturday.


----------



## ekim68

Oregon Set To Become First Coal-Free State




> Oregon lawmakers have approved legislation to eliminate coal from the state's electrical supply by 2035, the first U.S. state to do so.
> 
> The bill, called the Clean Electricity and Coal Transition plan, commits the state to doubling its use of renewable energy, including solar and wind, to 50 percent by 2040.
> 
> The measure makes Oregon the first state to eliminate coal by legislative action, The Associated Press reports.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive - At 100, BMW sees radical new future in world of driverless cars




> After a century building what it calls the "ultimate driving machine", BMW is preparing for a world in which its customers will be mere passengers, and the cars will do the driving themselves.


----------



## ekim68

The innovators: portable solar panels that can be unrolled like a carpet




> Talk is not cheap in the mountains of Nepal. Getting a mobile phone charged can cost $5 in areas where there is no electricity and backpackers have to rely on diesel generators used by locals to power up.
> 
> John Hingley had a solution stuffed in his rucksack: a thin and lightweight portable solar panel that unfolded and could generate enough energy to power his phone, camera and computer. As well as keeping him charged in the mountains, the simple device commonly used by travellers and outdoor enthusiasts gave him an idea - to make a much bigger version.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

5G Wireless Hype Overshadows Fact Nobody Actually Knows What 5G Is Yet




> At the Mobile World Congress convention in Spain last week, one of the most well-hyped products in convention history was something that doesn't technically exist. Fifth generation wireless (5G) was all the rage at the show, with multiple carriers promising they were in various stages of bringing the new ultra-fast wireless standard to consumers. The problem is that while engineers have a general idea of some of the technologies that may be included in the final standard when approved, _nobody actually knows what 5G is_ yet. And when it does finally get solidified, it's likely to be 2020 or later before actual launches occur.


----------



## ekim68

Shoulder-mounted SkyWall launcher takes aim at illegal drones




> From trained eagles to radio beam disabling systems, countermeasures to deal with rogue drones illegally entering sensitive airspace are proliferating almost as fast as drones themselves. British engineering firm OpenWorks' approach to dealing with unmanned aerial interlopers takes the form of a shoulder-mounted launcher that captures errant aircraft in a net from up to 100 m (330 ft) away.


----------



## ekim68

Thames Water building Europe's largest floating solar array




> Europe's biggest-ever floating solar panel array is to be installed on the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir in London. The array will have a peak capacity of 6.3 MW and is expected to generate 5.8 million kWh in its first year, which is enough to power around 1,800 homes.


----------



## ekim68

Ford hopes you'll watch movies in self-driving cars




> If and when self-driving cars become a practical reality, you'll probably want something to do during your journeys besides chatting with passengers or checking your phone. Thankfully, Ford might have an answer. It recently obtained a patent for an "autonomous vehicle entertainment system" that would let you watch videos when you're hands-free.


----------



## ekim68

Package Guard takes alarming approach to porch pirates




> Compulsive shoppers aren't the only ones benefitting from the rise of online retailers, with unattended packages providing plenty of opportunity for porch plunderers. The Package Guard is a simple solution designed to scare off shady characters by sounding an alarm when a delivery is removed by someone other than the intended recipient.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Package Guard takes alarming approach to porch pirates


----------



## ekim68

Self-driving Fords are keeping their cool in the snow




> Self-driving cars are developing apace and are ultimately expected to become safer than those driven by people, but first they will have to overcome their biggest nemesis: snow. It's slippery, unpredictable and obscures road markings. Ford has given some insight into how its autonomous cars will deal with the white stuff.


----------



## ekim68

First bionic fingertip implant delivers sensational results




> Dennis Aabo Sørensen may be missing a hand, but he nonetheless recently felt rough and smooth textures using a fingertip on that arm. The fingertip was electronic, and was surgically hard-wired to nerves in his upper arm. He is reportedly the first person in the world to recognize texture using a bionic fingertip connected to electrodes that were surgically implanted above his stump.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> First bionic fingertip implant delivers sensational results


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop deal would link three European capitals




> One of the companies vying to make Elon Musk's transportation dream a reality has signed a deal with the government of Slovakia to explore building a three-country Hyperloop. Crowdsourced engineering project Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) will look into a route that links three European capitals. From Vienna, Austria to Bratislava, Slovakia, and from Bratislava to Budapest, Hungary.


----------



## ekim68

FDA approves Vanderbilt-designed Indego exoskeleton for clinical and personal use




> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given clearance to market and sell the powered lower-limb exoskeleton created by a team of Vanderbilt engineers and commercialized by the Parker Hannifin Corporation for both clinical and personal use in the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Newfound bacteria can eat plastic




> SAKAI, Japan, March 11 (UPI) -- Researchers in Japan have discovered a new species of bacteria that can eat a common type of plastic. The bacteria species is _Ideonella sakaiensis_ and the plastic is PET or polyethylene terephthalate.
> 
> Scientists found the bacteria growing on piles of plastic debris in the Japanese city of Sakai. PET is found in everything from plastic bottles and polyester clothing to food packaging and thermal insulation.


----------



## ekim68

GM buys driverless software startup Cruise Automation




> General Motors has today confirmed its acquisition of autonomous software company Cruise Automation. The Silicon Valley-based firm, set up by former Twitch co-founder Kyle Vogt in 2013, creates auto-pilot technologies which can transform regular cars into driverless vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Cautious Steps toward Seabed Mining




> The deep ocean was once assumed to be lifeless and barren. Today we know that even the deepest waters teem with living creatures, some of them thought to be little changed from when life itself first appeared on the planet. The deep ocean is also essential to the earth's biosphere. It regulates global temperatures, stores carbon, provides habitat for countless species and cycles nutrients for marine food webs.
> 
> Currently stressed by pollution, industrial fishing, and oil and gas development, these cold, dark waters now face another challenge: mining. With land-based mineral sources in decline, seabeds offer a new and largely untapped frontier for mineral extraction, and companies are gearing up to mine a treasure trove of copper, zinc, gold, manganese, and other minerals from the ocean floor.


----------



## ekim68

Star Trek's Vision Becomes Reality




> "_Beam me up, Scotty_" - even if Captain Kirk supposedly never said this exact phrase, it remains a popular catch-phrase to this day. Whenever the chief commander of the television series starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) wanted to go back to his control centre, this command was enough to take him back to the control centre instantly-travelling through the infinity of outer space without any loss of time.
> 
> But is all of this science fiction that was thought up in the 1960s? Not quite: Physicists are actually capable of beaming-or "teleporting" as it is called in technical language - if not actual solid particles at least their properties.


----------



## ekim68

The Hyperloop Will Feature "Augmented" and "Interactive" Windows




> In 2013, innovator Elon Musk had the great idea to create a hyperloop, but he didn't have time to develop it. So he did something original, he crowdsourced it. The hyperloop is a low-pressure tube in which passenger capsules or pods will travel at more than 700 mph.
> 
> Any claustrophobe looks at the tube and asks: "Are there are no windows?! How will be breathe?" Well, CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Dirk Ahlborn, addressed the issue of "passenger experience" at his "Crowdsourcing the Hyperloop" presentation during South By Southwest Interactive on Sunday in Austin.
> 
> Ahlborn announced that though there won't be actual windows, virtual ones are planned for the hyperloop.


----------



## ekim68

Meet the Guy Whose Software Keeps the World's Clocks in Sync




> Clocks sprang forward last weekend in about 75 countries. Over time, technology has spared many citizens who observe daylight saving time the headache of physically changing their clocks. Electronic clocks automatically reset the time-a subtle convenience made possible by the rise of the global Internet, a network of real-life atomic clocks, and a physicist who has spent decades finding smarter ways to distribute time.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Meet the Guy Whose Software Keeps the World's Clocks in Sync


Well not the whole world because pass Sunday I had to turn the wall clock ahead and the coffee maker, microwave and the trucks radio clocks also.


----------



## ekim68

Just think Harry, those manual labor things keep you in shape, eh?


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Just think Harry, those manual labor things keep you in shape, eh?


I did that Sunday for sure and had to watch out and not hurt the finger.


----------



## ekim68

The vast majority of expiration dates are bogus - here's how long your food is still good




> We waste a lot of food out of fear: Experts estimate that $165 billion worth gets tossed each year.
> 
> But most expiration dates are largely made up. According to The National Resource Defense Council, the "sell by" dates do indicate not whether foods are safe to eat - they simply tell you when food will reach its limits for "optimal quality."


----------



## ekim68

Google argues that if self-driving cars can pass safety tests, they should be legal




> Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car project, has sent a letter to US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today with a plan for selling autonomous vehicles that have no steering wheels or pedals, AP reports. The plan appears to be pretty straightforward: Urmson argues that if a self-driving car can pass standardized federal safety tests, they should be road-legal.


----------



## ekim68

How many digits of pi does NASA use?




> Mathematicians have calculated pi out to more than 13 trillion decimal places, a calculation that took 208 days. NASA's Marc Rayman explains that in order to send out probes and slingshot them accurately throughout the solar system, NASA needs to use only 15 decimal places, or 3.141592653589793. How precise are calculations with that number? This precise:


----------



## ekim68

Tiny Vermont brings food industry to its knees on GMO labels



> MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) -- General Mills' announcement on Friday that it will start labeling products that contain genetically modified ingredients to comply with a Vermont law shows food companies might be throwing in the towel, even as they hold out hope Congress will find a national solution.
> 
> Tiny Vermont is the first state to require such labeling, effective July 1.


----------



## ekim68

Sands of time: a century of Egyptian photography - in pictures




> These images of everyone from presidents to paupers show the tourist's view of Egypt that we know - and the backstreets we don't.


----------



## hewee

Huge Victory for American Consumers: Senate Rejects DARK Act
Senate bill would have made GMO labeling voluntary despite widespread opposition

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/03/16/huge-victory-american-consumers-senate-rejects-dark-act


----------



## ekim68

Osteoporosis in mice reversed with single injection of stem cells




> Age-related osteoporosis, where the bone structure deteriorates and becomes more vulnerable to fracture, is said to affect more than 200 million people worldwide. Drugs are available to treat or delay the condition, but a cure has remained elusive. Much-needed help may now be on the way, however, with scientists discovering healthy bone structure can be restored in mice with a single injection of stem cells.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Osteoporosis in mice reversed with single injection of stem cells


----------



## ekim68

Arizona Has a Plan to Get Revenge on Its Pro-Worker Cities




> Inspired by decisions in cities like Tacoma, Wash., and Elizabeth, N.J., to require companies to offer paid sick leave, Lauren Kuby, a City Council member in Tempe, Ariz., began pushing a year ago for her city to do the same. By September, Kuby had secured enough support from her colleagues to have the city formally explore the issue. "I really took seriously Obama's call to take local action," says Kuby. "I saw cities as the place to make a difference."
> 
> Then Kuby and her colleagues heard that Arizona's Republican-controlled state legislature was considering punishing cities that tried to set their own codes for worker benefits.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/how-your-parents-career-choices-affect-your-own-visual-1766110573']How Your Parents' Career Choices Affect Your Own, Visualized[/URL]




> Ever wondered if your choice of job was influenced by what your parents did for a living? Well, researchers at Facebook have taken a look at parent-child profession choices to find out.
> 
> In a blog post, Facebook research staff Ismail Onur Filiz and Lada Adamic explain how they've sifted through 5.6 million parent-child pairs in the English-speaking Facebook world to identify some trends. By examining listed occupations, the pair were able to calculate the probability of a child having an occupation given their parent's occupation.


----------



## ekim68

At Microhotels, the Price Is Right and the Space Is Tight




> On a recent business trip to New York, Kelly Buck went small for her hotel room - as in 100 square feet.
> 
> Ms. Buck, a nonprofit marketing executive from Auburn, N.Y., sought a good deal and found one at the Pod 39, one of a growing number of so-called microhotels that are taking a smaller-is-better approach. And the price, about $100 a night, was right.


----------



## ekim68

Major U.S. Carriers Open Free Calls & Texts To Brussels




> Following the attacks at Brussels International Airport and the Maelbeek Subway Station in Brussels, Belgium earlier this morning, all four major U.S. carriers have announced that they will be offering their customers the opportunity to make free calls to Brussels, as a means of letting customers keep in contact with friends and loved ones who live or are traveling within the city, a gesture which both Verizon and Sprint offered to customers last year following the attacks in Paris, France. As the city of Brussels begins and continues to mourn in the wake of the attacks, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless will all offer free calls and texts to Brussels from the U.S., beginning today and lasting throughout the next few days to a week.


----------



## ekim68

Hackers Modify Water Treatment Parameters by Accident




> A group of hackers, previously involved in various hacktivism campaigns, have accidentally made their way into an ICS/SCADA system installed at a water treatment facility and have altered crucial settings that controlled the amount of chemicals used to treat tap water*.*


----------



## ekim68

Rockefeller fund dumping fossil fuels, hits Exxon on climate issues




> The Rockefeller Family Fund said on Wednesday it will divest from fossil fuels as quickly as possible and "eliminate holdings" of Exxon Mobil, chiding the oil company for allegedly misleading the public about the threat of climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists push a record 57Gbps through fiber optic lines




> Need proof that the limits of fiber optic technology have been shattered? You just got it. University of Illinois researchers report that they've set a record for fiber data transmission, delivering 57Gbps of error-free data. And importantly, they sent the data at room temperature -- they didn't have to cool things down to keep those bits going. Even when things got toasty (185F), the technology could still deliver a brisk 50Gbps.


----------



## ekim68

Ekso competitor unveils lightest robotic suit ever




> Homayoon Kazerooni led the team that developed BLEEX, the first viable actuated suit that didn't need to be plugged in, back in 2005. Groundbreaking at the time, the technology was eventually spun off into Ekso Bionics, long a darling of the Bay Area hardware scene.
> 
> Kazerooni, whose reputation as a genius with a stormy personality is a touchstone among ex-colleagues, split from the company soon after it was formed and has been pursuing his own projects.
> 
> His latest is suitX, a robotics company in Berkeley that's developed a new exoskeleton called Pheonix that's designed to enable paraplegics to walk.


----------



## ekim68

University Endowments




> A not-so-old joke has it that Harvard is best thought of as a hedge fund with a university attached. The money in question is its endowment, a $37.6 billion pool made up largely of donations and retained earnings from investments. Big college endowments are a mostly American phenomenon, the product of a culture of philanthropy, rising inequality and aggressive investment techniques. Endowments also benefit from tax breaks for donors and a tax exemption on a fund's earnings. Critics, including some members of Congress, are asking whether endowments are doing enough to help students at a time of soaring educational debt - or if the support by taxpayers is just helping the richest schools get richer.


----------



## ekim68

9 figures to help you understand the state of renewable energy




> Today, you'll see some headlines touting last year's record investment in renewables. A new report from the Frankfurt School-UNEP Centre and Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows investment in clean energy grew to $286 billion globally in 2015 - a new world record! - up 5 percent from the previous year.


----------



## ekim68

Number of US drones will nearly triple by 2020: FAA




> An estimated seven million drones will fly in US skies by 2020, nearly tripling the number expected to be in circulation by the end of the year, the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

India Aims to Become 100 Percent Electric Vehicle Nation by 2030: Power Minister




> The government is working on a scheme to provide electric cars on zero down payment for which people can pay out of their savings on expensive fossil fuels, with the aim of becoming 100 percent electric vehicle nation by 2030.
> 
> "India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this programme self financing. We don't need one rupee support from the government. We don't need one rupee investment from the people of India," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said at an event organised by CII Young India.


----------



## ekim68

Airlines get nasty in competition for routes to Cuba



> The war of words has gotten nasty, with the candidates describing the ideas of their rivals as "disingenuous," "extreme" and "capricious."
> 
> These are not the comments of presidential candidates. This is the language used by airlines that are competing for a handful of routes to Cuba that the U.S. government will award this summer under the Obama administration's effort to normalize relations with the island nation.


----------



## ekim68

Will cellphone use while walking be banned in N.J.?




> Here is another reason to take a break from texting or talking on your smartphone while walking in New Jersey: a possible $50 fine.
> 
> A bill proposed this week by Assemblywoman Pamela R. Lampitt (D., Camden) would impose a fine of up to $50 and possibly 15 days in jail for pedestrians caught using their cellphones without hands-free devices while walking on public sidewalks and along roadways.
> 
> If the bill becomes law, "petextrians" - people who text while walking - would face the same penalties as jaywalkers in New Jersey.


----------



## ekim68

DARPA's next challenge could lead to AI-powered radios




> So far, the solutions to wireless spectrum crunches have involved either offering relatively untapped airwaves or reusing frequencies that were previously assigned to something else. However, DARPA knows this can't go on forever -- and it's looking for help to devise a clever way around the problem. The military research agency has launched a new Grand Challenge that will have teams develop artificial intelligence-powered radios that cooperate with each other to avoid wireless congestion. Rather than force devices to use narrow frequency ranges regardless of how crowded they may be, DARPA would like to see those gadgets negotiate frequency sharing whenever they need it.


----------



## ekim68

Here's the U.S. Earthquake Forecast, Now Including the Quakes We Cause




> Towns on the Great Plains are built to withstand tornadoes. Earthquakes are a new thing.
> 
> A cluster of central states surrounding Oklahoma now faces the highest risk of earthquakes induced by human activities "such as fluid injection or extraction," according to a short-term seismic forecast by the U.S. Geological Survey.
> 
> The report, which for the first time includes quakes that may be linked to oil and gas production, comes after an alarming six-year rise in the incidence of quakes throughout the central and eastern U.S. There, some seven million people, concentrated near Oklahoma City and Dallas-Fort Worth, face an increased risk of earthquakes.


----------



## ekim68

Cuba's free med schools are the meritocratic institutions that America's private system can't match




> The median parental income of the parents of new med school students in America is $100,000 -- twice the national average. In Cuba, America's brilliant, working class med students pay nothing -- free tuition, lodging and meals -- and they come home to America and provide front-line medical services to families who are frozen out of the US system, in which debt-saddled doctors opt for lucrative specialties instead of family medicine.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68

Apple wants the FBI to reveal how it hacked the San Bernardino killer's iPhone




> Apple Inc.





> refused to give the FBI software the agency desperately wanted. Now Apple is the one that needs the FBI's assistance.
> 
> The FBI announced Monday that it managed to unlock an iPhone 5c belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters without the help of Apple. And the agency has shown no interest in telling Apple how it skirted the phone's security features, leaving the tech giant guessing about a vulnerability that could compromise millions of devices.
> 
> "One way or another, Apple needs to figure out the details," said Justin Olsson, product counsel at security software maker AVG Technologies. "The responsible thing for the government to do is privately disclose the vulnerability to Apple so they can continue hardening security on their devices."
> 
> But that's not how it's playing out so far.


----------



## ekim68

Majority of Americans oppose fracking - poll




> More than half of Americans are opposed to fracking in pursuit of oil and gas, according to a new Gallup poll. The results come amid mounting concerns about the links between fracking and earthquakes and groundwater pollution.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Majority of Americans oppose fracking - poll


Any the ones that do like it do not understand or are making money from it so don't care. Look up the facts and it should be stopped.


----------



## ekim68

And on that note.....


Fracking Triggers 90% of Large Quakes in Western Canada




> Fracking has also caused much backlash from local communities for its detrimental impact on the environment and personal health, yet it continues.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers Can Now Register to Hack The Pentagon




> Earlier this month, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced "Hack the Pentagon," a new bug bounty program that will award security researchers who can discover vulnerabilities on the Pentagon's public web pages.
> 
> Starting today, interested security researchers can now officially register to test their hacking skills against the DoD.


----------



## hewee

Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking.



> For the first time, a scientific study has linked natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing with a pattern of drinking water contamination so severe that some faucets can be lit on fire.


https://www.propublica.org/article/scientific-study-links-flammable-drinking-water-to-fracking

That was done years ago so you think they would stop it but we just do it more because MONEY rules over what is right thing to do.


----------



## ekim68

It's the Golden Rule Harry, whoever controls the Gold, Rules......


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> It's the Golden Rule Harry, whoever controls the Gold, Rules......


You got that right.


----------



## ekim68

The Richest and Poorest Countries in the World




> The world economy is complex, but today's series of maps will allow you to simplify your understanding of the relative wealth of people around the globe.
> 
> Global Finance Magazine recently collated data from the World Bank on Gross National Income (GNI) per capita for 204 countries.


----------



## ekim68

Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study




> A new study shows that knowledge of government surveillance causes people to self-censor their dissenting opinions online. The research offers a sobering look at the oft-touted "democratizing" effect of social media and Internet access that bolsters minority opinion.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's Model 3 has already racked up 232,000 pre-orders




> It hasn't even been 24 hours since we got our first glimpse of Tesla's $35,000 Model 3 electric vehicle, and the pre-orders are flying in. Despite, or possibly because of, a polarizing style and interesting cabin that ditches the usual gauges for a single flatscreen, CEO Elon Musk reports the vehicle has already notched 232,000 pre-orders.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T's Caps Are a Giant Con and an Attack on Cord Cutters



> Earlier this week we noted that AT&T would be imposing usage caps on the company's U-Verse broadband customers. But the company also announced it would be following Comcast's lead and "allowing" users to pay $30 more a month if they wanted to avoid usage caps entirely. In short, both companies have now effectively made unlimited data a luxury option, while simultaneously charging their customers more money -- for the exact same service. This glorified price hike is, of course, a clear example of the lack of real broadband competition facing both companies.


----------



## ekim68

Museums



> In honour of #museumweek, BBC Culture rounds up stunning buildings around the world that house the treasures of civilisation.


----------



## ekim68

Apple at 40: The forgotten founder who gave it all away




> Apple has just turned 40 years old - a timely reason to track down a man who helped start the firm and then walked away.
> 
> Drive out of Las Vegas for an hour into the Nevada desert. When you reach what feels like the end of civilization, carry on. That's where you'll find Pahrump.


----------



## ekim68

Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis?




> On 11 March, panic struck engineers at a giant power station on the banks of the Ganges river in West Bengal state.
> 
> Readings showed that the water level in the canal connecting the river to the plant was going down rapidly. Water is used to produce steam to run the turbines and for cooling vital equipment of coal-fired power stations.


----------



## ekim68

Consumer-ready wireless charger for EVs inches closer




> Tesla and Chevrolet might have committed to mass-producing electric cars, but that doesn't mean everyone is ready to plug a battery-powered car into their garage every night. Depending on who you ask, wireless charging might just be the solution. Even if we can't quite expect every manhole or green lane to extend our range just yet, a team at Oak Ridge Laboratories believes it has come close to creating a wireless car charging system efficient enough to broaden the appeal of electric vehicles.
> 
> Oak Ridge's 20 kW wireless charger was created in collaboration with Toyota, Cisco, Evatran and Clemson University, and is reported to operate at 90 percent efficiency. Built around a unique architecture, the system features an inverter, isolation transformer, vehicle-side electronics and technologies to couple the individual parts together.


----------



## ekim68

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge?



> Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.
> 
> It comes from agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or 'not knowing', and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge?


...


----------



## ekim68

Half of Scotland's energy consumption came from renewables last year




> Scotland has met a key target for renewable energy consumption, according to official figures.
> 
> Statistics published by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change show 57.7% of Scottish electricity consumption came from renewables in 2015 - 7.7% ahead of the 50% target.


----------



## ekim68

White House finds temporary fix in Zika funding fight




> The White House said on Wednesday it will redirect $589 million in funds to prepare for the Zika virus before the mosquito that carries it begins to emerge in the continental United States, but urged Congress to act quickly on its request for more money.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung Receives Patent for Smart Contact Lenses




> Samsung has received a patent in South Korea for interactive contact lenses that can receive or send data to a nearby phone.
> 
> According to the patent, the way Samsung's "smart" contact lenses work is by integrating a camera, movement sensors, a transmitter, and a display unit in the lenses' glass.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla has received 325,000 preorders for the Model 3




> Tesla announced Thursday that it has received 325,000 preorders for its recently unveiled Model 3. If it sells every car that's been reserved, the company says it will earn enough revenue to make this the "biggest one-week launch of any product ever." A few days ago, the electric car company was saying it had received twice the number of preorders it originally expected to get. Now it's quickly approaching three times that number, which raises questions about the company's ability to meet its increasingly complex production goals.


----------



## ekim68

All-weather solar cell design generates electricity come rain or shine




> Numerous research efforts have already demonstrated the potential for graphene to improve the efficiency of solar cells. Now a team of researchers in China has leveraged the remarkable properties of the wonder material to develop a new all-weather solar cell design that is able to generate electricity when current solar cells can't - when it's raining.


----------



## ekim68

FCC's "nutrition labels" for broadband show speed, caps, and hidden fees




> The Federal Communications Commission today unveiled new broadband labels modeled after the nutrition labels commonly seen on food products. Home Internet service providers and mobile carriers are being urged to use the labels to give consumers details such as prices (including hidden fees tacked onto the base price), data caps, overage charges, speed, latency, packet loss, and so on.
> 
> ISPs aren't required to use these labels. But they are required to make more specific disclosures as part of transparency requirements in the FCC's net neutrality order, which reclassified Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC recommends that ISPs use these labels to comply with the disclosure rules and says use of the labels will act as a "safe harbor" for demonstrating compliance.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> FCC's "nutrition labels" for broadband show speed, caps, and hidden fees


You bet they will make it so you can not understand it. Lots of if and may so your still be lost.


----------



## ekim68

Fingerprints to be tested as 'currency'




> Starting this summer, the government will test a system in which foreign tourists will be able to verify their identities and buy things at stores using only their fingerprints.
> 
> The government hopes to increase the number of foreign tourists by using the system to prevent crime and relieve users from the necessity of carrying cash or credit cards. It aims to realize the system by the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games.


----------



## poochee




----------



## ekim68




----------



## ekim68

Keystone pipeline leaked 16,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota field




> TransCanada estimated on Thursday that about 16,800 gallons of oil leak in a field in South Dakota from the Keystone I pipeline. The spill, discovered by a farmer over the weekend, led the company to close down the pipeline.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Keystone pipeline leaked 16,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota field


----------



## ekim68

Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines




> A botnet that enslaved about 4,000 Linux computers and caused them to blast the Internet with spam for more than a year has finally been shut down.
> 
> Known as Mumblehard, the botnet was the product of highly skilled developers. It used a custom "packer" to conceal the Perl-based source code that made it run, a backdoor that gave attackers persistent access, and a mail daemon that was able to send large volumes of spam.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines


...


----------



## ekim68

US water systems repeatedly exceed federal standard for lead



> An Associated Press analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data found that nearly 1,400 water systems serving 3.6 million Americans exceeded the federal lead standard at least once between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 30, 2015. The affected systems are large and small, public and private, and include 278 systems that are owned and operated by schools and day care centers in 41 states.


----------



## ekim68

Australian invents Sleepbus - a bus that provides homeless people (and their pets) a safe place to sleep




> The bus will help ease the strain on homeless shelters and hostels by providing a mobile service featuring 22 sleep pods, toilets, lockers and most importantly - room for pets so people can bring along their trusty pooch.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Scientists have published a list of the 50 most incorrectly used terms in psychology




> Words are hard to get right, particularly in science. Not only do the same words mean entirely different things whether you're using them in regular conversation or in a scientific context (hello, "theory"), but the more we use certain words and phrases, the faster they can lose their original meaning, or be simplified so much, they end up being just plain wrong.


----------



## poochee

Interesting..........


----------



## ekim68

:up:


----------



## ekim68

This Device Could Provide a Third of America's Power




> There are 332,519,000 cubic miles of water on the planet. That's 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons just sloshing around out there.
> 
> Anyone who's ridden or been tossed by a wave has a sense of the kinetic energy contained in our perpetually moving oceans. If we could harness it, it could provide a clean, renewable source of energy. But efforts to turn our oceans into power generators-often in the form of "aqua-mills," windmill technology adapted to water-have foundered on the complexity of their many moving parts in the corrosive and remote environs of the sea.
> 
> A new approach, developed by a company called Oscilla Power, applies all that kinetic energy to a solid piece of metal instead of using it to turn the blades of an impeller. That creates an alternating magnetic polarity in the metal that can be converted into electrical current.


----------



## ekim68

Postal Service dropping mail prices for first time in 100 years




> Mailing letters, postcards and parcels gets cheaper Sunday as the U.S. Postal Service drops its prices for the first time in 100 years.
> 
> First-class letters will drop from 49 cents to 47 cents, and postcards from 35 cents to 34 cents.


----------



## ekim68

First came the Breathalyzer, now meet the roadside police "textalyzer"




> We're all familiar with the Breathalyzer, the brand name for a roadside device that measures a suspected drunken driver's blood-alcohol level. It has been in use for decades. Now there's a so-called "textalyzer" device to help the authorities determine whether someone involved in a motor vehicle accident was unlawfully driving while distracted.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> First came the Breathalyzer, now meet the roadside police "textalyzer"


...


----------



## ekim68

10 ways 'negative emissions' could slow climate change



> The Paris Agreement, adopted at the COP21 climate talks in December, sets out a global aim to limit average global surface temperatures to "well below 2C" above pre-industrial levels. It adds that there should be "efforts" to limit it to 1.5C.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/scientists-finally-made-carbyne-a-material-stronger-tha-1770682640']Scientists Finally Made Carbyne-a Material Stronger Than Graphene-That Lasts[/URL]




> Several years ago, scientists calculated the properties of an exotic form of carbon-called Carbyne-and found that it promised more strength and stiffness than any other known material. Now, it's finally been made in a stable form inside an Austrian lab.


----------



## ekim68

We're one step closer to a cure for paralysis




> After two years of work, quadriplegic Ian Burkhart can now play 'Guitar Hero'


----------



## ekim68

Life Expectancy Study: It's Not Just What You Make, It's Where You Live




> Poor people who reside in expensive, well-educated cities such as San Francisco tend to live longer than low-income people in less affluent places, according to a study of more than a billion Social Security and tax records.


----------



## ekim68

Climate claims pile up on U.S. energy industry's door




> WASHINGTON, April 14 (UPI) -- The U.S. oil and gas industry was working as early as the 1940s to spin the narrative on the role fossil fuels influenced the climate, a report finds.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. government worse than all major industries on cyber security: report




> U.S. federal, state and local government agencies rank in last place in cyber security when compared against 17 major private industries, including transportation, retail and healthcare, according to a new report released Thursday.
> 
> The analysis, from venture-backed security risk benchmarking startup SecurityScorecard, measured the relative security health of government and industries across 10 categories, including vulnerability to malware infections, exposure rates of passwords and susceptibility to social engineering, such as an employee using corporate account information on a public social network.


----------



## ekim68

Carbon fiber strings protect buildings against earthquakes




> The problem with earthquake-proofing a building is that it usually involves grafting on a lot of support -- not really an option with historic buildings or other particularly delicate structures. Komatsu Seiren Fabric Laboratory might have a better way, however. Its carbon fiber-based CABKOMA Strand Rods can protect a building against quakes by tying the roof to the ground, making sure that the whole building moves together -- and thus stays together -- during a tremor. The fibers are both very strong and very light (you can easily carry a 520-foot strand by yourself), so it's more like draping spiderwebs over a building than anchors.


----------



## ekim68

I wonder why you never hear this on the Evening News....


US corporations have $1.4tn hidden in tax havens, claims Oxfam report




> US corporate giants such as Apple, Walmart and General Electric have stashed $1.4tn (£980bn) in tax havens, despite receiving trillions of dollars in taxpayer support, according to a report by anti-poverty charity Oxfam.
> 
> The sum, larger than the economic output of Russia, South Korea and Spain, is held in an "opaque and secretive network" of 1,608 subsidiaries based offshore, said Oxfam.
> 
> The charity's analysis of the financial affairs of the 50 biggest US corporations comes amid intense scrutiny of tax havens following the leak of the Panama Papers.


----------



## ekim68

8 awesome innovations in Elon Musk's Gigafactory




> Tesla finally revealed its first mass-market car, the Model 3, last month.
> 
> It's expected to be delivered by the end of 2017 and is key to helping Tesla accomplish its goal of producing 500,000 cars per year by 2020.
> 
> But for Tesla to produce that many cars, it will need to make a lot of batteries, which is why the company is working to complete its giant battery plant, the Gigafactory.


----------



## ekim68

They Built the Single-Atom Engine And It Actually Works




> Physicists have just built the smallest working engine ever created. It's a heat-powered motor barely larger than the single atom it runs on. Designed and build by a team of experimental physicists led by Johannes Roßnagel (pronounced 'Rossnahgel') at the University of Mainz in Germany, the single atom engine is about as efficient as your car at transforming the changing temperature into mechanical energy.


----------



## ekim68

Fossil fuels could be phased out worldwide in a decade, says new study




> The worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade, according to an article published by a major energy think tank in the UK.
> 
> Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, believes that the next great energy revolution could take place in a fraction of the time of major changes in the past.


----------



## ekim68

FAA Confirms It's a Federal Crime to Shoot Down a Drone




> The Federal Aviation Administration is a busy organization, one that oversees everything from air traffic control systems to pilot certifications. You'd think that would leave it with enough on its hands, but the current vogue for civilian drones keeps piling new new responsibilities onto the beleaguered administration. Last year, the FAA established a drone registry for pilots of unmanned aircraft. Now it's unequivocally confirming that it's a federal crime to shoot down a drone, as John Goglia reports in _Forbes_.


----------



## ekim68

Indigenous community lets tourists in on newly won Australian homeland




> It took the Olkola 30 years to win rights to their land in north Queensland, but instead of mining, they will open it to visitors


----------



## ekim68

Phineas Fisher's Account of How He Broke Into Hacking Team Servers




> Almost a year after carrying out his attacks, the hacker behind the Hacking Team data breach has published a step-by-step explainer on how he breached the company's servers and stole all their data.


----------



## ekim68

The Newtown Families Just Won a Big Victory in Their Fight Against Remington Guns




> A Connecticut judge ruled Thursday afternoon that a lawsuit against Remington Arms Company over the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School can move forward.
> 
> The ruling is a victory for the victims and families who brought what could be a landmark case against gun manufacturers-but it should be understood as a narrow procedural win that did not yet beat back the gunmaker-immunity law passed by Congress in 2005. Ultimately, the unprecedented immunity given to gun manufacturers may still shield Remington from any liability for the deaths of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook in December 2012.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The Newtown Families Just Won a Big Victory in Their Fight Against Remington Guns


----------



## ekim68

EmblemHealth IT employees fear their jobs are gone once they transfer their knowledge to Cognizant




> IT employees at EmblemHealth are organizing to stop the New York-based employer from outsourcing their jobs to offshore provider Cognizant.
> 
> Employees say the insurer is on the verge of signing a contract with Cognizant, an IT services firm and one of the largest users of H-1B workers. They say the contract may be signed as early as this week.
> 
> They fear what a contract with an IT services offshore firm may mean: Humiliation as part of the "knowledge transfer" process, loss of their jobs or a "rebadging" to Cognizant, which they see as little more than temporary employment. Many of the workers, about 200 they estimate, are older, with 15-plus-year tenures. This means a hard job search for them.
> 
> The IT employees have decided not go quietly.


----------



## ekim68

Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill




> WASHINGTON - Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Play with your pets from anywhere with PlayDate's smart ball




> We've seen connected food dispensers and health trackers for pets, but we're still waiting for the first truly great smart pet toy. That's what PlayDate is aiming for with its smart ball, which resembles Sphero's devices and LG's upcoming Rolling Bot. It can be controlled remotely and has an integrated webcam, so you can use it to keep an eye on your furry friends throughout the house, as well as give them something to chase.


----------



## ekim68

FBI Tells Congress It Needs Hackers To Keep Up With Tech Company Encryption




> A high ranking FBI official tells Congress that developing solutions to penetrate encrypted devices is too costly and sometimes requires expertise that the FBI does not have.


----------



## ekim68

New system to identify people by their 'brainprints'




> Scientists have developed a new system that can identify people using their brain waves or 'brainprint' with 100 per cent accuracy, an advance that may be useful in high-security applications.


----------



## hewee

Nuke the brain.


----------



## ekim68

Solar is now cheaper than coal, says India energy minister




> India is on track to soar past a goal to deploy more than 100 gigawatts of solar power by 2022, the country's energy minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Security Firm Discovers Secret Plan to Hack Numerous Websites and Forums




> Security researchers from SurfWatch Labs have shut down a secret plan to hack and infect hundreds or possibly thousands of forums and websites hosted on the infrastructure of Invision Power Services, who are the makers of the IP.Board forum platform, now known as the IPS Community Suite.
> 
> The plan belonged to a malware coder known as AlphaLeon, who, at the start of March this year, started selling a new trojan called Thanatos.


----------



## ekim68

Solar Impulse 2 resumes its around-the-world flight after months of delays




> After a several month-long layover in Hawaii, Solar Impulse 2 is back in the air and on the way to California for the latest leg in its around-the-world journey. Following delays due to wind gusts, the solar-powered plane took off with Bertrand Piccard in the cockpit just around sunrise from the island of O'ahu.


----------



## ekim68

Google Search Will Soon Include Live TV Listings




> Google is ready to give TV Guide and IMDB a run for their money. Pretty soon, you will be able to Google the name of a television show or movie and see live air times for that content within the search results.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Google Search Will Soon Include Live TV Listings


----------



## ekim68

Volvo aiming to sell one million electric vehicles by 2025




> Volvo has doubled down on electrification. It previously stated intentions of offering plug-in hybrid variants of every model, and it's been following through with the likes of the new S90 sedan and V90 wagon. It only plans to get more aggressive with electrification in the coming years, announcing this week that it hopes to sell up to one million electrified vehicles (all-electric and plug-in hybrid models), in total, by 2025. It will work toward that goal by creating two plug-in variants of every model and introducing its first fully electric car in 2019.


----------



## ekim68

Non-invasive treatment produces 98 percent prostate cancer cure rate




> Traditional approaches to tackling prostate cancer are generally quite effective, with a 80 to 90 percent cure rate, but a new method, known as Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT) could revolutionize the practice. The results of an extensive five-year study have now been published, showing that the method, which requires far fewer hospital visits than conventional radiation therapy, has a cure rate of 98.6 percent.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Non-invasive treatment produces 98 percent prostate cancer cure rate


----------



## ekim68

Study: Crayfish may help restore dirty streams




> AVONDALE, Pa., April 21 (UPI) -- A pair of researchers were trying to measure the effects of crayfish in small stream ecosystems. During their experiments, they happened upon a surprising result -- one that suggests the presence of crayfish is beneficial to a stream's health.
> 
> Scientists created a series of mesh enclosures in Valley Creek, a tributary of the Schuylkill River outside Philadelphia that has been degraded by urbanization. In some enclosures, the researchers deposited crayfish. Others were left crayfish-free.
> 
> At the end of the experiment, researchers found more macroinvertebrates like caddisflies -- a mainstay of the crayfish's diet -- in the enclosures with crayfish. The presence of insects like caddisflies are usually interpreted as a sign of fresh water's improving environmental health.


----------



## ekim68

Koch brothers said to be funding plan to block Grand Canyon conservation




> Tax forms reveal donor from their network channeled money into Arizona-based group fighting plan that would ban uranium mining around the landmark.


----------



## ekim68

Bangladesh Bank exposed to hackers by cheap switches, no firewall: police




> Bangladesh's central bank was vulnerable to hackers because it did not have a firewall and used second-hand, $10 switches to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payment network, an investigator into one of the world's biggest cyber heists said.
> 
> The shortcomings made it easier for hackers to break into the Bangladesh Bank system earlier this year and attempt to siphon off nearly $1 billion using the bank's SWIFT credentials, said Mohammad Shah Alam, head of the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh police's criminal investigation department.
> 
> "It could be difficult to hack if there was a firewall," Alam said in an interview.


----------



## ekim68

Leading jihadis 'twice as likely to be students of science as of Sharia'




> Prominent jihadists are twice as likely to have studied science at university than subjects related to Islam, according to a new survey, while British fighters appear to know the least about their religion.
> 
> The report, which analysed the histories of 100 of the most prominent jihadist leaders of the last three decades, said that despite claiming to be the sole interpreters of Islamic theology, they often had little or no training in the subject.


----------



## ekim68

US court could give chimpanzees rights as persons




> Chimpanzees will receive special legal rights recognising that they are "autonomous and self-determining" beings, according to a lawyer who is leading a US court fight on behalf of two chimps, who vowed that "it's just a matter of time" before they get the status they deserve.
> 
> Professor Steven Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, is leading a high-profile court case in New York - due to culminate later month - to secure the release of two chimps, Hercules and Leo, held at the Stony Brook University in New York.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> US court could give chimpanzees rights as persons


----------



## ekim68

Consumer Complaints About Broadband Caps Are Soaring



> Consumer complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about broadband data caps rose to 7,904 in the second half of 2015 from 863 in the first half, notes a new report by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency to obtain the data on complaints, which have spiked as a growing number of fixed-line broadband providers apply caps and overage fees to already pricey connections.


----------



## ekim68

Computers That Crush Humans at Games Might Have Met Their Match: 'StarCraft'




> SEOUL-Humanity has fallen to artificial intelligence in checkers, chess, and, last month, Go, the complex ancient Chinese board game.
> 
> But some of the world's biggest nerds are confident that machines will meet their Waterloo on the pixelated battlefields of the computer strategy game StarCraft.
> 
> A key reason: Unlike machines, humans are good at lying.


----------



## Brigham

poochee said:


>


When I look around I think they already have.


----------



## ekim68

Imagine that. Other Living Creatures having rights......!


----------



## ekim68

9 Types Of Intelligence




> That is what school beat into us by putting certain types of intelligence on a pedestal and ignoring other types. If you are not good at math or language, you might still be gifted at other things but it was not called "intelligence". Why?


----------



## ekim68

Hackers Have Launched a War Against the KKK and the Spread of Online Hate




> Hackers are launching a campaign against the promotion of hatred and racism online, and one of their main targets is the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
> 
> Over the course of the last couple months, websites belonging to the KKK flicked off and on, members of the hate group have had their identities posted online, and their recruiting efforts have been attacked.
> 
> This has been the work of several hacker collectives, including Anonymous and BinarySec, under a loosely-coordinated operation they're calling #OpKKK.


----------



## hewee

Look up the pass history of the democratic party and ku klux klan and it was the democratic that was bad.


----------



## ekim68

This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Thin Air




> Today, the biggest hurdle when it comes to designing new gadgets is battery technology. These big, bulky things restrict the forms our smartphones, computers, and wearables can take, and unfortunately, battery technology is so stagnant that there's no promise of things getting better any time soon.
> 
> But what if you could leave the battery out of the equation entirely? That's just what the University of Washington's Sensor Lab has done. Researchers there created the WISP, or Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform: a combination sensor and computing chip that doesn't need a battery or a wired power source to operate. Instead, it sucks in radio waves emitted from a standard, off-the-shelf RFID reader-the same technology that retail shops use to deter shoplifters-and converts them into electricity.


----------



## ekim68

The Surprising Things You Don't Know About Big Data




> You're probably familiar with the terms byte, megabyte, and gigabyte - but do you know what a terabyte is? How about a petabyte, or an exabyte?


----------



## ekim68

India makes it compulsory for phones to have 'panic buttons'




> India has prescribed that starting next year mobile phones in the country should have buttons that can be quickly used by women to alert the police and close relatives if they are in distress.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> India makes it compulsory for phones to have 'panic buttons'


----------



## valis

well, this stinks.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/26/massive-fire-guts-delhis-natural-history-museum


----------



## ekim68

How America's rich betrayed their fellow citizens




> In the past, wealth came with responsibility. Today's rich avoid taxes, military service, and charitable giving. No wonder we're seeing a populist backlash


----------



## ekim68

There will be a huge new 'Panama Papers' data dump




> The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is about to unleash a huge data dump about how some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people hide their cash.
> 
> The group has already released a host of information regarding how major figures in politics and business store their wealth in tax havens.


----------



## ekim68

Nvidia GPU-powered autonomous car teaches itself to see and steer




> Nvidia's breakthrough is the vehicle automatically taught itself to drive by watching how a human drove


----------



## ekim68

High performance transistors created on flexible plastic sheets




> Using a technique known as nanoimprint lithography, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW Madison) and partners have created a breakthrough method to allow the simple manufacture of inexpensive, high-performance, wireless-capable, flexible Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFET) that overcome many of the operation problems encountered in devices manufactured using standard techniques. Created on large rolls of pliable plastic, these MOSFETs could be used to make a host of devices ranging from wearable electronics to bendable sensors.


----------



## ekim68

India Installs 'Laser Walls' at Border With Pakistan




> After experimenting with barbed wire, surveillance cameras and even cowbells and camels, India has now reportedly introduced "laser walls" at its border with archenemy Pakistan.
> 
> One of the world's most dangerous nuclear flashpoints, the India-Pakistan border is also among the most militarized.
> 
> Both New Delhi and Islamabad deploy more than half of their 1 million and 600,000-strong armies, respectively, on the border.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/someone-is-finally-trying-to-stop-this-underground-garb-1773895325']Someone Is Finally Trying to Stop This Underground Garbage Fire That's Burned for Six Years[/URL]




> For six years, an underground garbage fire has been steadily burning outside of Saint Louis, Missouri, right next to a landfill filled with nuclear waste buried in the mid-70s. So why hasn't anyone managed to extinguish it yet?


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/23735-one-oil-field-a-key-culprit-in-global-ethane-gas-increase']One oil field a key culprit in global ethane gas increase[/URL]




> ANN ARBOR-A single U.S. shale oil field is responsible for much of the past decade's increase in global atmospheric levels of ethane, a gas that can damage air quality and impact climate, according to new study led by the University of Michigan.
> 
> The researchers found that the Bakken Formation, an oil and gas field in North Dakota and Montana, is emitting roughly 2 percent of the globe's ethane. That's about 250,000 tons per year.


----------



## ekim68

Say hello to our first national mammal




> North America used to be teeming with bison. But in one century, their numbers plummeted from tens of millions to just a few dozen in the wild after hunters nearly wiped out the continent's largest mammals.
> 
> Now, the bison is about to become the first national mammal of the United States. The National Bison Legacy Act, which designates the bison as the official mammal of the United States, passed the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Thursday.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Say hello to our first national mammal


----------



## ekim68

Did OPEC Just Start Preparing for the End of the Oil Era?




> It is hard to overstate the significance of the Doha debacle. At the very least, it will perpetuate the low oil prices that have plagued the industry for the past two years, forcing smaller firms into bankruptcy and erasing hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in new production capacity. It may also have obliterated any future prospects for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in regulating the market. Most of all, however, it demonstrated that the petroleum-fueled world we've known these last decades-with oil demand always thrusting ahead of supply, ensuring steady profits for all major producers-is no more. Replacing it is an anemic, possibly even declining, demand for oil that is likely to force suppliers to fight one another for ever-diminishing market shares.


----------



## ekim68

Windows 7 drops under 50% market share, XP falls below 10%




> Windows 7 is still the king, but it no longer holds the majority.
> 
> Nine months after Windows 10's release, Windows 7 has finally fallen below 50 percent market share, and Windows XP has dropped into single digits. While this is good news for Microsoft, April was actually a poor month for Windows, which for the first time owned less than 90 percent of the market, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.


----------



## ekim68

UAE to build artificial mountain to improve rainfall




> The UAE is currently in the first stage of a man-made mountain development project as the country mulls different approaches to maximising rainfall.
> Experts from the US-based University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are in the "detailed modelling study" phase, as per NCAR scientist and lead researcher Roelof Bruintjes.
> 
> "What we are looking at is basically evaluating the effects on weather through the type of mountain, how high it should be and how the slopes should be," said Bruintjes. "We will have a report of the first phase this summer as an initial step."


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Has More Gas Flares than Any Country




> Drive through many oil and gas fields in the U.S. and one thing stands out above the pumpjacks and storage tanks, especially at night-steadily flickering flames.
> 
> Those flames are known as gas flares, which burn off excess natural gas from crude oil and natural gas wells across the globe. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using satellites to learn more about those flares-how much gas is being burned, how many flares exist and where they are.


----------



## ekim68

Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year




> This past week, a Milwaukee toddler fatally shot his mother after finding a handgun in the back seat of the car they were riding in. The case drew a lot of national attention given the unusual circumstances: Little kids rarely kill people, intentionally or not.
> 
> But this type of thing happens more often than you might think. Since April 20, there have been at least seven instances in which a 1- , 2- or 3-year-old shot themselves or somebody else in the United States:


----------



## ekim68

Saudi Arabia gives women the right to a copy of their marriage contract




> Saudi brides will now get a copy of their marriage contracts, a privilege that was previously exclusive to men in the ultra-conservative kingdom, the kingdom's justice ministry has announced.
> 
> According to a directorate issued by the justice minister, Walid al-Samaani, clerics who register marriage contracts will now have to hand a copy to the bride "to ensure her awareness of her rights and the terms of the contract".


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Saudi Arabia gives women the right to a copy of their marriage contract


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year


Sad.


----------



## ekim68

The 50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time




> Think of the gear you can't live without: The smartphone you constantly check. The camera that goes with you on every vacation. The TV that serves as a portal to binge-watching and -gaming. Each owes its influence to one model that changed the course of technology for good.
> 
> It's those devices we're recognizing in this list of the 50 most influential gadgets of all time.


----------



## valis

Ye Gods.

60k evacuated in Ft. McMurray, Alberta.


----------



## hewee

valis said:


> Ye Gods.
> 
> 60k evacuated in Ft. McMurray, Alberta.


Wow that is not a nice thing to happen.


----------



## valis

I don't know that I've ever heard of a mandatory evacuation of a city that size. Well, maybe Hurricane Floyd, but I cannot recall if that was mandatory.


----------



## ekim68

Diagnostic blood test shows promise in early detection of Parkinson's




> Early detection of Parkinson's could help doctors decide on treatment options or improve disease management. But often people get a neurological examination after symptoms appear, when vital brain cells have already been destroyed. Now a game-changing blood test is being developed to give doctors a reliable method to detect the disease earlier through clinical biomarkers.


----------



## ekim68

Medical error is third biggest cause of death in the US, experts say




> Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US, accounting for 250,000 deaths every year, according to an analysis released on Tuesday.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Diagnostic blood test shows promise in early detection of Parkinson's


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Medical error is third biggest cause of death in the US, experts say


That is sick what they do and get away with.


----------



## ekim68

Sony files patent for contact lens that records what you see




> Although electronic devices are shrinking all the time, the idea of a smart contact lens still seems wildly ambitious. Now Sony has reached even further into the realm of the hypothetical and yanked out something that trumps all the efforts we have seen before. A patent filing by the Japanese company reveals its vision for a contact lens that not only records video and images with a simple blink, but manages to store them right there and then on the user's eyeballs.


----------



## ekim68

India plans to spend $6 billion on creating new forests




> The Narendra Modi government plans to spend a staggering $6.2 billion (Rs41,000 crore) to increase India's green cover.


----------



## ekim68

Starving cancer cells of nutrients halts tumour growth




> There are more than 900 different types of cancer currently identified, and many of them require very specific treatments, and can become resistant to chemotherapy as time goes on. Now, researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have made a potentially huge breakthrough, working out how to cut off the supply of vital nutrients to cancer cells. The work opens the door to future treatments that could be less prone to resistance than many current methods, and could work across with a wide range of cancers.


----------



## ekim68

Harvard Scientist, Longtime Solar Skeptic, Now Sees the Light




> David Keith, a Harvard University scientist, has long doubted solar energy's potential to compete on cost with conventional power sources. Now he sees the light.
> 
> "I was wrong," largely because the fundamentals of solar power have changed, Keith, a professor of applied physics and public policy, wrote in a recent essay. "One can now build systems in the world's sunny locations and get very cheap power."


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/a-29-year-study-has-found-no-link-between-brain-cancer-1775038908']A 29-Year Study Has Found No Link Between Brain Cancer and Cellphones[/URL]




> If, and by how much cellphones increase the risk of brain cancer is a long and disputed argument. No one study is going to settle anything, but one statistical analysis of data in Australia hints at cellphones being reasonably safe.


----------



## ekim68

San Diego Outlines Plan to Run the City Totally on Renewable Energy by 2035






> San Diego seems to be on the frontline of the battle against climate change, as the city has recently released a plan that includes running the municipality totally on renewable energy by 2035. The full future intentions for the city are outlined in a 74-page document entitled the Climate Action Plan.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> A 29-Year Study Has Found No Link Between Brain Cancer and Cellphones


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gawker.com/1-650-pages-of-george-w-bushs-skull-and-bones-records-1775113932']1,650 Pages of George W. Bush's Skull and Bones Records Are Set to Be Publicly Released[/URL]




> Mark your calendars: In July, the National Archives intends to publicly release over 1,000 pages of records from the George W. Bush administration pertaining to Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that counts both the former president and his former president father as members. If we're lucky, maybe we'll learn whether Dubya's grandfather Prescott Bush-also a Bonesman-really dug up and stole the skull of Geronimo from the Apache warrior's grave, as Skull and Bones legend holds he did one night in 1918.


----------



## ekim68

Non-invasive device monitors diabetes using microwaves




> For diabetics, keeping track of blood sugar can be a drag, with Type 1 sufferers having to monitor their levels as much as six times a day. A new device might make life significantly easier, providing a non-invasive solution for tracking glucose levels, without the need to extract blood.


----------



## ekim68

Tucows Removes Ads From Its Popular Software Download Site




> TORONTO, May 03, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Tucows (NASDAQ:TCX) (TSX:TC) is pleased to announce that the seminal software downloads site, tucows.com/downloads, is now completely ad free.
> 
> Tucows began as a software downloads site nearly 25 years ago. It has since evolved beyond that early core business and into domain names (wholesale with OpenSRS and retail with Hover), mobile phone service (Ting) and symmetrical gigabit fiber Internet in select towns and cities in the US (Ting Internet).


----------



## ekim68

What Happens in an Internet Minute in 2016?




> Today, we enter into the digital realm to see what happens every minute on the internet. The statistics are mind-boggling and put in perspective how scalable platforms have taken over the world:


----------



## ekim68

Welsh home installs UK's first Tesla Powerwall storage battery




> Battery could revolutionise UK energy market by enabling people to store excess energy generated from rooftop solar panels


----------



## ekim68

Global first? Every Swiss could be guaranteed $2,600 a month tax-free




> GENEVA, Switzerland - Chalk it up to Swiss affluence. Voters here will decide next month whether all 8 million citizens and legal residents should be guaranteed a generous monthly income, something no country in the world has ever done.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter blocks feds from data mining service




> Twitter





> has moved to block U.S. intelligence agencies from access to a widely used data-mining service it partly owns.
> 
> The social media company told Dataminr, the business partner that sifts through and provides access to the full output of Twitter's social media postings known as tweets, that it didn't want the service provided to government investigators, a person with direct knowledge of the issue said Monday.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Global first? Every Swiss could be guaranteed $2,600 a month tax-free


WOW!!


----------



## ekim68

Newspaper chain sending IT jobs overseas




> The McClatchy Company, which operates a major chain of newspapers in the U.S., is moving IT work overseas.
> 
> The number of affected jobs, based on employee estimates, range from 120 to 150.
> 
> The chain owns about 30 newspapers, including _The Sacramento Bee_, where McClatchy is based; _The Fresno Bee_, _The News & Observer_ in Raleigh, N.C., _The State_ in Columbia, S.C. and the _Miami Herald_.


(And the Beat goes on.........)


----------



## ekim68

Cable companies are so scared of Netflix they've actually started showing fewer ads




> Major TV networks are so scared of Netflix they are actually starting to show fewer ads. Companies like Time Warner, Fox, and Viacom have begun to reverse the trend of trying to shove as many ads in your face as possible.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Newspaper chain sending IT jobs overseas
> 
> 
> 
> (And the Beat goes on.........)


Yep!!


----------



## ekim68

poochee said:


> Yep!!


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://vitals.lifehacker.com/why-health-care-is-so-expensive-1775781692']Why Health Care Is So Expensive[/URL]




> When you get sick, you shouldn't have to decide between medical care and rent. Medical costs are already unreasonable for 25 percent of Americans, and are getting worse every year. Pricey insurance and unexpected medical bills are a potential ticket to bankruptcy, and you have little power to protect yourself.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One technology tested successfully in Nevada desert




> Hyperloop One, a Los Angeles company working to develop futuristic transportation technology, conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology Wednesday in the desert outside Las Vegas.


----------



## ekim68

Linux is the largest software development project on the planet: Greg Kroah-Hartman




> Greg Kroah-Hartman is second in command in the Linux kernel community. In addition to doing great work on device drivers, he also maintains the stable tree of the Linux kernel.
> 
> In his keynote presentation at CoreOS Fest in Berlin this week, Kroah-Hartman offered some inside perspective on just how massive the Linux kernel project is.


----------



## ekim68

Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan




> A critical medical equipment crashed during a heart procedure due to a timely scan triggered by the antivirus software installed on the PC to which the said device was sending data for logging and monitoring.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan


----------



## ekim68

Where does America's e-waste end up? GPS tracker tells all




> High above the Pacific Ocean in a plane headed for Hong Kong, most of the passengers are fast asleep.
> 
> But not Jim Puckett. His eyes are fixed on the glowing screen of his laptop. Little orange markers dot a satellite image. He squints at the pixelated terrain trying to make out telltale signs.
> 
> He's searching for America's electronic waste.
> 
> "People have the right to know where their stuff goes," he says.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/tylenol-could-be-making-you-less-empathetic-1776664345']America's Most Common Drug Ingredient Could Be Making You Less Empathetic [/URL]




> Every week, a quarter of Americans take a painkiller that could be dampening our collective feelings of empathy. In a paper published online this week, scientists claim that acetaminophen, Tylenol's main ingredient, makes people more likely to think that other people's pain isn't a big deal.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> America's Most Common Drug Ingredient Could Be Making You Less Empathetic


----------



## ekim68

How expiring patents are ushering in the next generation of 3D printing




> The year 2016 is quickly shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record for 3D printing innovations. Although there is still a lot of hype surrounding 3D printing and how it may or may not be the next industrial revolution, one thing is for certain: the cost of printing will continue to drop while the quality of 3D prints continues to rise.
> 
> This development can be traced to advanced 3D printing technologies becoming accessible due to the expiration of key patents on pre-existing industrial printing processes.


----------



## ekim68

Anonymous Goes After Denver Mayor Because of His Treatment of the Homeless




> The group launched its threats via a video posted on YouTube yesterday. The hackers are requesting the mayor to stop the homeless sweeps that have put the lives of many of Denver's displaced citizens at risks.
> 
> Mayor Hancock recently approved a ban on illegal camping sites across Denver and city workers have been taking down any sheds or places where Denver's homeless were finding refuge.


----------



## ekim68

Only Amazon can open a college bookstore with no books




> [email protected] probably doesn't look like any store you've ever visited. The brightly lit space includes no shelves, no standing inventory and no checkout. It's likely debatable the location is even a "store" at all.
> 
> Yet this 3,500-square-foot space, which hosted a grand opening Friday at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, serves as another example of Amazon's evolution, as the world's biggest e-commerce company starts building physical locations to draw itself even closer to its millions of customers.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Anonymous Goes After Denver Mayor Because of His Treatment of the Homeless


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Now Trying To Claim That Delivering Just TV To Third-Party Set Top Boxes 'Not Feasible'




> We've talked a lot about how the FCC is trying to open up the set top box market to additional competition, breaking open cable's monopoly control of the hardware, while driving down set top prices and improving gear quality. Given this would kill $21 billion in annual set top rental fee revenue and expose customers to more streaming options than ever before, the cable industry has been engaged in raging histrionics to try and shut down the effort and protect the status quo.


----------



## ekim68

Cells carry 'memory' of injury, which could reveal why chronic pain persists




> A new study offers clues as to why chronic pain can persist, even when the injury that caused it has gone. Although still in its infancy, this research could explain how small and seemingly innocuous injuries leave molecular 'footprints' which add up to more lasting damage, and ultimately chronic pain.


----------



## ekim68

Iraq Shuts Down Internet for Entire Country to Prevent Exam Cheating




> Iraq has done it again. The country's Ministry of Communications has shut down Internet access in the entire country for the second year in a row just to make it harder for Iraqi students to cheat on their exams.


----------



## ekim68

Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity




> If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/portugal-just-powered-itself-exclusively-on-renewable-e-1777511231']Portugal Just Powered Itself Exclusively on Renewable Energy for Four Whole Days[/URL]




> Last week, the nation of Portugal achieved something remarkable. For 107 hours-about four days-the country ran on nothing but wind, solar and hydro power.
> 
> Running a country of about 10 million people without any fossil fuels is certainly an impressive feat. The weather helped: sunny, breezy days optimized energy-collection and mild temperatures didn't strain the grid with excessive heating or cooling needs. Of course, this figure only nods to utilities-it doesn't include the gas-powered vehicles on streets. But it does mean that any electric vehicles that were charged during that period were truly zero-emission vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

If You Clicked Anything Online, Google Probably Knows About It




> Princeton assistant professor Arvind Narayanan and graduate student Steven Englehardt have conducted a massive research into how websites track users using different techniques.
> 
> The results of the Princeton Web Census study, which they claim to be the biggest to date, shows that Google, through multiple domains, is tracking users on around 80 percent of all Top 1 Million domains.


----------



## ekim68

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle hold the most cash: Moody's report




> For the first time, the top five non-financial U.S. companies with the most cash are in tech.
> 
> With $216 billion in cash at the end of 2015, Apple tops them all - as it has since 2009, according to a Moody's Investors Service report released Friday. Apple's cash hoard, plus that of Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle, makes up 30 percent, or $504 billion, of all non-financial U.S. companies' cash.


----------



## ekim68

Discovery of new stem cell pathway indicates route to much higher yields in maize, staple crops




> Cold Spring Harbor, NY* -* Biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have made an important discovery that helps explain how plants regulate the proliferation of their stem cells. The discovery has near-term implications for increasing the yield of maize and many other staple crops, perhaps by as much as 50%.


----------



## ekim68

Superjet technology nears reality after Australia test




> Sydney (AFP) - A two-hour flight from Sydney to London is a step closer to reality after the latest successful test Wednesday of hypersonic technology in the Australian desert.
> 
> A joint US-Australian military research team is running a series of 10 trials at the world's largest land testing range, Woomera in South Australia, and at Norway's Andoya Rocket Range.
> 
> "It is a game-changing technology... and could revolutionise global air travel, providing cost-effective access to space," Australia's chief scientist Alex Zelinsky said in a statement.


----------



## ekim68

How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers




> Long before Edward Snowden went public, John Crane was a top Pentagon official fighting to protect NSA whistleblowers. Instead their lives were ruined - and so was his.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota Teaming With Segway Inventor Kamen on Better Wheelchairs




> Toyota Motor Corp. said it will work with Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway human transporter, to develop advanced wheelchairs for disabled people and aging populations worldwide.


----------



## ekim68

World record in terrestrial radio transmission: Multi-Gigabit wireless communication



> Transmitting the contents of a conventional DVD in under ten seconds by radio transmission is incredibly fast -- and a new world record in wireless data transmission. With a data rate of 6 Gigabit per second over a distance of 37 kilometers, the project exceeded the state of the art by a factor of 10.


----------



## ekim68

SAE approves wireless charging guidelines for plug-in electric vehicles




> The Society for Automotive Engineers International has approved publication of its first wireless charging guidelines. The "SAE TIR J2954 Wireless Power Transfer for Light-Duty Plug-in/Electric Vehicles and Alignment Methodology" paves the way towards an industry-wide wireless charging standard for automobiles.


----------



## ekim68

The elderly are way savvier with password security than millennials



> Just because millennials grew up with technology doesn't mean they're actually smarter about how they use it. If anything, they appear to be more careless when it comes to online security.
> 
> That's according to a report released May 24 by Gigya, which has an API that businesses can use to let their customers log into websites using their social media accounts. Surveying 4,000 adults in the US and UK, Gigya found that 18- to 34-year-olds are more likely to use bad passwords and report their online accounts being compromised.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft accused of Windows 10 upgrade 'nasty trick'




> Microsoft has faced criticism for changing the pop-up box encouraging Windows users to upgrade to Windows 10.
> 
> Clicking the red cross on the right hand corner of the pop-up box now activates the upgrade instead of closing the box.
> 
> And this has caused confusion as typically clicking a red cross closes a pop-up notification.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Microsoft accused of Windows 10 upgrade 'nasty trick'


This is probably not the only trick.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota is establishing a 'strategic partnership' with Uber, which is a really big deal




> Toyota and Uber are forming a "strategic partnership" which will include an investment by the Japanese automaker in the San Francisco-based ride-sharing company. Under the agreement, Uber drivers can lease their vehicles from Toyota and cover their payments through earnings generated as Uber drivers. The leasing period will be flexible and based on driver needs. The two companies also agree to conduct ride-sharing trials in countries that have yet to establish the practice.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2016/05/02/influence-abroad-american-vulture-funds-feed-on-argentinas-debt-crisis/']Influence Abroad: American vulture funds feed on Argentina's debt crisis[/URL]




> Vulture funds preyed on Argentina, resulting in economic depression for the South American country - and huge profits for investors.


----------



## ekim68

Oil sands industry a major source of air pollution, study finds




> NEW HAVEN, Conn., May 26 (UPI) -- Tar sands oil, sometimes called the dirtiest oil in the world, is mostly thought of as a threat to water sources, though new research suggests oil sands operations are a large source of air pollution.
> 
> A team of Yale scientists -- with help from researchers in Canada -- determined that oil sands operations in Alberta, Canada, are one of the largest producers of human-caused secondary organic aerosols in North America.


----------



## ekim68

Unlike other Americans, millennials value speed over security online




> Millennials stand apart from other Americans in preferring faster Internet access to safer Internet access, according to a new survey.
> 
> When digital-authentication firm SecureAuth asked people from all age groups whether they would rather be safer online or browse faster online, 57 percent of Americans chose security and 43 percent chose speed. But among millennials, the results were almost reversed: 54 percent chose speed over security.


----------



## ekim68

Anti-Choice Groups Use Smartphone Surveillance to Target 'Abortion-Minded Women' During Clinic Visits




> Women who have visited almost any abortion clinic in the United States have seen anti-choice protesters outside, wielding placards and chanting abuse. A Boston advertiser's technology, when deployed by anti-choice groups, allows those groups to send propaganda directly to a woman's phone while she is in a clinic waiting room.


----------



## ekim68

Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Echo break US child privacy law, experts say




> Storing voice recordings of people younger than 13 via Alexa, Google Home and Siri appears to flout the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act


----------



## ekim68

All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020




> All scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible as of 2020. EU member states want to achieve optimal reuse of research data. They are also looking into a European visa for foreign start-up founders.


----------



## bobs-here

China's "Land Airbus" will let you drive directly under a bus

Theres a vid on the page.. showing the size and design of the bus.


> A new take on mass transit may be headed to China as early as the end of the year: A so-called "Land Airbus" system that looks like an overgrown monorail as it motors over existing lanes of traffic. QUOTE]


----------



## ekim68

News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016




> A majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. adults reported seeing news on social media.1


http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/#fn-55250-1


----------



## ekim68

Qualcomm to manufacture custom chips for Chinese market




> Qualcomm president Derek Aberle has suggested that the semiconductor giant is preparing to produce its own custom chips for the Chinese market.
> 
> A _Wall Street Journal_ interview with Aberle revealed that the American company had entered into a joint venture with the local government in Guizhou province to manufacture custom chips starting in the second half of 2016. According to Aberle, the Guizhou government owns 55% of the venture, while Qualcomm owns the remaining 45%.


----------



## ekim68

Peter Thiel and Gawker




> This is what happens when people have too much money.
> 
> They distort not only the legal system, they tear the basic fabric of our country apart.
> 
> We revere the rich, believing they made it upon hard work, but the truth is not only do they have educational and family advantages, they bend the rules repeatedly to win. Meanwhile, they tell everybody else to just pick themselves up by their bootstraps so they too can succeed, which is utter hogwash. If you think Trump made his money by being honest and forthright you have no idea how business works, you can't handle the truth.


----------



## ekim68

One chip to rule them all? The Internet of Things and the next great era of hardware




> It's been almost 10 years since Apple unveiled the iPhone. Since that day, the smartphone has been the overwhelming driver of innovation in the technology industry. Cameras, Wi-Fi, batteries, touch sensors, baseband processors and memory chips - in less than a decade, these components have made stunning advances to keep up with consumer demand to have sleeker, more powerful devices every year.





> For chip makers, the pressure has been to produce smaller, more powerful components for each generation of phones. Denser, faster, cheaper - these mantras have driven our industry for as long as most people can remember.
> 
> But there's a new game in town. The smartphone era is not over, but the growth rate is slowing. The key growth driver in hardware could soon be the Internet of Things.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla To Hold Gigafactory Grand Opening on July 29




> Electric car maker Tesla Motors plans to hold a "grand opening" celebration for its massive battery factory under construction outside of Reno, Nev. on the night of July 29.
> 
> The company disclosed that date in an email to customers who had won tickets to the event by referring more than five other customers in Tesla's car referral program.


----------



## ekim68

Is Bitcoin Really Money? Economics Professor Says 'No' In Landmark Criminal Case




> Should bitcoin be considered money? It is a question which banks, government, regulators and financial institutions around the world have been grappling with for years, but now the question could finally be answered in a ground-breaking court case, the result of which could have significant impact on the cryptocurrency market all over the world.


----------



## ekim68

Canada's energy superpower status threatened as world shifts off fossil fuel, federal think-tank warns




> Canada's status as an "energy superpower" is under threat because the global dominance of fossil fuels could wane faster than previously believed, according to a draft report from a federal government think-tank obtained by CBC News.
> 
> "It is increasingly plausible to foresee a future in which cheap renewable electricity becomes the world's primary power source and fossil fuels are relegated to a minority status," reads the conclusion of the 32-page document, produced by Policy Horizons Canada.


----------



## ekim68

New study suggests Americans don't trust AI systems




> It may be brilliant, but it's not all that trustworthy. That appears to be the opinion Americans hold when it comes to Artificial Intelligence systems. After all, there's something strangely … artificial about the computer-based brain. And while we may be interacting with AI systems more frequently than we realize (hi, Siri), a new study from Time etc suggests that Americans don't believe the AI revolution is quite here yet, with 54 percent claiming to have never interacted with such a system.


----------



## ekim68

How the Feds Pulled Off the Biggest Insider-Trading Investigation in U.S. History



> For more than seven years, the U.S. government has relentlessly prosecuted Wall Street traders who used inside information to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
> 
> Federal prosecutors in New York have racked up 91 convictions and collected almost $2 billion in fines. In the latest action on May 19, the government looked beyond Wall Street, accusing a legendary Las Vegas gambler of profiting from insider tips.


----------



## ekim68

World's Longest Tunnel Drilled Under Swiss Alps




> After 15 years of construction, the world's longest tunnel is taking shape.
> 
> The passageway will form the lynchpin of a new network between northern and southeastern Europe.
> 
> The world's longest tunnel will take shape deep beneath the Swiss Alps on Friday when a giant drilling machine clears a path for a key high speed railway through the heart of Europe.


----------



## ekim68

Trained immune cells raise prospect of universal cancer vaccine




> Engineering immune cells to attack cancer is a form of treatment that is showing great promise, but it is complex because it involves extracting and modifying T cells before injecting them back into the body. Scientists have now demonstrated a way to not just arm immune cells while still inside the body, but equip them with the ability to fight any kind of cancer, providing an early proof-of-concept for a cheap, universal vaccine for the deadly disease.


----------



## ekim68

After secret Harvard meeting, scientists announce plans for synthetic human genomes




> Three weeks ago, 130 scientists, entrepreneurs and policy leaders held an invitation-only, closed-door meeting at Harvard University to discuss an ambitious plan to create synthetic human genomes. Now, after a flurry of criticism over the secrecy of the effort, the participants have published their idea, declaring that they're launching a project to radically reduce the cost of synthesizing genomes -- a potentially revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous 30-mile flight for Sikorsky S-76 commercial helicopter




> Using technology developed for DARPA's Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program, a Sikorsky S-76 commercial helicopter has taken off and flown autonomously from Stratford, Connecticut to Robertson Airport in Plainville, Connecticut, covering a distance of around 30 miles (48 km), before safely landing autonomously. The entire flight was planned, monitored, and executed by an operator using only a tablet device.


----------



## ekim68

Electric Bikes Won Over China. Is the U.S. Next?




> The vibe is buoyant at the headquarters of BH Bikes in Vitoria, a city in Spain's Basque region. Founded in 1909 as an arms manufacturer, the company switched to bikes after World War I and introduced its first electric model in 2008. Today there are more than 60, ranging in price from about $1,300 to $5,200. "Growth has been tremendous," says Mikel Quintana, head of the e-bike division, who expects to sell 20,000 this year, up 20 percent from 2015.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://electrek.co/2016/06/03/norway-gasoline-powered-car-ban-2025/']Norway reportedly agrees on banning new sales of gas-powered cars by 2025[/URL]




> Norway's four main political parties have been discussing a possible ban on new gasoline-powered car sales (diesel or petrol) for quite some time, but they were not able to come to an understanding until now, according to a new report from Dagens Næringsliv (Paywall), an important newspaper in Norway.
> 
> The four main political parties, both from the right and the left, have agreed on a new energy policy that will include a ban on new gasoline-powered car sales as soon as 2025 - making it one of the most aggressive timeline of its kind for such a policy. What's probably most remarkable here is that Norway is currently one of the world's largest Oil exporters.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_exports


----------



## ekim68

IBM has been awarded an average of 24 patents per day so far in 2016




> The media tends to focus on the crazy things Google, Facebook, and Apple patent, but they're still dwarfed by more traditional companies like IBM and Samsung when it comes to the number of patents they're awarded each year. Through the first half of 2016, IBM has, yet again, been the leader in technology patents, averaging roughly 23.6 patents awarded each day.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Alexa now has over 1,000 Skills, up from 135 in January




> Amazon's Echo speaker, and its descendents, Dot and Tap, are growing in popularity as consumers' preferred "smart" speakers and the voice computing platform for the home. But they're also encouraging a wave of developer interest, in the form of add-ons dubbed "skills" which allow you to teach Amazon's personal assistant Alexa new tricks, like calling you an Uber…or ordering you a pizza. Today, Amazon announced that its Alexa app store, so to speak - the "skills" section - has grown to over 1,000 skills. That's a notable milestone, given that ordering the Echo was only available by invite up until last June.


http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/amazon-echo-us-wide/


----------



## ekim68

Flat lens promises possible revolution in optics




> A flat lens made of paint whitener on a sliver of glass could revolutionise optics, according to its US inventors.
> 
> Just 2mm across and finer than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses.
> 
> It is the latest example of the power of metamaterials, whose novel properties emerge from their structure.
> 
> Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre.


----------



## ekim68

King County launches app that alerts bystanders when someone needs CPR




> For most people, sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is fatal. When the condition hits, each minute that passes without CPR reduces the chance of survival by seven to 10 percent, according to Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.
> 
> That's why the Seattle Fire Department has partnered with the Medic One Foundation to develop an app for SCA victims. PulsePoint works in tandem with a community's emergency dispatch network and alerts CPR-trained bystanders when someone in their direct vicinity is suffering from sudden cardiac arrest. The app also notifies users where the nearest automated external defibrillator (AED) is located, which can be critical in emergency first-response.


----------



## ekim68

Latest bionic leaf now 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis




> Over the last few years, great strides have been made in creating artificial leaves that mimic the ability of their natural counterparts to produce energy from water and sunlight. In 2011, the first cost-effective, stable artificial leaves were created, and in 2013, the devices were improved to self-heal and work with impure water. Now, scientists at Harvard have developed the "bionic leaf 2.0," which increases the efficiency of the system well beyond nature's own capabilities, and used it to produce liquid fuels for the first time.


----------



## ekim68

Tiny sea creatures are saving us from hell on earth. So why are we endangering them?




> Deep in the ocean where the sun don't shine, fissures in the earth's crust spew super-heated geothermal water and gases of up to 400 degrees Celsius.
> 
> Sounds like hell? Not quite - hydrothermal vents discovered just 40 years ago by scientists, teem with a surprising abundance of life. And these hotbeds of biodiversity are crucial for underwater ecosystems and the global climate, according to a recent report in Frontiers In Marine Science.


----------



## ekim68

GE Considers Scrapping the Annual Raise




> General Electric Co. is the laboratory of American management. So when the manufacturing giant says it's rethinking a bedrock tradition of corporate life -- the annual raise -- you can bet that C-suites everywhere will be watching closely.
> 
> GE executives are reviewing whether annual updates to compensation are the best response to the achievements and needs of employees. The company may also scrap the longstanding and much-imitated system of rating staff on a five-point scale. Decisions on both issues may come within the next several months, spokeswoman Valerie Van den Keybus said by phone.


----------



## 2twenty2

Man sued for $30K over $40 printer he sold on Craigslist - http://www.usatoday.com/story/money...-over-40-printer-he-sold-craigslist/85478168/



> INDIANAPOLIS --- Selling a used, black-and-white printer through Craigslist seemed simple and straightforward to Doug Costello.
> 
> It wasn't.
> 
> What the 66-year-old Massachusetts man didn't know then is that he would spend the next 6 ½ years embroiled in a complicated and confusing legal dispute in Indiana over that printer, which, according to its buyer, was broken.


----------



## ekim68

Future Phones May Use Vacuum Tube Chips as Silicon Hits Moore's Law Extremes



> A team of researchers thinks it may have solved an impending problem with silicon-based computer chips: replace the transistors with vacuum tubes. The technology has been around for decades, but the ones under development at Caltech's Nanofabrication Group are a million times smaller than the ones in use 100 years ago.


----------



## ekim68

A Monthly Income Just for Being Human, and Other Sensible Ideas



> Unconditional basic income, a policy option that seems radical by American standards, is gaining new traction across Europe, Canada, and even a few places in the United States. Also known as "universal basic income," the policy mandates a guaranteed stipend to every resident of a community, with no strings attached. It is promoted as a way to address rising inequality, protect against economic uncertainty, and replace increasingly austere and inadequate means-tested benefit programs. A basic income is gaining credence among economists and policymakers as a necessity in a global economy that's failing millions of people.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/faa-warns-of-gps-outages-this-month-during-mysterious-t-1780866590']FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests on the West Coast[/URL]



> Starting today, it appears the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say "appears" because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy's largest installation in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won't tell us much about what's going on.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> A Monthly Income Just for Being Human, and Other Sensible Ideas


Interesting.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers Turn Smartphone Vibration Motor into Microphone to Spy on You



> Two researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have devised a method for turning vibration motors, like the ones found in smartphones, into makeshift microphones, capable of recording the sound around them.
> 
> Their method doesn't yield perfect results and also needs physical access to the device, but it puts in place the theoretical details needed to carry out and refine such attacks in the future.


----------



## ekim68

Belgium tops list of nations most vulnerable to hacking



> Tajikistan comes second, Samoa third and Australia fourth as new 'heat map of the internet' reveals which countries are most at risk due to exposed servers


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. Army Is Rolling Out Superhuman Hearing to Soldiers



> Infantry combat is loud, and gunshots are an occupational hazard of being a soldier. A single gunshot can temporarily blow out a soldier's hearing, reducing situational awareness and the ability to overhear commands. Prolonged gunshot noise exposure over a soldier's career can do irreparable harm to hearing.
> 
> Which is why the U.S. Army has developed an all-in-one hearing system that not only boosts the hearing of troops in the field, it also acts to cut down the noise of battle. The system, known as Tactical Communication and Protective System (TCAPS), is currently rolling out to units in the field.


----------



## ekim68

The inventor of the Web thinks we need a new one that governments can't control



> Although the internet has created millions of new opportunities for people around the world and made the sum of human knowledge available to anyone with a connection, it's also created problems that seem impossible to solve.
> 
> "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web," said Brewster Kahle, who heads up Internet Archive. And he's not wrong: governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-majority-of-americans-cant-see-the-milky-way-anymor-1781756700']The Majority of Americans Can't See the Milky Way Anymore[/URL]



> Our world is getting brighter, as we turn more and more lights on across the planet. But all that light shining from the ground makes it harder to see the lights shining from the sky. It's now gotten so bad that the Milky Way is almost impossible to see in most of the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Appeals Court: No Second Amendment Right to Carry Concealed Firearms Outside the Home



> On Thursday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the Constitution does not grant citizens the right to carry concealed firearms outside the home. The decision, _Peruta v. San Diego_, is likely to be the last word on this litigation: It was issued en banc, meaning the plaintiffs' only remaining hope is a Hail Mary appeal to the Supreme Court, which makes a habit of avoiding gun cases these days.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/09/apple-energy-company/']Apple has just become an energy company, looks to sell excess electricity into the grid and maybe more[/URL]



> Apple has quietly created an energy subsidiary, 'Apple Energy' LLC, registered in Delaware but run from its Cupertino headquarters. The company was seemingly formed to allow it to sell excess electricity generated by its solar farms in Cupertino and Nevada, with plans to sell electricity across the whole of the US.


----------



## ekim68

World's first passenger drone cleared for testing in Nevada



> The world's first passenger drone capable of autonomously carrying a person in the air for 23 minutes has been given clearance for testing in Nevada.
> 
> Chinese firm Ehang, which unveiled the electric Ehang 184 passenger drone at CES in Las Vegas in January, has partnered with the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS) and the Governor's Office of Economic Development (Goed) to put the drone through testing and regulatory approval.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-world-s-first-child-sized-exoskeleton-will-melt-you-1781778322']The World's First Child-Sized Exoskeleton Will Melt Your Heart[/URL]



> We've seen exoskeletons before, but nothing quite like this one. The new brace, developed by Spanish researchers, will help children with spinal muscular atrophy.
> 
> The 26-pound device consists of long support rods and are adjusted to fit around a child's legs and torso. A series of motors mimic human muscles in the joints, endowing the patient the required strength to stand upright and walk. A series of sensors, along with a movement controller and a five-hour battery, complete the system. The aluminum and titanium device can also be expanded and modified to accommodate children between the age of 3 and 14.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

World's First Large-Scale Carbon-Neutral Brewery Now in Operation



> Heinekens are now brewed with clean energy. The global beer company's Göss Brewery in Austria is the first carbon-neutral brewery of its scale in the world.
> 
> The facility, which kicked off its green upgrades back in 2003, has now met 100 percent of its energy needs via clean power sources including hydropower, solar thermal energy from a 1,500-square-meter photovoltaic array and biomass district heating, in which 40 percent of the brewery's heat requirements comes from surplus heat discharged from a neighboring sawmill.
> 
> The site is also incredibly savvy with waste. It hosts its own grain fermentation plant that converts production waste into biogas-the first plant of its kind a major brewery. The grain fermentation plant converts 18,000 tons of the brewer's grains, filter residues and other byproducts from beer-making process into biogas annually. Residues from the fermentation plant are used as fertilizer.


----------



## ekim68

Watch our private tour of Campus 2, Apple's upcoming headquarters


----------



## ekim68

30 years ago scientists warned Congress on global warming. What they said sounds eerily familiar



> It was such a different time - and yet, the message was so similar.
> 
> Thirty years ago, on June 10 and 11 of 1986, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works commenced two days of hearings, convened by Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), on the subject of "Ozone Depletion, the Greenhouse Effect, and Climate Change."
> 
> "This is not a matter of Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling," Chafee said at the hearing. "The scientific evidence … is telling us we have a problem, a serious problem."


----------



## ekim68

Nobody needs an AR-15: The Orlando massacre teaches us (again) that we must ban semi-automatic human killing machines




> Do it now: Congress must ban military-style weapons and make it harder for terrorists to act on their hate


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Nobody needs an AR-15: The Orlando massacre teaches us (again) that we must ban semi-automatic human killing machines


----------



## ekim68

Apple watchOS 3 announced: Instant Launch, updated interface, handwriting recognition



> WatchOS 3 has arrived. Apple just announced the new version of its smartwatch operating system during the keynote presentation of its Worldwide Developer's Conference. The headline feature is much faster app performance thanks to something called Instant Launch. Apple says that apps will launch up to seven times faster than on watchOS 2. Additionally, Apple has revamped much of the user interface to make it easier to access apps and information and add the ability to write characters with your finger to reply to messages.


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court Affirms That Puerto Rico Is Really a U.S. Colony



> Last week the Supreme Court insulted Puerto Rico by saying its people aren't sovereign. This week the court added injury to the insult, denying Puerto Rico access to federal bankruptcy laws that would have created a path to recovery for its struggling utilities.
> 
> The decision on Monday passed the ball to Congress to change the law or arrange a bailout. At the same time, it underscored the outrageousness of Puerto Rico's distinct legal status as a quasi-colony: the Commonwealth will have to lobby a Congress in which its residents, U.S. citizens all, have no representation.


----------



## ekim68

NASA satellite snaps the first methane leak detected from space



> Methane's concentration in the atmosphere might be outweighed and outlasted by the more bountiful CO2, but this greenhouse gas is perfectly capable of doing some damage while it's up there. Due to its superior radiation-trapping abilities, methane presents a much more potent threat to the climate than CO2 does pound-for-pound, so monitoring the source of methane emissions is therefore pretty important. And it looks like we might have a new tool at our disposal, with NASA announcing the first observation of a single methane leak on our planet's surface from an Earth-orbiting spacecraft.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter, Facebook and Google being sued amidst claims they knowingly 'aided Paris attacks'



> Reynaldo Gonzalez's daughter, Nohemi, was among the 130 killed when religious extremists attacked Paris last year. Now, he's suing Twitter, Facebook and Google for facilitating the spread of "extremist propaganda" after alleging the trio "knowingly permitted" ISIS to recruit, raise money and spread its message across each of the respective platforms.


----------



## ekim68

Domino's backs out of free pizza promotion with T-Mobile due to higher-than-expected demand



> T-Mobile's latest "un-carrier" move - an attempt to reward its customers with freebies offered via an app called T-Mobile Tuesdays - has been just a bit too popular. Demand for the app and its various promotions was so high that the app crashed under the influx of customers right out of the gate. And now, one of the best deals it offered - free Domino's pizza - has been pulled. According to T-Mobile CEO John Legere, Domino's couldn't handle the increase in order volume, and has pulled out of the promotion indefinitely.


----------



## ekim68

FBI: Business e-mail scam losses top $3 billion, a 1,300% increase in since Jan.




> FBI/IC3 say latest scam variant finds fraudulent requests sent utilizing a business executive's compromised e-mail


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://securityledger.com/2016/06/at-the-hacker-oscars-a-new-category-for-junk-hacking/']At the Hacker Oscars: An Award for Junk Hacking[/URL]



> In a sign that hacking connected "things" is joining the mainstream of the information security awards, The Pwnies, a long-running awards ceremony that is the hacker community's equivalent of The Oscars (or at least The People's Choice Awards) is adding an award for "Junk Hacking" to its 2016 roster.
> 
> The awards, which are handed out at the annual Black Hat Briefings conference in Las Vegas in August, added a "Pwnie for Best Junk Hack" to its list of new awards. But in a nod to the security industry's penchant for stunt hacking and the technology industry's penchant for unwarranted complexity, the award will be given to researchers who "discovered and performed the most needlessly sophisticated attack against the most needlessly Internet-enabled 'Thing.'"


----------



## ekim68

Floating dairy farm will ship milk to Rotterdam



> A Dutch collaboration is pushing the boat out with an idea of how to feed growing city populations despite decreasing amounts of space in which to produce food. The Floating Farm will produce various kinds of milk and yogurt from its location docked in the port of Rotterdam.
> 
> This isn't the first time waterborne farms have been mooted as a means of food production. Last year, Forward Thinking Architecture proposed its triple-decker Smart Floating Farms that would provide 2.2 million sq ft (204,400 sq m) of space for rearing fish and growing crops, while the Swale mobile floating food forest is scheduled to tour New York piers from this month.


----------



## ekim68

Kickstarter Just Did Something Tech Startups Never Do: It Paid a Dividend



> In early March, Kickstarter quietly sent shareholders a dividend. In the wider world of business, such an action would be unremarkable. More than 80 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 pay dividends, and many smaller companies do, too. But divvying up quarterly profits with shareholders is unheard of among tech startups.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers build a 1,000-core processor




> The KiloCore can perform many tasks at once while using only a tiny amount of power.


----------



## ekim68

Smartphone Users Are Paying for Their Own Surveillance



> In the movie _Sneakers_, a motley gang of security experts chase after a little black box that can crack any form of encryption. Though the idea of a digital skeleton key may seem like the stuff of Hollywood thrillers, there are researchers at the University of Michigan who've recently created just that. They've built a stealthy hardware back door that can be inserted into the blueprints of a computer chip to give intruders complete access to a system after executing an obscure series of commands.
> 
> Consider the implications: This kind of low-level attack is extremely difficult to detect and even more challenging to defend against. If a small group of university professors can successfully cook up their own little black box, imagine what an intelligence service with federal backing can do.


----------



## ekim68

Indigenous Leader Killed in Land Dispute in Brazil



> On June 14, 2016 approximately 70 armed men approached a small group of Guaraní-Kaiowá families and, after terrorizing them by burning their belongings, opened fire, killing 26-year-old indigenous leader Clodiodi Aquileu Rodrigues de Souza Guaraní-Kaiowá. Among those shot, at least 10 other people were injured, including a twelve-year-old boy who was shot in the stomach. The _Instituto Socioambiental _(Socio-environmental Institute; ISA), a non-profit organization that advocates for human rights observance among the indigenous people, first reported the case, writing that indigenous leaders were taken hostage and that others are missing.[1] The attack happened within a disputed area in the traditional indigenous territory of _Tekohá Te'ýikue_, located on the indigenous reserve of _Dourados-Amambaipegua I_. This land is within the municipality of Caarapó, located in the central Brazilian State of Mato Grosso do Sul, a region known for violent conflict between indigenous groups and land owners.


----------



## ekim68

German government agrees to ban fracking indefinitely



> Germany's coalition government agreed to ban fracking for shale gas indefinitely on Tuesday, after years of fractious talks over the issue, but environmental groups said the ban did not go far enough and vowed to fight the deal.
> 
> Test drilling will be allowed but only with the permission of the respective state government, officials said.
> 
> German industry is keen to keep the door open to fracking - which involves blasting chemicals and water into rocks to release trapped gas - arguing it could help lower energy costs, but opposition is strong in the country, where a powerful green lobby has warned about possible risks to drinking water.
> 
> If the law is approved by parliament, Germany will follow France, which has banned fracking, whereas Britain allows it subject to strict environmental and safety guidelines.


----------



## ekim68

Firm pays $950,000 penalty for using Wi-Fi signals to secretly track phone users




> InMobi ad network, which reaches more than 1 billion devices, settles FTC charges.


----------



## 2twenty2

KFC's Watt A Box will charge your smartphone, while you eat -

http://indianexpress.com/article/te...-1-meal-power-bank-charge-smartphone-2869203/


----------



## ekim68

Dutch prototype clean-up boom brings Pacific plastics solution a step closer



> A bid to clear the Pacific of its plastic debris has moved a step closer with the launch of the biggest prototype clean-up boom yet by the Dutch environment minister at a port in The Hague.
> 
> On Thursday the 100 metre-long barrier will be towed 12 miles (20km) out to sea for a year of sensor-monitored tests, before being scaled up for real-life trials off the Japanese coast at the end of next year.
> 
> If all goes well, full-scale deployment of a 100km-long version will take place in the "great Pacific garbage patch" between California and Hawaii in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Xiaomi's cheap, foldable electric bike looks perfect for city commutes



> Xiaomi continues to push the message that it's not just a phone company - it's a _technology_ company. Over the past year or so the company has launched various internet-connected devices, including air purifiers, wearables, rice cookers, and kettles. And it's latest? A folding electric bicycle, released under Xiaomi's QiCycle brand.


----------



## ekim68

Beijing has fallen: China's capital sinking by 11cm a year, satellite study warns



> China's capital is known for its horrendous smog and occasional sandstorms. Yet one of its major environmental threats lies underground: Beijing is sinking.
> 
> Excessive pumping of groundwater is causing the geology under the city to collapse, according to a new study using satellite imagery that reveals parts of Beijing - particularly its central business district - are subsiding each year by as much as 11 centimetres, or more than four inches.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists force computer to binge on TV shows and predict what humans will do



> Researchers have taught a computer to do a better-than-expected job of predicting what characters on TV shows will do, just by forcing the machine to study 600 hours' worth of YouTube videos.


----------



## ekim68

NASCAR Team Pays Ransomware Fee to Recover Files Worth $2 Million



> The infection took place on the computer belonging to Dave Winston, CSLFR's crew chief. Winston's staff detected the infection when encrypted files from Winston's computer began syncing to their joint Dropbox account.
> 
> The crew notified Winston, who isolated his computer from the rest of the network, but by that time, the ransomware's encryption process had already all the data it needed to lock the rest of the files.


----------



## ekim68

Sweden cuts the ribbon on electric highway for trucks



> ntegrating carbon-friendly power supplies into roadways is an idea loaded with merit, as the considerable global interest in this technology seems to indicate. Working to rid its independent transport sector of fossil fuels by 2030, Sweden has opened up its first electrified highway, which will serve as a testbed for a possible wider deployment in the coming years.


----------



## ekim68

Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials



> An experimental cancer treatment that alters the DNA of patients has won a key approval to proceed with its first human tests using the controversial gene-altering tool known as Crispr.
> 
> Scientist from the University of Pennsylvania want to edit the immune systems of 18 patients to target cancer cells more effectively. The experiment, backed by internet billionaire Sean Parker, won approval from the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), a federal ethics panel set up at the National Institutes of Health 40 years ago to review controversial experiments that change the human genome. The trial still needs final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials


----------



## ekim68

Net neutrality advocates to FCC: Put the kibosh on internet freebies



> Net neutrality advocates demand action.
> 
> Representatives from Fight the Future, the Center for Media Justice and Free Press on Friday hand-delivered a 6-foot tall package containing 100,000 letters of complaint to the Federal Communications Commission. They ask the agency to take action against AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile and Verizon for violating the agency's Open Internet order by offering so-called zero-rating service plans.
> 
> Zero-rating is a practice in which wireless and broadband providers exempt certain applications or services from monthly data caps. T-Mobile's Binge On service, which allows customers to stream unlimited video from certain services, is one example. Verizon's FreeBee program allows content owners to pay for a customer's data usage while using their service.
> 
> While the practice offers some benefits to customers, critics say it violates the agency's Net neutrality principles, which requires all services on the internet be treated the same. They claim it puts smaller competitors at a disadvantage and highlights the fact that data caps are unnecessary.


----------



## ekim68

A World Without Uber: Dispatches From Austin



> Austin, Texas has become a ridesharing wasteland. One month ago, Uber and Lyft left the city, abandoning their 10,000 drivers-and leaving the city's residents in a state of transportation chaos.
> 
> "Nobody really thought this was actually going to happen," said driver Sarah Cooper, who spoke to Vocativ on a stormy afternoon in Texas. "There's too much to lose in Austin, everybody said." Cooper had been providing about 150 rides a week between Lyft and Uber before they left.
> 
> It's been a month since Austinites narrowly voted down Proposition 1, which means rideshare drivers must now be subjected to a fingerprint-based background check in order to work for a ridesharing company. The defeat prompted the two Silicon Valley-based companies to leave Austin on May 9.
> 
> In their place, they left a patchwork of rogue Facebook groups, drivers struggling to find rides, bartenders terrified to over serve, and *stranded drunks* trying to get home.


----------



## ekim68

Moroccan Hacker Defaces 37 Escort Sites for Religious Reasons



> ElSurveillance, a religiously motivated Moroccan hacker, has defaced 37 websites as part of his #EscortsOffline campaign that he started last summer.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce expects remote-controlled cargo ships by 2020



> Rolls-Royce isn't limiting its robotic transportation plans to luxury cars. The British transportation firm has outlined a strategy for deploying remote-controlled and autonomous cargo vessels. It's working on virtual decks where land-based crews could control every aspect of a ship, complete with VR camera views and monitoring drones to spot issues that no human ever could. Accordingly, Rolls is designing boats where humans wouldn't have to come aboard. In theory, one human would steer several boats -- crew shortages would disappear overnight.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous buses hit the road in Switzerland



> Switzerland has joined a growing number of places around the world exploring the potential of electric autonomous buses, with a pair of driverless shuttles now ferrying passengers around the city of Sion as part of a two-year trial.
> 
> Other autonomous buses being tested out across the globe include the EZ10 in California and Singapore, the Navia also in Singapore, and the IBM-powered Olli in Washington DC that can even talk to its passengers en route.


----------



## ekim68

Nation's First Solar Roadway Coming to Historic Route 66





> Missouri's Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has announced plans to install solar panels at a rest stop alongside the iconic Route 66 as part of the department's "Road to Tomorrow Initiative."
> 
> The Historic Route 66 welcome center in Conway, Missouri will receive the nation's first solar roadway panels on a public right of way.
> 
> "… part of why we picked this location is because of the the historic Route 66 concept," Laurel McKean, MoDot assistant district engineer, told KY3. "You know, here's one of the main roadways that's iconic for the United States, and being able to use the history to create potentially the future."
> 
> The panels were developed by Solar Roadways, an Idaho-based startup founded by Scott and Julie Brusaw.
> 
> Their project received tons of attention in 2014 after the world caught wind of the couple's ambitious plan to harness the energy being soaked up by the country's roads and parking lots all day. Their viral video "Solar FREAKIN' roadways" has been viewed more than 21 million times to date.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Satellite Map Gets a 700-Trillion-Pixel Makeover




> More than 1 billion people





> use Google Maps every month, making it possibly the most popular atlas ever created. On Monday, it gets a makeover, and its many users will see something different when they examine the planet's forests, fields, seas, and cities.
> 
> Google has added 700 trillion pixels of new data to its service.


----------



## ekim68

Texas Supreme Court sidesteps key home schooling issue



> AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Texas Supreme Court sided Friday with a family accused of not teaching its children anything while waiting to be "raptured," but failed to answer larger constitutional questions about whether home-schooled students must be properly educated.
> 
> The 6-3 decision by the all-Republican court on technical grounds means nothing was decided regarding a showdown between religious liberties and educational requirements in America's largest conservative state, though it will live on in lower Texas courts.
> 
> Texas doesn't require parents who home-school their children to register with state authorities. While families must meet "basic educational goals" in reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics and citizenship, they don't have to give standardized testing or otherwise prove student progress is made.
> 
> Problems for Laura and Michael McIntyre, who once educated their nine children in an empty office at the family's motorcycle dealership in El Paso, arose after an uncle told the school district that he never saw the children do much of anything educational. According to court filings, he also overheard of the children tell a cousin "they did not need to do schoolwork because they were going to be raptured," or blessed by the second coming of Jesus Christ.


----------



## ekim68

Apple patented a way to keep people from filming at concerts and movie theaters on their phones



> "Please, no flash photography."
> 
> Polite requests like this can be found in museums all over the world, but they generally don't dissuade people from taking photos of whatever they feel like. The same goes for concerts, movie theaters and other places where people routinely ignore filming restrictions. A new patent from Apple may hinder that rebellious streak-on phones at least.


----------



## ekim68

Whoa, shades of Fantastic Voyage...


3D-printing: German engineers create injectable micro-camera



> German engineers have created a camera no bigger than a grain of salt that could change the future of health imaging - and clandestine surveillance.


----------



## ekim68

UK has fastest mobile internet while US lags behind, says report



> In a bad week for Britain in the news, the UK can at least take solace in its average mobile connection speeds, which - according to a new report from content delivery network Akamai - are the best in the world. The company's latest State of the Internet report claims that British mobile users were able to get average speeds of 27.9 Mbps when connecting to Akamai's HTTP/S platform in Q1 2016, beating most countries in Europe by an average of more than 10 Mbps, and the United States' average speed by more than 20 Mbps.


----------



## ekim68

FCC says TV airwaves being sold for wireless use worth $86.4 billion



> The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday the price of 126 MHz of television airwaves taken from broadcasters to be sold for wireless use in an ongoing auction is $86.4 billion.
> 
> But analysts said wireless providers may not be willing to pay the staggering amount for the airwaves to expand their networks, which could prompt the FCC to hold another round of auctions.


----------



## ekim68

New technology could help millions with knee pain



> A new knee implant may soon transform the way many Americans live.
> 
> The NUsurface Meniscus Implant, a replacement for the knee joint's cartilage pad between the thigh and shin bones, has gone into a second clinical trial to assess its safety and effectiveness in functioning like a natural meniscus.


----------



## ekim68

Netherlands gets first nationwide 'Internet of Things'



> Dutch telecoms group KPN said Thursday that The Netherlands had become the first country in the world to implement a nationwide long range (LoRa) network for the so-called Internet of Things.
> 
> Connecting everyday objects to networks, allowing them to send and receive data, is widely seen as the next major evolution of the Internet and one that may transform how many businesses operate and people live.


----------



## ekim68

America's Offshore Tax Cheats Are Feeling the Heat Once Again



> U.S. taxpayers who entered into an IRS program that made it easier to disclose their hidden offshore bank accounts may have thought they put their legal troubles behind them. Instead, prosecutors may try to put some of them in jail for not telling all.


----------



## ekim68

I set up a Bunch of These back in the Day....


The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys



> In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last.


----------



## ekim68

Ozone hole on the mend 30 years after global pact



> In the mid 1980s the world made an important judgement call. CFCs, the chemical compounds in fridges, aerosols and dry cleaning products, had been boring a hole in the Earth's ozone layer over the polar regions which, if left unchecked, could cause grave public health and environmental problems. So pretty much every country signed up to ban the use of CFCs, a decision that is now paying big dividends with scientists reporting significant shrinkage of the hole and evidence of what looks to be a path to recovery.


----------



## poochee

...


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## ekim68

Study: Seattle rises to 3rd best tech city in the U.S., surpassing New York



> Seattle is the third best tech market in North America, trailing only the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington D.C., according to a new report from real estate services company CBRE.
> 
> CBRE's annual Scoring Tech Talent report uses 13 metrics like number of tech employees, population trends, wages, education levels and housing and business costs to rank the top metro areas for tech.
> 
> Seattle passed New York for third this year on the back of a growing, well-paid and well-educated class of tech employees and a strong roster of big companies.


----------



## ekim68

How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin's Civil War



> A delegation of American executives flew to Beijing in April for a secret meeting just blocks from Tiananmen Square. They had come to court the new kingmakers in one of the strangest experiments in money the world has seen: the virtual currency known as Bitcoin.


----------



## ekim68

As World Burns, Richest Nations Can't Decide When to End Fossil Fuel Handouts


> Despite ambitious pledges, global energy ministers could not agree on a target date to phase out billions in subsidies to dirty energy


----------



## ekim68

Uber plans to start tracking driving behavior



> Uber's app will be updated soon to help improve your safety. The ride-sharing service has developed a new technology that it plans on using to track driver behavior, specifically if drivers are traveling too fast or braking too harshly.
> 
> It's tracking that's made possible thanks to the sensors already inside most smartphones. Information about how a driver is performing will be shared with Uber, but will also be shared with the driver, along with safety tips on how they can improve their performance.


----------



## poochee

...


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## ekim68

Electronic nose smells pesticides and nerve gas



> The best-known electronic nose is the breathalyser. As drivers breathe into the device, a chemical sensor measures the amount of alcohol in their breath. This chemical reaction is then converted into an electronic signal, allowing the police officer to read off the result. Alcohol is easy to detect, because the chemical reaction is specific and the concentration of the measured gas is fairly high. But many other gases are complex mixtures of molecules in very low concentrations. Building electronic noses to detect them is thus quite a challenge.
> 
> Researchers from KU Leuven have now built a very sensitive electronic nose with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). "MOFs are like microscopic sponges," postdoctoral researcher Ivo Stassen explains. "They can absorb quite a lot of gas into their minuscule pores."


----------



## ekim68

First Nations Cheer as Court Quashes Canada Tar Sands Pipeline




> The Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposed to carry tar sands oil across more than 700 miles of pristine forest and waterways.


----------



## ekim68

Japan moves quickly into mirrorless cars



> ISEHARA, Japan -- Go to any auto show and there will likely be a futuristic concept car that has ditched its rearview or sideview mirrors.
> 
> Designers may have substituted unobtrusive camera lenses that barely bud from the sheet metal.
> 
> Mirrorless cars -- or vehicles that drop old-school glass mirrors in favor of video screens -- have been proposed for years by stylists and engineers wanting sleeker looks as well as improved safety and fuel efficiency.


----------



## poochee

Many informative articles in this thread.


----------



## ekim68

20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions



> You make thousands of rational decisions every day - or so you think.
> 
> From what you'll eat throughout the day to whether you should make a big career move, research suggests that there are a number of cognitive stumbling blocks that affect your behavior, and they can prevent you from acting in your own best interests.


----------



## ekim68

Google's DeepMind AI to use 1 million NHS eye scans to spot diseases earlier



> Google's DeepMind division has announced a partnership with the NHS's Moorfields Eye Hospital to apply machine learning to spot common eye diseases earlier. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields' patient database, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analysing eye scans.
> 
> The hope is that this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, to be spotted more rapidly and hence be treated more effectively. For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment.


----------



## ekim68

European Union's First Cybersecurity Law Gets Green Light



> The European Union approved its first rules on cybersecurity, forcing businesses to strengthen defenses and companies such as Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to report attacks.
> 
> The European Parliament endorsed legislation that will impose security and reporting obligations on service operators in industries such as banking, energy, transport and health and on digital operators like search engines and online marketplaces. The law, voted through on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, also requires EU national governments to cooperate among themselves in the field of network security.


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## ekim68

I think this is a very good idea...:up:


To Avoid Another Rio, Make Greece the Olympics' Permanent Home



> In 2009, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) picked Rio de Janeiro as the site of the 2016 summer Olympics. "There was absolutely no flaw in the bid," the IOC's president, Jacques Rogge, said of Brazil's proposal.
> 
> The choice, however, has turned out to be anything but flawless. Brazil is suffering its worst recession in decades, complicated by a corruption-driven political crisis. As a result, it lacks the funds to finish some of the Olympic venues.


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## Brigham

The trouble with Greece is that they have no money. Because of European mismanagement they are all but bankrupt. Although the games would bring some money in, it would require a large loan to get them started.


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## ekim68

I think with a World-wide effort and input it could be sustainable and probably profitable....:up:


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## ekim68

What's Good for Workers Is Terrible for Investors



> Last week the Washington Center for Equitable Growth reported that 2015 was the best year for real income growth for the bottom 99 percent of income earners since 1998, as the impact of a tightening labor market and deflationary forces from abroad flowed through to workers. Wage data from the first-quarter GDP report suggests that 2016 will continue this trend: Wages and salary accruals as a percentage of GDP reached a seven-year high, and stands higher than at any point during the credit boom years of 2005-6.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One says it can connect Helsinki to Stockholm in under 30 minutes



> Many questions swirl around the Hyperloop: how much will it cost? Where will it be built? How fast will it travel? Really, that fast? Who will be the first to ride it? Will their bodies turn into paste or goo? What's the difference?
> 
> Now, Hyperloop One, one of the LA-based startups seeking to realize Elon Musk's vision of 760 mph, tube-based travel, has answers to some of those questions. (Sadly, not the last one.) In a new study released today, the company says a hyperloop connecting Stockholm, Sweden, and Helsinki, Finland, could transform a 300-mile trip - normally a 3.5 hour trip (including getting to-and-from the airport) or overnight ferry ride - into a breezy 28-minute ride.


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## ekim68

First published book on heliocentric theory heads for auction



> Christies will auction a work of considerable scientific gravitas on July 13 in London. It is a first edition of the first printed book to propose that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
> 
> _De Libris Revolutionum Eruditissimi Viridoctoris_ came not from Nicolaus Copernicus, but from his only student, Georg Joachim Rheticus, and when published in 1540, provided the momentum needed for Copernicus to finally have his landmark _De revolutionibus orbium coelestium_ published in 1543.


----------



## ekim68

Your Smart Watch Can Steal Your ATM PIN



> Mobile systems and cyber security expert Yan Wang doesn't wear a smart watch.
> 
> "It knows too much," says Wang, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University in Upstate New York. "If you are using a smart watch, you need to be cautious."
> 
> He would know. Wearable devices can give away your PIN number, according to research he and colleagues presented in June at the 11th annual Association for Computing Machinery Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) in Xi'an, China.


----------



## ekim68

The Most Common Reason Users Cancel a Streaming Service? Advertisements



> But the most interesting note was the reasoning behind why we cancel our subscriptions. One of the most common reasons people cancel was of course price (25%). But even above that was advertisements (27%). This is probably why a service like Hulu suffers, the ad-supported version specifically, drawing in a much higher number of cancellations compared to Netflix.


----------



## ekim68

Green mountain grows out of Singapore's concrete jungle



> When you live in one of the world's most densely populated cities, green space can seem almost non-existent. That won't be the case for people who frequent Ingenhoven Architects' Marina One development in Singapore, which is centered around a huge, lush and green biodiversity garden.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T thinks drones can fix terrible reception at baseball games



> So you're at a Beyoncé concert, but can't Snapchat a video. You want to text your friends your location at a baseball game, but your phone has no signal. Packed venues like these are notorious for poor cellphone reception. Well, AT&T says it has a solution: drones.


[/URL]
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-stay-safe-while-playing-pokemon-go-1783585626


----------



## ekim68

90% of software developers work outside Silicon Valley



> So much code to write, so few developers. The chronic talent shortage afflicting Silicon Valley is now all over the US-and the developers are too.
> 
> A study by the software trade group The App Association analyzed government and private sector data to map where software developers live, and it identified 223,054 open positions around the country. It found that most developers live far away from the technology epicenter of Silicon Valley, and job openings follow a similar pattern.
> 
> The upshot: Silicon Valley-style talent wars are moving away from tech hubs to smaller metro and even rural areas. Everywhere from rural Vermont to the middle of Montana is in need of programmers.


----------



## ekim68

Obesity is three times as deadly for men than women



> Piling on the pounds is three times more deadly for men than women and even being slightly overweight raises the risk of dying early, the biggest ever study into weight and death has shown.


----------



## ekim68

Air pollution causes wrinkles and premature ageing, new research shows



> Air pollution is prematurely ageing the faces of city dwellers by accelerating wrinkles and age spots, according to emerging scientific research.
> 
> The effects of toxic fumes on skin are being seen in both western cities, such as London and New York, as well as in more visibly polluted Asian cities and in some cases may be the primary cause of ageing. The pollution is also being linked to worsening skin conditions such as eczema and hives.


----------



## ekim68

Cybercrime Overtakes Traditional Crime in UK



> In a notable sign of the times, cybercrime has now surpassed all other forms of crime in the United Kingdom, the nation's *National Crime Agency* (NCA) warned in a new report. It remains unclear how closely the rest of the world tracks the U.K.'s experience, but the report reminds readers that the problem is likely far worse than the numbers suggest, noting that cybercrime is vastly under-reported by victims.


----------



## ekim68

In China, fears that Pokemon GO may aid locating military bases



> And although the game is not available in China, the world's biggest smartphone and online gaming market, some people there fear it could become a Trojan horse for offensive action by the United States and Japan.


----------



## ekim68

US government releases proposed guidelines for smart guns



> Federal authorities have just released a set of recommended guidelines to define the minimum technical requirements that law enforcement agencies expect from smart guns. The proposed baseline specs cover just pistols for now, and are open for public input from now till September 13.
> 
> The biggest difference that the proposed smart gun would have from regular firearms is the addition of a so-called "security device." This is designed to prevent unauthorized use by disabling the firing system unless when in control of identified users, and has to meet an exhaustive list of requirements (at least, in this draft proposal).


----------



## ekim68

Drone disguised as a BIRD discovered in Somalia reveals chilling government surveillance tactics



> A crashed metal drone disguised as a bird has been discovered in Mogadishu, the troubled capital of Somalia.
> 
> Early reports have suggested the downed craft could belong to NISA, the Somali intelligence agency.


----------



## ekim68

A bunch of computers will try to hack each other in Vegas for a $2 million prize



> Seven fully-autonomous computers will face off in a historic battle in Las Vegas early next month, as each try to defend themselves and point out flaws without any human control.


----------



## ekim68

Google, Facebook and Apple draw hordes of tech tourists



> Move over, Alcatraz; clear some way, cable cars; and back off, Mickey: Silicon Valley is giving San Francisco and other Golden State attractions a run for their money when it comes to drawing hordes of tourists.
> Because for some tourists, taking a selfie in front of Facebook is all part of the vacation plan.


----------



## ekim68

BP to pay another further fines for Deepwater leak



> BP PLC on Thursday said its quarterly profits would take another $5.2 billion hit from the deadly Gulf of Mexico oil spill, estimating a total bill of $61.6 billion for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.
> 
> The British oil giant said the pretax charge likely would be the last related to the Deepwater Horizon accident to have a "material impact" on its financial performance, potentially bringing to an end six years of litigation, fines and cleanup costs that humbled one of the world's largest energy companies.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> BP to pay another further fines for Deepwater leak


----------



## ekim68

Soaring Temperatures Will Make It Too Hot to Work, UN Warns



> Searing temperatures caused by climate change may cost global economies more than $2 trillion by 2030, restricting working hours in some of the poorest parts of the world, according to United Nations research.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Zooming in on perovskites sheds light on solar cell efficiency boost



> First invented in 2009, perovskite solar cells are improving at an astonishing rate, having already surpassed the 20 percent efficiency mark in the lab. A new finding at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) could now reveal their full potential, approaching their theoretical efficiency limit of 31 percent - far better than commercially available panels.
> 
> Perovskites are a family of materials that share a specific crystalline structure, from which they derive properties like ferroelectricity and superconductivity. Perovskite-based solar cells are taking the industry by storm because they are cheap and simple to make, and their performance is, after a short few years of development, already matching that of long established silicon-based cells.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Patents Way To Turn Lampposts, Church Steeples Into Drone Perches



> For the past few years, Amazon has been working on plans that would unleash a fleet of drones to handle some deliveries - from unveiling a prototype that acts more like a "horse than a car" and a patent for propellers that tell bystanders to "look out." Now, another recently released patent shows what those little flying machines might be doing while they aren't ferrying your Prime deliveries: sitting on a lamppost.


----------



## ekim68

Google uses AI to cut data centre energy use by 15%




> Google





> says it has cut its vast data centres' energy use by 15% by applying artificial intelligence to manage them more efficiently than humans.
> 
> The servers that power billions of web searches, streamed films and social media accounts are estimated to account for around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Google is believed to have one of the biggest fleets of them in the world.


----------



## ekim68

Japan Will Make Its Last-Ever VCR This Month



> Most of us stopped using video cassette recorders a very, very long time ago. By 2008, DVD had officially replaced VHS as the preferred home media format, and the glory days of the 1980s-when VHS and Betamax battled it out to be the number-one choice for watching and recording movies and television at home-were very much in the rear-view mirror.
> 
> So it might surprise you to learn that VCRs are still being manufactured-at least they were until this month.


----------



## ekim68

Arrgh Matey! US Navy Faces $600M Lawsuit For Allegedly Pirating 3D Software



> In a prime case of "Do as I say, not as I do," the FBI might have to do some investigating within the Department of Defense. The U.S. Navy is being accused of pirating 3D software after getting a small taste of a package offered by German company Bitmanagement Software GmbH. The Navy's actions were allegedly so egregious that Bitmanagement is suing the United States of America for over half a billion dollars.
> 
> According to the court filing, Bitmanagement licensed its BS Contact Geo software for use on 38 Navy computers from 2011 to 2012. This limited rollout was "for the purposes of testing, trial runs, and integration into Navy systems." While this test period was underway, the Navy reportedly began negotiating to license the software for use on thousands of additional computers.
> 
> However, even as the negotiations were ongoing, the Navy decided to go ahead and initiate its full-scale rollout without actually paying for the software. In total, the initial 38 computers allegedly swelled to 104,922 computers by October 2013.


----------



## ekim68

CEO Gets Decade in U.S. Prison for Illegal Exports to Russia



> A Russian-born chief executive officer who pleaded guilty to procuring millions of dollars of sophisticated microelectronics for Russia, including warfare defense systems used in fighter jets, was sentenced to 10 years in a U.S. prison by a judge who accepted his claims that he's an immigrant who "loves" America.
> 
> A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, rejected a prosecutor's request to sentence Arc Electronics Inc. founder Alexander Fishenko to more than 18 years on the basis that his actions led to "a sophisticated effort to assist Russia's militarization efforts."


----------



## ekim68

Amazon wants to sell you everything, including student loans



> Amazon sells just about everything, so why not financial services, too?
> 
> The e-commerce giant inked a deal with Wells Fargo to offer interest rate discounts on loans to students who are Amazon Prime members. The bank, which is the second largest student lender in the US, will shave off half a percentage point for Amazon "Prime Student" customers who take out student loans to attend college or are looking to refinance their existing student loans.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Completes First Test Flight Of Its Giant Internet Drone




> The 737-sized Aquila is meant to fly on solar power at altitudes of 60,000 feet or more and deliver wireless Internet for three months at a time.


----------



## ekim68

Got tons of CO2? Get more giant trees.



> If you think about it, giant sequoias are the Dwayne Johnsons of the tree world. They're California natives. They're pretty buff, growing up to 300 feet tall and 30 feet wide. And they're resilient as hell, swatting droughts and diseases off their hefty shoulders.
> 
> And Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a Michigan-based non-profit, is working on cloning California's green giants - complete with their jackpot genetics - and sending them to various parts of the planet. The goal: to layeth the smackdown on climate change.
> 
> Founder David Milarch believes that the size and hardiness of sequoias makes them perfect vacuum cleaners for greenhouse gases. Planting groves of these trees - which can live up to 3,000 years - could potentially offset tons of CO2.
> 
> His group has managed to clone 170 types of trees in 20 years, and about 300,000 of them have taken root in seven different countries, Milarch told the AP.


----------



## ekim68

Police 3D-printed a murder victim's finger to unlock his phone



> Police in Michigan have a new tool for unlocking phones: 3D printing. According to a new report from _Flash Forward_ creator Rose Eveleth, law enforcement officers approached a professor at Michigan State earlier this year to reproduce a murder victim's fingerprint from a prerecorded scan. Once created, the 3D model would be used to create a false fingerprint, which could be used to unlock the phone.
> 
> Because the investigation is ongoing, details are limited, and it's unclear whether the technique will be successful.


----------



## ekim68

Ransomware Gang Claims Fortune 500 Company Hired Them to Hack the Competition




> Ransomware





> -computer viruses that lock a victim's files and demand a payment to get them back-has become so common that experts believe it's now an "epidemic."
> 
> Security experts have always assumed that ransomware hackers are in it for the ransom. But a shocking claim made by one ransomware agent suggests there may be another motive: corporate sabotage.


----------



## ekim68

Google Fiber no longer a moonshot - it's a 'real business'



> "Every time I say that I have Google Fiber, people freak out," says Mosqueda. "And I say, 'You should freak out. It's amazing.'"
> 
> Mosqueda is not a spokesman for Google Fiber but he might as well be. Testimonials like his are fueling demand for the super-speedy Internet service across the country.
> 
> And that's good news for Fiber, which has a green light from executives at parent Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG) to spend big in its mission to become a national broadband company that competes with the industry's deeply entrenched heavyweights.


----------



## ekim68

ACLU Praises New Illinois Limits on Cellphone Surveillance



> A new Illinois law limits how police can use devices that cast a wide net in gathering cellphone data and are at the center of a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department.
> 
> Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the legislation into law on Friday and drew immediate praise from civil libertarians.
> 
> The technology, a cell site simulator, is perhaps best known by the brand name Stingray. It gathers phone-usage data on targets of criminal investigations, but it also gathers data on other cellphones - hundreds or even thousands of them - in the area.
> 
> The new law requires police to delete the phone information of anyone who wasn't an investigation target within 24 hours. It also prohibits police from accessing data for use in an investigation not authorized by a judge.


----------



## ekim68

US to create nationwide network of EV charging stations



> The US government has announced "an unprecedented set of actions" to pump up the country's plug-in electric vehicle market, including US$4.5 billion in loan guarantees to create a nationwide network of commercial scale and fast charging stations. The initiative to push for greater electric car adoption calls for a collaboration between federal and state agencies, utilities, major automakers and other groups.


----------



## ekim68

Crispr: Chinese scientists to pioneer gene-editing trial on humans



> A team of Chinese scientists will be the first in the world to apply the revolutionary gene-editing technique known as Crispr on human subjects.
> 
> Led by Lu You, an oncologist at Sichuan University's West China hospital in Chengdu, China, the team plan to start testing cells modified with Crispr on patients with lung cancer in August, according to the journal Nature.
> 
> Crispr is a game-changer in bioscience; a groundbreaking technique which can find, cut out and replace specific parts of DNA using a specially programmed enzyme named Cas9. Its ramifications are next to endless, from changing the color of mouse fur to designing malaria-free mosquitoes and pest-resistant crops to correcting a wide swath of genetic diseases like sickle-cell anaemia in humans.
> 
> The concept of editing human DNA has often been controversial. In the UK, genetic modification in humans remains off-limits.


----------



## ekim68

Most gun crimes not committed by legal gun owner, Pittsburgh study says



> The study showed nearly 80 percent of guns used in crimes are stolen or otherwise not owned by the perpetrator.


----------



## ekim68

The United States of Solar



> The United States' relationship with solar power has been an up and down affair. But now it seems to be in true ascent.
> 
> In the late 1970s, solar power was hailed as a revolutionary technology that could save the country from its energy crisis. In fact, the nation's most famous address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, had solar panels installed on its roof to demonstrate the importance the Carter Administration placed on solar.
> 
> But in the 1980s, solar fell on hard times. The Reagan Administration prioritized fossil fuels and nuclear power, slashed budgets for solar programs, and in a symbolic blow to the green revolution, removed the solar panels from the White House.
> 
> Now, amidst growing concerns about climate change and the declining price of solar panel systems, solar is once again in the spotlight - and its future looks bright.


----------



## ekim68

Highest-paid CEOs run worst-performing companies, research finds



> The highest-paid CEOs tend to run some of the worst-performing companies, according to new research.
> 
> The study, carried out by corporate research firm MSCI, found that for every $100 (£76) invested in companies with the highest-paid CEOs would have grown to $265 (£202) over 10 years.
> 
> But the same amount invested in the companies with the lowest-paid CEOs would have grown to $367 (£279) over a decade.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Highest-paid CEOs run worst-performing companies, research finds


----------



## ekim68

The UN Could Use a Little More Democracy



> As much as it demands transparency and accountability from its member nations, the United Nations has not always been very good at providing them itself. Now more than ever, the UN needs to bring more of its backroom dealings into the light -- and it can start with the process for selecting its leader.
> 
> The 15 members of the United Nations Security Council took their first straw poll last week to pick the UN's new secretary-general. But they won't tell the world the results, much less how any of them voted.


----------



## ekim68

Female leaders: US would be late to the history books with Clinton presidency



> The US is facing the possibility of having a woman as president after Hillary Clinton's nomination - but 52 countries have already had a female head of state.


----------



## ekim68

Norway considers giving mountain to Finland as 100th birthday present



> What do you give a country that has 188,000 lakes for a birthday present? Its highest mountain back, obviously.
> 
> Norway's government has confirmed that for the centenary of Finland's independence next year it is considering moving the border, gifting its Nordic neighbour a mountain peak that would be the country's highest point.
> 
> "There are a few formal difficulties and I have not yet made my final decision," the Norwegian prime minister, Erna Solberg, told NRK, the national broadcaster. "But we are looking into it."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Norway considers giving mountain to Finland as 100th birthday present


----------



## ekim68

:up:


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One Announces Opening Of Hyperloop One Metalworks



> LOS ANGELES, July 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyperloop One today announced the opening of Hyperloop One Metalworks, the first Hyperloop manufacturing plant in the world. Hyperloop One Metalworks, a 105,000 square foot tooling and fabrication plant in North Las Vegas, Nevada will house Hyperloop One engineers, machinists and welders who will build and test many of the components going into DevLoop, the full-system Hyperloop prototype, which will be tested in early 2017. The site will also house a new Transponics® test lab, which will continue to innovate on the propulsion system that launches a Hyperloop vehicle to high speeds.


----------



## ekim68

SeaCharger solar-powered unmanned craft completes California to Hawaii ocean adventure



> Back in May, engineer Damon McMillan announced that his two-year garage project would start making its 2,000-mile solo voyage on Memorial Day. As planned, the solar-powered SeaCharger entered Californian water on May 30, but didn't get very far. A software bug forced the attempt to be abandoned. A couple of weeks later, though, and the 8-foot long craft was on its way again. And just over 41 days after relaunch, it arrived safely at Mahukona, Hawaii.


----------



## ekim68

An All-Seeing Eye In The Sky Will Watch Over The Rio Olympics



> When the Olympic Games begin next month in Rio de Janeiro, billions of people are expected to watch athletes from countries around the world compete.
> 
> But also watching over the Olympic and Paralympic events will be a set of futuristic, balloon-mounted surveillance camera systems capable of monitoring a wide swath of the city in high resolution and in real-time.


----------



## ekim68

Russia cyber attack: Large hack 'hits government'



> A "professional" cyber attack has hit Russian government bodies, the country's intelligence service says.
> 
> A "cyber-spying virus" was found in the networks of about 20 organisations, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://electrek.co/2016/07/29/worlds-largest-solar-power-plant-planned-for-chernobyl-nuclear-wasteland/']World's largest solar power plant planned for Chernobyl nuclear wasteland[/URL]



> The world's most famous and damaging nuclear meltdown is now being considered for the world's largest solar power plant. The Ukrainian nuclear power station Chernobyl had a nuclear meltdown on April 26, 1986. Since then 1,600 square miles of land has been deemed an 'exclusion zone' as the radiation levels are too high for human health. But in a recent interview, Ukraine's ecology minister said the government was negotiating with two US investment firms and four Canadian energy companies, which have expressed interest in the Chernobyl's solar potential.


----------



## ekim68

US military using 'drone buggies' to patrol Africa camps



> The U.S. military is using an unmanned robotic vehicle to patrol around its camps in the Horn of Africa.
> 
> The remote controlled vehicle is the result of a 30-year plan after military chiefs approved the concept of a robotic security system in 1985.[/url]


----------



## ekim68

Online fraud: Top Nigerian scammer arrested



> A Nigerian behind thousands of online scams around the world has been arrested in the southern oil city of Port Harcourt, Interpol alleges.
> 
> The 40-year-old man, known only as "Mike" is alleged to head a network of 40 individuals behind global scams worth more than $60m (£45m).
> 
> His operations involved using malware to take over systems to compromise emails, as well as romance scams.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Online fraud: Top Nigerian scammer arrested


----------



## ekim68

Comcast sued for $3.7bn by Washington state for 'deceiving its customers'



> Washington state has filed a $3.7bn lawsuit against the telecommunications firm Comcast alleging that the company violated the state's Consumer Protection Act almost 2m times.
> 
> If the suit is successful, the exact award would be up to a judge to decide, but if Washington gets the amount it is demanding, it would be one of the largest legal payouts in American history.


----------



## ekim68

Japan starts 8K TV broadcasts in time for Rio Olympics




> The country will have the world's highest resolution Olympics coverage


----------



## ekim68

Solar Cells converts Co2 into hydrocarbon fuel




> Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply





> and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.
> 
> The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.


----------



## ekim68

Protecting Ice Memory : scientists are joining forces to create a global archive of glacial ice for our future generations



> The project's first mission to protect the world's ice memory will be launched in France on 15 August, in the Mont Blanc massif. Researchers from the CNRS, the IRD and the Université Grenoble Alpes will be extracting ice samples from the Col du Dôme, ultimately for storage in Antarctica.
> 
> "In the coming decades, or even centuries, this ice archive will be invaluable - be it for entirely unprecedented scientific discoveries or for understanding local changes in the environment.


----------



## ekim68

Apple makes slight progress on diversity while its rivals are making practically none



> CUPERTINO, Calif. - Faculty and students from historically black colleges crowded onto Apple's campus this week, part of an effort to improve the company's diversity problem. It's a problem the tech giant appears to making an ever-so-slight dent in, according to the company's annual diversity report released Wednesday.
> 
> Apple is 32 percent female, 9 percent black and 12 percent Hispanic - a single percentage point increase in each category from last year, according to the report. The company also said it made stronger progress with new hires: Out of a global workforce of 125,000, 37 percent of new hires in the last 12 months were women. Out of a U.S. workforce of 80,000, 27 percent of hires came from underrepresented minority groups in the last year. That's a 6 percent increase from three years ago.


----------



## ekim68

Implantable sand-sized sensors to monitor internal goings on in real time



> Health and fitness monitors may have come along in leaps and bounds, but there's still a whole lot they don't know about us. Placing miniaturized sensors deep inside our bodies would be one way to change that, and now it seems such a technology mightn't be so far away. Scientists have developed tiny wireless sensors they call "neural dust", which track nerve signals and muscles in real time, opening up a wide array of potential applications that range from checking internal organs to wirelessly controlling prosthetics with your mind.


----------



## ekim68

Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here



> July 19, 2016 - Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "Now, that's a pump!" Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.


----------



## ekim68

Pokemon GO DDoS Attacks Postponed As PoodleCorp Botnet Suffers Security Breach



> The hacking crew that promised to launch DDoS attacks on the Pokemon GO servers on August 1 suffered a minor setback yesterday, after someone hacked their site, dumped the database, and shared it with data breach index service LeakedSource.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon and Microsoft Are Running One and Two in Two-Cloud Race




> It's these two clouds, and then Google, Gartner says.


----------



## ekim68

Alphabet will begin testing Project Wing delivery drones in the US



> Google's parent company, Alphabet, will start testing its Project Wing delivery drones in the US, after being given permission by the White House on Tuesday.
> 
> The drones will be tested in one of six designated Federal Aviation Authority areas within the US as part of the government's initiative to promote research into unmanned flight and safety legislation.


----------



## ekim68

Old Money still fighting New Money......


AT&T, Comcast Fight Utility Pole Reform To Slow Google Fiber's Arrival In Nashville



> We've talked a few times about how incumbent broadband providers often use their ownership of city utility poles (or their "ownership" of entire city councils and state legislatures) to slow Google Fiber's arrival in new markets. In California and Texas, AT&T has often been accused of using the process of pole attachment approval to intentionally block or slow down the arrival of competitors. AT&T also recently sued the city of Louisville for streamlining utility pole attachment rules intended to dramatically speed up the time it takes to attach new fiber to poles.


----------



## ekim68

Man says Tesla Autopilot saved his life by driving him to the hospital



> A Missouri man says his Tesla helped saved his life by driving him to the hospital during a life-threatening emergency.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Argue the US Ban on Human Gene Editing Will Leave It Behind



> As the biotech revolution accelerates globally, the US could be getting left behind on key technological advances: namely, human genetic modification.
> 
> A Congressional ban on human germline modification has "drawn new lines in the sand" on gene editing legislation, argues a paper published today in _Science_ by Harvard law and bioethics professor I. Glenn Cohen and leading biologist Eli Adashi of Brown University. They say that without a course correction, "the United States is ceding its leadership in this arena to other nations."


----------



## ekim68

PIN-controlled self-locking gun has safety in its sights



> One of the problems with handguns is that it's very difficult to keep them both available for immediate use, yet secure against falling into the wrong hands. San Diego-based startup Safety First Arms is looking to solve that problem with its self-locking Smart 2 pistol, which is unlocked using a built-in PIN pad and incorporates an anti-theft alarm to prevent theft, tampering, and unauthorized use.


----------



## ekim68

Well, Sign of an Earlier Times.....


[URL='http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/innovation/2014/03/09/website-pioneers/index.html']9 website pioneers[/URL]



> On March 12, 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system that now serves as the infrastructure for the World Wide Web. He may not have imagined that 25 years later, more than a billion active websites thrive.


----------



## ekim68

A New Kind of AI Spots 90% of Online Abuse



> Researchers at Yahoo (yes, for the moment, it's still Yahoo) have unveiled an algorithm that uses machine learning and natural language processing to detect online abuse and hate speech. Abusive behavior online has been in the limelight lately, both because it's so inherently vile, and because it could alienate users of platforms like Twitter  TWTR 0.72% and Yahoo  YHOO 0.18% , arguably threatening their bottom line, or even the entire digital economy.


----------



## ekim68

Nigerian Scammers Infect Themselves With Own Malware, Revealing New Wire-Wire Fraud Scheme



> A pair of security researchers recently uncovered a Nigerian scammer ring that they say operates a new kind of attack called "wire-wire" after a few of its members accidentally infected themselves with their own malware. Over the past several months, they've watched from a virtual front row seat as members used this technique to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from small and medium-sized businesses worldwide.
> 
> "We've gotten unprecedented insight into the very nitty-gritty mechanics of their entire operation," says James Bettke, a researcher at SecureWorks, a subsidiary of Dell Inc. focused on cybersecurity.


----------



## poochee

Good!


----------



## ekim68

This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult



> Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America's 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records-known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person's car-and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it's weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.


----------



## ekim68

Haters Gonna Hate - but They Better Stop Doing It on Twitter, or They Will Kill It.



> But it's biggest problem are those trolls. They're winning. Too often Twitter's users are subject to pernicious streams of abuse and harassment. This dissuades new users from wanting to sign up, drives formerly loyal tweeters to close their accounts, and gives advertisers pause as they consider where to place their brand dollars.
> 
> Every time a notable figure says she will quit Twitter publicly over harassment, the service loses credibility among a mainstream audience. It's been exactly three years since the first time Twitter vowed to take abuse and harassment more seriously. The company is running out of time to figure out how to maintain its open platform, while keeping abusers from unleashing their plague of hate.


----------



## ekim68

'Faceless Recognition System' Can Identify You Even When You Hide Your Face



> With widespread adoption among law enforcement, advertisers, and even churches, face recognition has undoubtedly become one of the biggest threats to privacy out there.
> 
> By itself, the ability to instantly identify anyone just by seeing their face already creates massive power imbalances, with serious implications for free speech and political protest. But more recently, researchers have demonstrated that even when faces are blurred or otherwise obscured, algorithms can be trained to identify people by matching previously-observed patterns around their head and body.


----------



## ekim68

Muslim Americans launch "ISIS Sucks" billboard campaign: So-called Islamic State "does not represent Islam"



> People driving down the highway in Chicago may be met with a giant billboard reading, "Hey ISIS, you suck!!! From: #ActualMuslims."
> 
> The billboard is part of an "ISIS Sucks" campaign, launched by a Muslim American non-profit organization.
> 
> The Sound Vision Foundation bought the billboard as part of a larger strategy to challenge extremism and Islamophobia.
> 
> "We launched the campaign in light of the constant pressure on American Muslims to condemn ISIS, especially since Muslims are the biggest victims of ISIS," explained Leena Suleiman, the director of creative engagement at Sound Vision.


----------



## poochee

Many interesting and informative articles in this thread.


----------



## ekim68

A Model Carbon Tax




> Canada once again leads the way - this time on how a carbon tax can fight climate change while growing the economy.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter is not legally responsible for the rise of ISIS, rules California district court



> A lawsuit accusing Twitter of providing material support to ISIS  has been dismissed by a California District Court. First filed in January, the lawsuit argued ISIS's persistent presence on Twitter constituted material support for the terror group, and sought to hold Twitter responsible for an ISIS-linked attack on that basis.


----------



## ekim68

Online Drug Sales Triple After Silk Road Closure



> Online drug sales have tripled in the years after the Silk Road was shut down, showing how cracking down on the sale of illicit goods online can turn into a game of whack-a-mole for authorities.
> 
> The 2013 closure of the Silk Road, a marketplace where people could purchase drugs and other illegal goods, didn't seem to deter copycat sellers, according to a report from RAND.


----------



## ekim68

We need a global treaty on plastics. Here's what it should look like.



> August 9, 2016 - Plastics have boosted our economy because they are versatile, cheap and durable. Yet, thanks to these same traits, in the course of establishing a US$750 billion global industry, we have also created a massive problem. Rivers are filled with plastic garbage. Plastic bottles soil beaches. Masses of plastic are floating in the ocean. Birds become entangled in plastic pieces, and whales' stomachs fill with plastic debris. Plastics can harm humans, too, by releasing toxic additives.
> 
> And the problem is getting worse: The production of plastics reached 311 million metric tons (343 million tons) in 2014 and is continuing to increase worldwide. Scientists estimate that in 2010 alone between 5 and 13 million metric tons (6 and 14 million tons) of plastics streamed into the sea. Many hopes have been put on biodegradable plastics, but those still don't break down easily enough.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change May Be Doubted by Some, But Now It's the Law



> A federal appeals court in Chicago gave a thumbs-up this week to an obscure regulatory practice that helps the U.S. government account for projected costs of climate change. The decision comes less than a week after the White House issued guidance to all federal agencies about how they can build carbon accounting into their decision-making.


----------



## ekim68

Bleeping Computer countersues maker of SpyHunter




> Bleeping Computer





> , a longstanding popular discussion forum that helps people rid their computers of malware, has now countersued Enigma Software Group (ESG), which makes an antivirus software known as SpyHunter.


----------



## ekim68

Electric cars are so popular we're running out of plugs



> In Los Angeles, there are approximately 20 electric vehicles for every public electric car charger. In a fair and just world, that ratio should be more like four to one, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power told _Utility Dive_. But as things stand, L.A. Water and Power has some of the most heavily used car chargers in the state.


----------



## ekim68

1st US offshore wind farm to usher in new era for industry



> PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- The nation's first offshore wind farm is set to open off the coast of Rhode Island this fall, ushering in a new era in the U.S. for the industry.
> 
> Developers, federal regulators and industry experts say the opening will move the U.S. industry from a theory to reality, paving the way for the construction of many more wind farms that will eventually provide power for many Americans.


----------



## ekim68

More airline outages seen as carriers grapple with aging technology



> Airlines will likely suffer more disruptions like the one that grounded about 2,000 Delta (DAL.N) flights this week because major carriers have not invested enough to overhaul reservations systems based on technology dating to the 1960s, airline industry and technology experts told Reuters.
> 
> Airlines have spent heavily to introduce new features such as automated check-in kiosks, real-time luggage tracking and slick mobile apps. But they have avoided the steep cost of rebuilding their reservations systems from the ground up, former airline executives said.


----------



## ekim68

New Attacks Can Monitor Keystrokes, Steal Sensitive Data from Android Phones



> Researchers from an Austrian university have developed techniques that allow them to perform cache attacks on non-rooted Android phones that can monitor the keystrokes, screen taps, and even observe code execution inside the ARM processor's TrustZone secure execution environment.
> 
> The attacks the team developed are complex and rely on a number of individual building blocks. The techniques are similar to some used against Intel x86 processor-based systems, but the team from Graz University of Technology in Austria shows that they can be used on ARM-based systems, such as Android phones, as well.


----------



## ekim68

EPA Science Advisory Board: Agency's Fracking Study Ignored Significant Water Contamination Cases



> A recent peer-reviewed analysis of the science on unconventional oil and gas extraction, of more than 680 peer-reviewed studies, found that, "The great majority of science contains findings that indicate concerns for public health, air quality and water quality." In October of 2015, a partnership of prominent health organizations encompassing nationwide medical and public health experts and scientists released a Compendium of more than 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers, as well as numerous government reports and findings, demonstrating the risks of fracking to public health, air and water quality, birth and infant health, the environment and climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Britain's army is investing $1 billion in insect-sized drones, laser firearms, and virtual-reality goggles



> The British military is looking to embrace future technologies with open arms, as it's planning to invest some 800 million pounds ($1.03 billion) in speculative technologies including insect-sized drones, laser firearms, and virtual reality goggles.
> 
> Students and industry participants will be allowed to pitch their ideas to the new Innovation and Research Insights Unit (IRIS) which will be responsible for doling out the development fund.[/url]


----------



## ekim68

Holy Grail of energy policy in sight as battery technology smashes the old order



> The world's next energy revolution is probably no more than five or ten years away. Cutting-edge research into cheap and clean forms of electricity storage is moving so fast that we may never again need to build 20th Century power plants in this country, let alone a nuclear white elephant such as Hinkley Point.


----------



## ekim68

There are now more Americans working in Internet publishing than for newspapers
[/URL]


> There are now more Americans working for online publishers and broadcasters than for newspapers, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment at online outlets first eclipsed newspapers in October 2015.


----------



## ekim68

Twelve Charts That Show a Massive Divide in How Americans See the Economy



> In the midst of a heated presidential election campaign, it's clear that America is a nation divided on both personal pocketbook issues and those relating to the national economy.


----------



## ekim68

Every major cable TV company lost subscribers last quarter



> The second quarter of each year is generally bad for pay-TV companies, but subscriber losses this year reached new heights.
> 
> The 11 biggest pay-TV providers in the US, representing 95 percent of the market, lost 665,000 net video subscribers in Q2 2016, Leichtman Research Group reported today. This is more than double the losses of two years ago. Previously, the companies lost 545,000 subscribers in Q2 2015, 300,000 in Q2 2014, and 350,000 in Q2 2013.


----------



## ekim68

New evidence suggests bigger 100 kWh battery for Tesla Model S and Model X



> New evidence has emerged that Tesla is preparing to release a 100 kWh battery option for its Model S and Model X cars. Both vehicles currently offer 90 kWh batteries as their largest capacity, and the increased size would boost their ranges - perhaps to as much as 380 miles for the Model S.


----------



## ekim68

Americans have $12.29 trillion of debt - here's what it looks like



> Americans are still adding debt.
> 
> Household debt - which includes things as varied as mortgages and credit cards - increased to $12.29 trillion in the second quarter of 2016, an increase of $35 billion, or 0.3%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit.


----------



## ekim68

Facing Reality.................


In Hoboken, a glimpse of cities' future fights over rising seas



> Nearly 1.9 million U.S. homes could be rendered uninhabitable if sea levels rise six feet by the end of the century, as many scientists expect, according to a report from the real estate data firm Zillow. Nearly half could be in Florida, but New York, New Jersey, South Carolina and Louisiana each could have tens of thousands of inundated homes.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Americans have $12.29 trillion of debt - here's what it looks like


----------



## ekim68

Ford plans to have a fleet of fully autonomous cars operating in a ride-hail service by 2021




> The company has invested in four startups as part of that effort.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter suspended 360,000 accounts for 'promotion of terrorism'



> Twitter Inc has shut down 360,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts since the middle of 2015, the company said in a blog post on Thursday.
> 
> The microblogging platform has previously come under fire from Washington and third-party groups for not doing enough to stop accounts linked to Islamic State militants.
> 
> But, since February, it has suspended an additional 235,000 accounts, after halting 125,000 accounts since the middle of 2015, most of which were related to Islamic State.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus wants to build flying taxis because everyone hates traffic



> Airbus wants to make sky taxis, straight from the realm of retro-futurist science fiction, a reality. The plane maker has a new program it's given the working title CityAirbus that will put commuters in the air. And it's all because cities are too damn crowded.
> 
> The futuristic multi-propeller aircraft sounds like an airborne Uber - passengers use an app to book passage, head to their local helipad, climb aboard with a number of other passengers, and in the words of Airbus are "whisked away to their destination." Each ride would cost "nearly the equivalent of a normal taxi ride for each passenger." Beyond the advantages of avoiding traffic, Airbus claims its new conveyance will be faster, more sustainable, and, obviously, more exciting. Initially, the program would rely on a human pilot, but as with nearly every mode of modern transport, there would eventually be an autonomous version.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Twitter suspended 360,000 accounts for 'promotion of terrorism'


----------



## ekim68

:up:


----------



## ekim68

In U.S. Methane Hot Spot, Researchers Pinpoint Sources of 250 Leaks



> Methane is escaping from more than 250 different oil and gas wells, storage tanks, pipelines, coal mines and other fossil fuel facilities across the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
> 
> The findings help solve a puzzle that had preoccupied the study's researchers since 2014. That year, they published research that flagged the region as one of the country's largest sources of methane emissions, but they couldn't determine the exact sources of the runaway gas.
> 
> The difference in this study, the researchers said, is that they used aircraft sensors allowing them to pinpoint the source of leaks within a few feet. The earlier paper relied on less precise, region-wide satellite data.


----------



## ekim68

Heat-responsive bandage helps heal wounds



> Over the years, scientists have come up with bandages to detect bedsores before they appear, paint-on bandages that tell doctors how the healing process is coming along, and dressings that change color when an infection is present. Now, a team of researchers from Northwestern University has created a stem cell-attracting bandage with a single purpose in mind - giving the body a helping hand in healing diabetic wounds.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Heat-responsive bandage helps heal wounds


----------



## ekim68

Uber's First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month



> Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world's experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University's robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google's self-driving car project, spent seven years researching autonomous robots at CMU, and the project's former director, Chris Urmson, was a CMU grad student.
> 
> "Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving," says John Bares, who had run CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. "I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling." Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture. The goal: to replace Uber's more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers-as quickly as possible.


----------



## ekim68

Japan eyes fighter drone, seeks record defense budget amid China assertiveness



> Japan aims to develop a prototype drone fighter jet in two decades with private sector help in a technology strategy that focuses on weapons communications and lasers, according to a document seen by Reuters.
> 
> The plan will be announced this month when the Defense Ministry also unveils its request for a record budget of 5.16 trillion yen ($51 billion) for fiscal 2017, as tension rises in the East China Sea and North Korea steps up its missile threat, government officials with direct knowledge of the matter said.
> 
> The military technology plan calls for first developing an unmanned surveillance aircraft in the next decade and then an unmanned fighter jet 10 years later, the document showed.


----------



## ekim68

FBI: Bank robbery? There's an app for that



> The FBI today said it released a new application easier for the public-as well as financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and others-to view photos and information about bank robberies in different geographic areas of the country.


----------



## ekim68

Fungi put to work extracting lithium from discarded batteries



> At the heart of devices like smartphones, tablets and electric cars are rechargeable batteries, and at the heart of those is lithium. With demand growing, mining isn't sustainable long-term, so researchers are exploring the difficult task of reclaiming lithium from old discarded batteries. A new study has put three strains of fungi to work to extract these valuable materials from electronic waste, which could lead to a safer and greener battery recycling system.
> 
> Thanks to our thirst for ever-new technology, e-waste is an increasing problem, as tonnes of discarded electronics are dumped in landfills or incinerated, releasing potentially hazardous chemicals into the air, water and soil. In addition, many of the components are made from rare and valuable materials like lithium and cobalt, so finding ways to reclaim them can help take the pressure off limited natural resources.


----------



## ekim68

This Chinese Router Is Depressingly Insecure and Downright Evil



> A Wi-Fi router manufactured and sold only in China by BHU contains so many security holes that you're looking for trouble every time you plug it in and exposing it to the Internet.


----------



## ekim68

The TSA Is Finding More and More Guns at Airport Checkpoints



> Usually, the loaded gun is stuffed in a carry-on bag or a purse. Almost always, the excuse is: "I forgot."
> 
> For the second consecutive week, the Transportation Security Administration confiscated a record number of firearms at security checkpoints at U.S. airports. Officers seized 81 guns between August 12th and 18th. Of the weapons, 70 were loaded, and 31 had a round chambered, meaning ready to fire at the squeeze of a trigger.


----------



## ekim68

UK's iconic red phone boxes take on new lives as smartphone repair shops



> A smartphone and tablet repair outfit has found a fitting way to breathe new life into the UK's iconic red telephone boxes. Lovefone is converting the underused booths into the kind of mobile phone repair shop that should probably be avoided by those with a fear of enclosed spaces. Each one will sport workbenches, charging stations and free Wi-Fi.


----------



## ekim68

FBI authorized informants to break the law 22,800 times in 4 years



> Over a four-year period, the FBI authorized informants to break the law more than 22,800 times, according to newly reviewed documents.
> 
> Official records obtained by the Daily Dot under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show the Federal Bureau of Investigation gave informants permission at least 5,649 times in 2013 to engage in activity that would otherwise be considered a crime. In 2014, authorization was given 5,577 times, the records show.


----------



## ekim68

German minister calls for introduction of facial recognition software at airports and train stations



> Germany's Interior Minister wants to introduce facial recognition software at train stations and airports to help identify terror suspects following two Islamist attacks in the country last month.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> German minister calls for introduction of facial recognition software at airports and train stations


----------



## ekim68

Tesla touts speed and driving range with new upgraded battery[/quote]



> Tesla Motors Inc ([URL='http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TSLA.O']TSLA.O





> ) crowned itself the maker of the world's fastest production car on Tuesday, saying a new version of its Model S all-electric sedan can accelerate from 0-60 miles per hour in just 2-1/2 seconds.
> 
> Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said the company will offer a larger upgraded battery pack for performance versions of its Model S and X vehicles that will extend range, while also allowing for super fast acceleration.


[/url]


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/a-startup-backed-by-peter-thiel-makes-bankrolling-civil-1785707590']A Startup Backed By Peter Thiel Makes Bankrolling Civil Lawsuits Easy[/URL]



> In courtrooms across America, investors are making money through litigation financing. The process allows investors to cover the cost of a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the financial settlement.
> 
> If this process sounds familiar to you, it's probably because it's similar to what billionaire Peter Thiel did when he secretly funded a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media. It's still unclear whether Thiel benefited financially from $140 million judgement against Gawker, but the impact of his attack is evident.
> 
> Now, a new startup wants to get more people in on the action. Two Harvard undergraduates have created a service called Legalist that uses what they call "data-backed litigation financing," analyzing civil lawsuits with an algorithm to predict case outcomes and determine which civil lawsuits are worth investing in.


----------



## ekim68

Self-driving cars aren't going to be so great until we make our maps way better



> Uber is rolling out self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, which is cool - but it means that the way we think about maps and addresses is about to get really complicated. For example, here is something that happens to me several times a week: I call an Uber to my apartment building, and the driver gets lost because they can't find the door.
> 
> See, the address of my building is on a main street, but the actual entrances are on the sides of the building - and when I drop a pin at those locations, Uber maps them to nonexistent addresses. So the drivers either pull up to the correct building address and don't see a door, or they pull up to a door that has a wildly different address on it.


----------



## ekim68

Italy quake rescuers ask locals to unlock their wi-fi



> Rescue teams searching for earthquake survivors in central Italy have asked locals to unlock their wi-fi passwords.
> 
> The Italian Red Cross says residents' home networks can assist with communications during the search for survivors.


----------



## ekim68

Future iPhones might collect fingerprints, photos of thieves



> An Apple patent application published on Thursday describes a method of storing an unauthorized user's biometric information, which can help strengthen security management or assist in device recovery and criminal prosecution in the case of a theft.


----------



## ekim68

America's Journalistic Hypocrites



> Over the past few decades, the U.S. mainstream media has failed the American people in a historic fashion by spinning false or misleading narratives on virtually every important global issue, continuing to this day to guide the nation into destructive and unnecessary conflicts.
> 
> To me, a major turning point came with the failure of the major news organizations to get anywhere near the bottom of the Iran-Contra scandal, including its origins in illicit contacts between Republicans and Iranians during the 1980 campaign and the Reagan administration's collaboration with drug traffickers to support the Contra war in Nicaragua. (Instead, the major U.S. media disparaged reporting on these very real scandals.)


----------



## ekim68

British Companies Are Selling Advanced Spy Tech to Authoritarian Regimes



> Since early 2015, over a dozen UK companies have been granted licenses to export powerful telecommunications interception technology to countries around the world, Motherboard has learned. Many of these exports include IMSI-catchers, devices which can monitor large numbers of mobile phones over broad areas.
> 
> Some of the UK companies were given permission to export their products to authoritarian states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Egypt; countries with poor human rights records that have been well-documented to abuse surveillance technology.


----------



## ekim68

Big Pharma's All-Out Push to Continue Wanton Profiteering



> It is hard to grasp the price gouging and unregulated sky-high profiteering of drug companies in the United States, but the rise in the cost of the lifesaving EpiPens -- a drug that can save people from lethal allergic attacks -- certainly offers a searing example. As news accounts have revealed, the pharmaceutical firm Mylan raised the price of the medication by hundreds of dollars after it acquired the injection patent from another firm. There was no increase in production costs, just exorbitant overcharging to achieve extortion-level profits. After all, this is a drug that some people need to live through possible deadly allergic reactions.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

To build a better battery, Dyson will spend $1.4 billion, enlist 3,000 engineers



> When James Dyson wants to invent something, he doesn't let obstacles like time and money get in his way. And with its "fail faster" mentality, Dyson's team doesn't hesitate to go through thousands of prototypes before finalizing an invention.
> 
> Among the 100 new products the company founder wants to invent by 2020, the greatest investment in people and money is to improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, as reported by Forbes.


----------



## ekim68

World's oldest person discovered in Indonesia at the age of 145



> The world's oldest man has been named as Indonesian Mbah Gotho, who is 145 years old, with documentation that says he was born in 1870.
> 
> Mr Gotho said he began preparing for his death in 1992, even having a gravestone made, but 24 years later he is still alive.
> 
> He has now outlived all 10 of his siblings, his four wives and his children.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> World's oldest person discovered in Indonesia at the age of 145


WOW!!


----------



## ekim68

Floating solar device boils water without mirrors




> It's simple, it's cheap, and it could distill water or generate steam.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/year-long-simulation-of-humans-living-on-mars-comes-to-1785865918']Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End[/URL]



> One year ago, six volunteers-an astrobiologist, a physicist, a pilot, an architect, a journalist, and a soil scientist - entered a 36-by-20 foot dome, located near a barren volcano in Hawaii, to simulate what living conditions would be like on Mars. Today they re-emerged from their year-long isolation.


----------



## ekim68

Swing states don't want DHS to protect its voting machines



> Some states' electronic voting machines are antiquated, insecure and vulnerable to potential attacks from hostile attackers. But despite this, states like Georgia and Pennsylvania would prefer to take the risk than allow the Department of Home Security anywhere near them. _NextGov_ is reporting that those states have rejected an offer from DHS chief Jeh Johnson to inspect the equipment for ways in which hackers could rig the vote. It comes just days after Johnson openly mulled demarcating voting machines as critical infrastructure -- meaning that they'd be defended with the same ferocity as power stations.
> 
> Georgia's secretary of state Brian Kemp feels that the Department of Homeland Security is overreaching in its attempt to, uh, preserve homeland security.


----------



## ekim68

Enhanced DMV facial recognition technology helps NY nab 100 ID thieves



> In January, the New York State DMV enhanced its facial recognition technology by doubling the number of measurement points on a driver's photograph, a move the state's governor says has led to the arrest of 100 suspected identity thieves and opened 900 unsolved cases. In all, since New York implemented facial recognition technology in 2010, more than 14,000 people have been hampered trying to get multiple licenses.
> 
> The newly upgraded system increases the measurement points of a driver's license picture from 64 to 128.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Urban Farming Is Revolutionizing Our Cities



> Humans are fast becoming city dwellers. According to the United Nations, "The urban population of the world has grown rapidly from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014."
> 
> Sixty-six percent of us will likely live in urban environments by 2050. The number of mega-cities (more than 10 million inhabitants) is also skyrocketing, from 10 in 1990 to 28 in 2014-home to more than 453 million people-and is expected to grow to 41 by 2030.
> 
> Along with concerns about climate change and the distances much of our food travels from farm to plate, that's spurred a renewed interest in producing food where people live. Urban agriculture won't resolve all food production and distribution problems, but it could help take pressure off rural land while providing other advantages. From balcony, backyard, rooftop, indoor and community gardens to city beehives and chicken coops to larger urban farms and farmers markets, growing and distributing local food in or near cities is a healthy way to help the environment.


----------



## ekim68

FAA Expects 600,000 Commercial Drones In The Air Within A Year



> We are in "one of the most dramatic periods of change in the history of transportation," says Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
> 
> He was talking about all of it: the self-driving cars, the smart-city movement, the maritime innovations. But the staggering prediction of the day goes to the drone industry:
> 
> The Federal Aviation Administration expects some 600,000 drones to be used commercially within a year.


----------



## ekim68

Graphene breakthrough is big news for future of semiconductors



> The supermaterial graphene has been receiving quite a bit of attention over the past few years. The latest breakthrough comes in the form of a method for using the strong, super-conducting one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms to create two-dimensional materials that could, in turn, be used in the next generation of lasers, electronics and sensors.
> 
> Materials scientists at Pennsylvania State University synthesized two-dimensional gallium nitride for the first time ever using a graphene encapsulation, lending the material's superb electronic properties and strength to the resulting flat gallium nitride.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2016/08/28/tesla-autopilot-safety-restrictions-v8-0-accidents/']Tesla will soon introduce new Autopilot safety restrictions after recent accidents[/URL]



> After the recent and widely covered series of Tesla accidents while on Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk talked about focusing on better educating Tesla owners on how to use Autopilot features. Last month, he mentioned an upcoming blog post to highlight "how Autopilot works as a safety system and what drivers are expected to do after they activate it."
> 
> We have yet to see that blog post, but now Electrek has learned that Tesla will introduce new Autopilot safety restrictions in order to reduce the risk of similar accidents happening again. Tesla owners are often wary of new Autopilot restrictions. They feel like Tesla is rolling back features that they have paid for, but they shouldn't worry about the new restrictions since they will not really affect owners using the system properly.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook lets users prompt danger alert



> Facebook is to enable members to trigger its Safety Check service themselves if a dangerous event occurs near them.
> 
> Until now, it could only be activated by Facebook staff.
> 
> Safety Check lets people notify their friends and family that they are safe in the aftermath of a natural disaster or human conflict in their area.
> 
> The recent earthquake in Italy marked the 25th time this year that it has been triggered.


https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/central-italy-earthquake-aug23-2016/


----------



## ekim68

Shetland turbines at Bluemull Sound connected to grid



> Turbines installed off the coast of Shetland could herald a "new era" in tidal energy, according to the company running the project.
> 
> Tidal energy specialist Nova Innovation said they were the first offshore tidal turbines in the world to deliver electricity to the grid.


----------



## ekim68

Self-driving tractors promise to get themselves to work, plow without complaint



> There's been a lot of focus on consumer self-driving technology recently, but autonomy promises to shake things up in the agricultural world too. CNH Industrial's latest concepts aim to demonstrate how self-driving tractors can deliver faster, more precise results than their human controlled counterparts.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft made 'em do it: The latest Kaby Lake, Zen chips will support only Windows 10



> Microsoft is slamming the door on PC builders and upgraders who might have hoped to use the new Intel Kaby Lake or AMD Zen chips for Windows 7 or Windows 8 PCs. Sorry: Both chips are officially supported only by Microsoft's Windows 10.
> 
> Microsoft's mandate is discreet rather than secret. In January, the company tried to shorten its support lifecycle for Intel Skylake PCs running Windows 7 and 8, a policy the company subsequently abandoned after much outcry. But Microsoft's statements have also consistently included a critical caveat: The latest generations of silicon-specifically Intel's Kaby Lake chip, Qualcomm's 8996, and AMD's Bristol Ridge silicon-will all require Windows 10.


----------



## ekim68

Hitler's 3-mile-long abandoned Nazi resort is transforming into a luxury getaway

:up:


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-fda-finally-bans-a-bunch-of-pointless-antibacterial-1786097195']The FDA Finally Bans a Bunch Of Pointless Antibacterial Soaps[/URL]



> Sorry, that antibacterial soap isn't doing anything more to clean you up than any other plain bar of soap.
> 
> The FDA just announced it is eliminating almost all of the active ingredients used in antibacterial soaps after determining that the soaps didn't have any more impact on preventing the spread of germs and infections than regular soap. These products will no longer be sold under misleading marketing.


----------



## ekim68

This rainforest is flourishing because of a 13,000-year human presence



> Us humans are pretty good at making our presence felt wherever we live out our resource-intensive lives. Of course there are places around the world where people co-exist harmlessly with their environment, but is it possible we could take things further and actually be the bringers of good health to patches of the planet? New research focusing on a coastal rainforest in Canada has found that human occupation over thousands of years is causing the region to flourish, with a penchant for shellfish and need for warmth big parts of the reasons why.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. developers have the numbers, but China and Russia have the skills




> A report from HackerRank finds that while the U.S. and India have lots of developers, Chinese and Russian programmers are the most talented


----------



## ekim68

Brain-Zapping Gadgets Need Regulation, Say Scientists and (Some) Manufacturers



> Just a few years ago, the idea of electrically stimulating your brain in the comfort of your own home would have sounded pretty weird, and probably like a bad idea.
> 
> But the practice of brain-zapping-in particular, an easy-to-pull-off technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)-has quickly advanced from labs to living rooms. DIYers are building their own devices and trading tips online, while startups are bringing out consumer products.
> 
> With that as the backdrop, a group of neuroscientists and manufacturers met in New York City on Sunday 28 August to discuss potential regulations for brain stimulation devices sold directly to consumers. "Neuromodulation is already here-it's on Amazon, it's in the coverage of the Olympics, it's everywhere," said conference organizer Marom Bikson, a professor at the City College of New York. "But there isn't a cohesive message from scientists or industry about regulations. As a community, we're behind."


----------



## ekim68

Diabetes Patients Are Losing Limbs And Sight Because They Can't Afford Insulin



> Earlier this week, we shared the concerns of patients who are struggling with the rising cost of EpiPens, injection devices that can save lives in the case of a severe allergic reaction to foods or other substances. The important thing about EpiPens, though, is that patients hope to never actually need to use them. Another drug with significant recent price increases, insulin, has to be taken every day… when patients can afford it.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Diabetes Patients Are Losing Limbs And Sight Because They Can't Afford Insulin


----------



## ekim68

Thousands to Receive Basic Income in Finland



> Finland is about to launch an experiment in which a randomly selected group of 2,000-3,000 citizens already on unemployment benefits will begin to receive a monthly basic income of 560 euros (approx. $600). That basic income will replace their existing benefits. The amount is the same as the current guaranteed minimum level of Finnish social security support. The pilot study, running for two years in 2017-2018, aims to assess whether basic income can help reduce poverty, social exclusion, and bureaucracy, while increasing the employment rate.


----------



## ekim68

What is your phone telling your rental car?



> When I rent a car, it's fun to get all the bells and whistles - like navigation, hands-free calls and texts, streaming music and even web browsing. But did you know that cars with these features might keep your personal information, long after you've returned your rental car? Here are some things to keep in mind when renting a connected car.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Thousands to Receive Basic Income in Finland


----------



## ekim68

When Extinction Is a Humanitarian Cause



> The mosquito spreading Zika doesn't belong in our environment. Soon we may be able to eradicate it with new technology.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections



> U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are investigating what they see as a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions, intelligence and congressional officials said.
> 
> The aim is to understand the scope and intent of the Russian campaign, which incorporates cyber-tools to hack systems used in the political process, enhancing Russia's ability to spread disinformation.


----------



## ekim68

Japan goes public with Brexit demands, says data flow deals must be protected



> Prime minister Theresa May said over the weekend that she wanted to take her time to secure the best trade deals for a post-Brexit Britain, and reiterated-in her trademark vague terms-that the so-called Article 50 won't be triggered this year. But political pressure from governments as far away as Japan continues to mount.
> 
> On Sunday, in a bold move, the Japanese government published a 15-page memo (PDF) setting out a number of demands it wants the UK to adhere to, once it leaves the European Union.


----------



## ekim68

Fujitsu To Mass-Produce NRAM Carbon Nanotube Memory In 2018



> Fujitsu announced that it has licensed Nantero's carbon nanotube-based NRAM (Non-volatile RAM) and will participate in a joint development effort to bring a 256Mb 55nm product to market in 2018. Carbon nanotubes are a promising technology projected to make an appearance in numerous applications, largely due to their incredible characteristics, which include unmatchable performance, durability and extreme temperature tolerance. Most view carbon nanotubes as a technology far off on the horizon, but Nantero has had working prototypes for several years.


----------



## ekim68

China Plans To Build A Deep-Sea 'Space Station' In South China Sea



> China is stepping up efforts to build a deep-sea underwater 'space station' in the South China Sea.
> 
> If the plans go ahead, the station would be located 3000 metres below the surface, inhabited by humans, and would be used to hunt for minerals.


----------



## ekim68

North Korea defections to South Korea climb 15%



> SEOUL, Sept. 7 (UPI) -- The number of North Koreans defecting to South Korea rose 15 percent in the first eight months of 2016 compared with last year, government data showed Wednesday.
> 
> From January to August, 894 North Koreans arrived in South Korea compared with 777 the previous year's eight months, according to data by the Ministry of Unification.


http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/northkorea/2016/09/07/0401000000AEN20160907001851315.html


----------



## ekim68

An Algorithm May Soon Cover Your Local Sports Team



> A Spanish startup is promising to revolutionize readers' access to often unreported news. The unreported news in question, however, is not overlooked disasters or under-reported tragedies in far-flung countries, but minor league sporting events.
> 
> David Llorente, co-founder of Narrativa, said was inspired to develop an AI-powered content generation system after he tried fruitlessly to find coverage of minor league soccer games from other countries in his native Spanish.


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> China Plans To Build A Deep-Sea 'Space Station' In South China Sea


About time. I don't know if you ever got around to reading Clarke's 'Tales From The White Hart', but one of the stories was exactly that. Mining the seas.


----------



## ekim68

Thanks Tim....I'm gonna check that out....:up:


----------



## valis

Pretty sure we've had this convo before, old hoss....... 

But yeah, please do. It's a collection of linked short stories, a la Asimov's Black Widower's collections. You are more or less tailor made as the audience. LOTS of fun science, and a healthy splash of humor as well.


----------



## ekim68

The Price of Solar Is Declining to Unprecedented Lows



> The installed price of solar energy has declined significantly in recent years as policy and market forces have driven more and more solar installations.
> 
> Now, the latest data show that the continued decrease in solar prices is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, with total installed prices dropping by 5 percent for rooftop residential systems, and 12 percent for larger utility-scale solar farms.


----------



## ekim68

After Massive Cable Industry Lobbying And Disinformation Effort, The FCC Is Forced To Weaken Its Cable Box Reform Plan



> Back in February, the FCC approved a new plan to bring some much-needed competition to the old cable box, resulting in better, cheaper, and more open hardware. But fearing a loss of control (and $21 billion in annual cable box rental fees) the cable industry launched an unprecedented lobbying campaign featuring an endless barrage of editorials attacking the plan for encouraging piracy and even being racist. The cable industry even managed to get the Copyright Office to fight on its behalf, spreading false claims that the plan would "harm copyright" despite having really nothing to do with the subject.


----------



## ekim68

It's getting tougher to tell if you're on the phone with a machine or human



> If you want to talk about something important or sensitive, odds are that conversation will happen over the phone rather than email or text. The sound of someone's voice is an important part of trusting them-but the ability to trust the voice on the other end of that call is human might change.
> 
> Google DeepMind announced a new speech generation method it calls WaveNet, which could bring artificial intelligence closer than ever to indiscernibly mimicking human speech.


----------



## ekim68

Meet the Texas billionaire and GOP donor behind the North Dakota pipeline controversy



> Over the Labor Day weekend, security guards for a petro pipeline company used attack dogs and pepper spray against Native Americans resisting construction of a $3.8 billion pipeline through North Dakota, a project they say is desecrating land sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux and putting critical water supplies at risk of contamination.
> 
> If completed, the Dakota Access Pipeline would carry crude from the nearby Bakken oilfields to Illinois, where it would meet an existing pipeline that would transport the oil to Texas. That's the home state of the billionaire and major Republican political donor behind the project: Kelcy Warren, chair of Energy Transfer Equity of Dallas, a company that's No. 65 on this year's Fortune 500 list.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://lifehacker.com/what-you-should-know-if-you-think-wells-fargo-ripped-yo-1786461333']What You Should Know If You Think Wells Fargo Ripped You Off[/URL]



> Wells Fargo is set to pay $185 million in penalties for illegal sales practices. If you're a Wells Fargo customer, here's what you should know about it.


----------



## ekim68

Judging a book through its cover



> MIT researchers and their colleagues are designing an imaging system that can read closed books.
> 
> In the latest issue of _Nature Communications_, the researchers describe a prototype of the system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.
> 
> "The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don't even want to touch," says Barmak Heshmat, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and corresponding author on the new paper. He adds that the system could be used to analyze any materials organized in thin layers, such as coatings on machine parts or pharmaceuticals.


----------



## ekim68

When did Charlie Rose go all Fox News? He's lost my respect for him...


----------



## ekim68

Samsung loses $26 billion of market value after Note 7 recall



> Samsung was having a great year, thanks to the S7 and S7 Edge, enticing investors to toss their money into the pool. Unfortunately, the rest of 2016 hasn't been going according to Samsung's forecast. The Korean chaebol has lost a whopping $26 billion (with a _B) _of its market value since it announced the Galaxy Note 7 recall, according to financial data provider Factset.


----------



## ekim68

Chevy's Bolt EV will cover 238 miles on a single charge



> In January, Chevrolet unveiled a fully electric version of its formerly hybrid-only Bolt and then filled in a few gaps. One gap that was still remaining - save for an above 200 mi (433 km) promise - was range, but Chevy has now pinned that down to 238 mi (383 km) on a single charge.
> 
> That distance comes courtesy of a 60-kWh battery pack that will charge fully in nine hours via a 240-volt charging system. Alternatively, customers will be able to gain 90 mi (145 km) of range in half an hour using an optional DC fast-charger. To further assuage any anxieties about range, the Volt EV's navigation system will take into consideration the location of charge points when calculating routes.


----------



## ekim68

Electric bus covers 600 miles on single charge



> Cars aren't the only form of transport moving towards the zero-local emissions benefits of electric power. Proterra has been working on its pure electric buses for some time and the latest addition to its stable, the Catalyst E2, has logged more the 600 miles (966 km) on a single charge under test conditions at the Michelin proving grounds in South Carolina.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix Pushes FCC to Crack Down on Usage Caps



> Netflix is urging the FCC to crack down on broadband usage caps, stating that they unfairly limit consumers' ability to consume streaming video services. Netflix has long has an adversarial relationship with ISPs, and often for good reason. Usage caps on fixed-line networks are specifically designed to protect ISP TV revenues from Netflix competition, allowing an ISP to both complicate and generate additional profit off of the shift away from legacy TV.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous Ubers hit the road in Pittsburgh



> Last year, Uber set up its Advanced Technologies Center in the US city of Pittsburgh, with a view to rolling out a fleet of autonomous ride-sharing vehicles. It may have been beaten to the punch by NuTonomy, but today Pittsburgh residents will be the first to experience Self-Driving Ubers, as real-world testing commences.
> 
> Uber sees this public testing as critical to the success of autonomous driving technology, which it suggests may ultimately help to offer an alternative to individual car ownership in cities. Among the benefits it envisions are a reduction in the number of traffic accidents, greater availability of parking spaces and less congestion.


----------



## ekim68

A good but weird read....


[URL='http://deadspin.com/report-russian-olympic-doping-program-was-comically-im-1776292302']Report: Russian Olympic Doping Program Was Comically Impressive [/URL]


----------



## ekim68

Historic Bill on Farmworkers Overtime Signed



> SACRAMENTO (CN) -Acting against California's prominent agricultural industry and in favor of thousands of farmworkers, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on Monday that grants agricultural workers long-awaited overtime pay.
> 
> Brown, a fourth-term governor and longtime champion of union rights, signed the contentious bill less than two weeks after the Legislature sent it to his desk.


----------



## ekim68

New EU rules promise 100Mbps broadband and free Wi-Fi for all



> BRUSSELS-The European Commission has promised free Wi-Fi in every town, village, and city in the European Union, in the next four years.
> 
> A new grant, with a total budget of €120 million, will allow public authorities to purchase state-of-the art equipment, for example a local wireless access point. If approved by the the European Parliament and national ministers the cash could be available before the end of next year.


----------



## ekim68

Mass Fish Die-Offs Are the New Normal: Climate Change Shuts Down a Montana River



> Early in the morning on August 19, 2016, Chad Jacobson, a 36-year-old Montanan, lifelong fisherman and soon-to-be father received a text message from a friend who is one of Montana's many fly-fishing guides.
> 
> "Can you believe they shut down the Yellowstone?" said the text.
> 
> Jacobson grew up in a family of fishermen and makes it a priority to get out on the rivers as often as possible throughout the year. He was stunned.
> 
> "I mean, you see this kind of stuff happening in rivers around here, it's something you can be almost sure will happen: low water and high temperatures leading to river closures and dead fish. But I don't think that anyone was prepared for it to happen on the *longest undammed river in the United States.* It was a shock,"


----------



## ekim68

Recent Progress Further Strengthens Clean Power Plan Outlook



> As the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals prepares to hear challengers' arguments against the Clean Power Plan on September 27th, the most up-to-date analysis shows that the Clean Power Plan's goals have become even more readily achievable as the electricity sector is already shifting to clean energy. Many power companies are not waiting for the courts to resolve the legal challenges. Instead, they are accelerating the shift to clean energy, assisted by the rapid cost declines of renewable technologies. This steady and continuing shift in our power sector makes clear that the goals set forth by the Clean Power Plan are eminently attainable.


----------



## ekim68

Brave telco giants kill threat of decent internet service in rural North Carolina




> Citizens told they can't have broadband because something, something, competition


----------



## ekim68

It hurts to be right: How Scott Walker proved Citizens United wrong




> Leaked emails show how the Republican governor of Wisconsin flouted campaign finance law to court secret donors


----------



## ekim68

After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update



> Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+.
> 
> Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.


----------



## ekim68

Half of U.S. smartphone users download zero apps per month




> Thirteen percent of smartphone owners account for more than 50 percent of all app downloads.


----------



## ekim68

ORWL PC: The most secure home computer ever




> When you really, really don't want your data to end up in the wrong hands.


----------



## ekim68

Quantum teleportation over 7 kilometres of cables smashes record



> A new world record for quantum teleportation has been set, bringing quantum communication networks that can stretch between cities a step closer. Two independent teams have transferred quantum information over several kilometres of fibre optic networks.
> 
> Being able to establish teleportation over long distances is a crucial step towards exchanging quantum cryptographic keys needed for encoding data sent over the fibres.
> 
> Quantum teleportation is a phenomenon in which the quantum states of one particle can be transferred to another, distant particle without anything physical traveling between them. It relies on a property called entanglement, in which measuring the state of one particle immediately affects the state of its entangled partner, regardless of the distance between them.


----------



## ekim68

Cable lobby tries to make you forget that it represents cable companies



> The US cable industry's biggest lobby group has dropped the word "cable" from its name in a rebrand focusing on its members' role as providers of both Internet and TV services.
> 
> The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) will henceforth be called NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. NCTA will be maintained in the name as a nod to the group's past, even though the initials no longer stand for any particular words.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-bullet-shaped-bike-just-set-a-human-powered-speed-1786845993']This Bullet-Shaped Bike Just Set a Human-Powered Speed Record[/URL]



> There's no room for your briefcase so it's hard to use for your daily commute, but just think how fast you'd ride to work on the Aerovelo Eta which just set a new record for the World's Fastest Human-Powered vehicle reaching 89.59 miles per hour. That's faster than you're legally allowed to drive on most highways.
> 
> The record was broken at the World Human Powered Speed Challenge held in Battle Mountain, Nevada, but the Eta was in no way assisted by a downhill grade. Hitting 89.59 miles per hour was made possible by the skill and stamina of pilot Todd Reichert, who also happens to be one of Aerovolo's co-founders, as well as the technological improvements made to the bike.


----------



## ekim68

Half of 265M U.S. firearms owned by just 3 percent of population, research says



> According to researchers, a tiny part of the U.S. population, just 7.7 million people, own 133 million of the 265 million firearms in circulation.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/sandisk-just-revealed-a-monstrous-1-terabyte-sd-memory-1786722284']SanDisk Just Revealed a Monstrous 1 Terabyte SD Memory Card[/URL]



> There's no word on when you'll be able to buy it, or to what extent you'll need to mortgage your home to afford one, but today SanDisk revealed a prototype of a one-terabyte SDXC card that will help ensure your camera never runs out of space for photos or videos.


----------



## ekim68

MIT scientists use radio waves to sense human emotions



> Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a device that uses radio waves to detect whether someone is happy, sad, angry or excited.
> 
> The breakthrough makes it easier to accomplish what scientists have tried to do for years with machines: sense human emotions. The researchers believe tracking a person's feelings is a step toward improving their overall emotional well-being.


----------



## ekim68

A Shocking Amount of E-Waste Recycling Is a Complete Sham



> Until recently, I had never really thought about what happens to my old electronics. I took them to a community e-waste recycling drive, or dropped my old phone in a box somewhere, and I assumed my stuff was recycled.
> 
> An alarming portion of the time this is not actually the case, according to the results of a project that used GPS trackers to follow e-waste over the course of two years. Forty percent of all US electronics recyclers testers included in the study proved to be complete shams, with our e-waste getting shipped wholesale to landfills in Hong Kong, China, and developing nations in Africa and Asia.


----------



## ekim68

Cancer-causing pollutant made famous by Erin Brockovich found in NE Ohio drinking water



> CLEVELAND, Ohio - Drinking water tainted with a cancer-causing toxin made famous by the environmental activist Erin Brockovich was found in all but one of the 30 water systems in Northeast Ohio, according to a report released today.
> 
> The Environmental Working Group, a health research and advocacy organization, said its report marked the first time widespread contamination by Chromium 6 had been documented in the drinking water of more than 200 million Americans in every state in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

TV Manufacturers Accused Of Gaming Energy Usage Tests



> SAN FRANCISCO (CBS / AP) - An environmental group on Wednesday accused three major TV manufacturers of misleading consumers and regulators about how much energy high-definition screens devour, alleging that the televisions were designed to perform more efficiently during government testing than in ordinary use.


----------



## ekim68

Venturi resets electric vehicle world speed record at 341 mph



> For years now, the electric vehicle world speed record race has been a competition of one. But that hasn't deterred Venturi and its partners at Ohio State University from pushing the bar continuously higher. Still, things have remained steady for over half a decade since the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 2.5 electric streamliner set a 307.7-mph (495 km/h) record back in 2010. That changed on Monday, when the VBB-3 sped to a new electric vehicle record just over 341.4 mph (549.4 km/h) and reached a top speed of 358 mph (576 km/h).


----------



## ekim68

This Country Just Unveiled a Hydrogen-Powered Passenger Train



> The world's first CO2-emission-free train powered through hydrogen was unveiled this week in Germany.
> 
> The Coradia iLint, created by French company Alstom, was presented at the Berlin InnoTrans trade show on Tuesday.
> 
> The train's energy comes from combining hydrogen stored in tanks on the train with oxygen in the air. The energy is then stored in lithium-ion batteries.
> 
> The train's only emissions are steam and condensed water.


----------



## ekim68

40 Percent of Organizations Store Admin Passwords in Word Documents




> Still, 55 percent say they have evolved processes for managing privileged accounts, a recent survey found.


----------



## ekim68

Hindsight, eh? :down:


Tony Blair Says Iraq War Helped Give Rise to ISIS



> LONDON - Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, suggested on Sunday that the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which removed Saddam Hussein from power, helped give rise to the Islamic State, even as he said it was "hard to apologize for removing Saddam."
> 
> Mr. Blair, whose decision to involve Britain in the military mission made him deeply unpopular at home, told CNN that "there are elements of truth" to the view that the war in Iraq helped pave the way for the Islamic State.


----------



## ekim68

Self-contained prototype brings artificial photosynthesis a step closer to commercial reality



> While solar cells and wind turbines are the devices many people will think of for off-grid electricity production, the development of practical artificial photosynthesis for the creation of hydrogen via solar-powered water splitting could radically alter the way we produce energy locally. As part of the on-going pursuit of this goal, researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich claim to have created a working, compact, self-contained artificial photosynthesis system that could form the basis for practical commercial devices.


----------



## ekim68

Cisco Talos: Spam at levels not seen since 2010



> Spam is back in a big way - levels that have not been seen since 201o in fact. That's according to a blog post today form Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet, stated the blog's author Jaeson Schultz.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/our-atmosphere-is-leaking-oxygen-and-scientists-dont-kn-1786948116']Our Atmosphere Is Leaking Oxygen and Scientists Don't Know Why[/URL]



> It's nothing to lose sleep over-really, I promise-but Earth's atmosphere is leaking oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen levels have dropped by 0.7 percent over the past 800,000 years, and while scientists aren't sure why, they're rather excited about it.
> 
> "We did this analysis more out of interest than any expectation," Princeton University geologist Daniel Stolper told Gizmodo. "We didn't know whether oxygen would be going up, down, or flat. It turns out there is a very clear trend."


----------



## ekim68

One Big Question: Why do some people refuse to accept that human-induced climate change is real?



> We've noticed something here at New Atlas. We often see some of the liveliest comments on the site whenever we post an article relating to climate change. Many of those comments have to do with whether or not the concept of rapid, human induced climate change is indeed real or not. This got us wondering why the topic garners so many naysayers when other research-based findings in different areas of science on which we report do not.


----------



## ekim68

Google's self-driving car is the victim in a serious crash




> Autonomous tech can only do so much to avoid reckless human drivers.


----------



## ekim68

America Is Not the Greatest Country on Earth. It's No. 28



> Every study ranking nations by health or living standards invariably offers Scandinavian social democracies a chance to show their quiet dominance. A new analysis published this week-perhaps the most comprehensive ever-is no different. But what it does reveal are the broad shortcomings of sustainable development efforts, the new shorthand for not killing ourselves or the planet, as well as the specific afflictions of a certain North American country.
> 
> Iceland and Sweden share the top slot with Singapore as world leaders when it comes to health goals set by the United Nations, according to a report published in the _Lancet_. Using the UN's sustainable development goals as guideposts, which measure the obvious (poverty, clean water, education) and less obvious (societal inequality, industry innovation), more than 1,870 researchers in 124 countries compiled data on 33 different indicators of progress toward the UN goals related to health.


----------



## ekim68

Amid scrutiny, California to track all police use of force



> LOS ANGELES (AP) - From a broken bone to a fatal shooting, all 800 police departments in California must begin using a new online tool launched Thursday to report and help track every time officers use force that causes serious injuries.
> 
> The tool's developers hail it as the first statewide dataset of its kind in the country and a model for other states. Those more critical of law enforcement call it a big step toward better police accountability.


----------



## ekim68

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Have Become Top Carbon Polluters



> For the first time in decades, more carbon emissions will come from transportation than from coal- and gas-fired power plants.


----------



## ekim68

ISP To FCC: The Internet Is Oreos So Therefore We Should Be Able To Charge More



> Internet service providers have come up with all kinds of interesting reasons for why they should be able to cap your internet usage and charge you more money when you want to go above it. The newest example for the gallery is a doozy, though. The literal argument - and no, we are not making this up - is that Double Stuf Oreos cost more than regular ones, and therefore you should pay more for more internet. Yes, really.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon Claims Nobody Wants Unlimited Data, Wouldn't Be Profitable Anyway



> Back in 2011, Verizon and AT&T eliminated unlimited wireless data plans, instead pushing users toward share data allotments and overage fees as high as $15 per gigabyte. And while the companies did "grandfather" many of these unlimited users at the time, both companies have made at art form out of harassing or otherwise annoying these customers until they convert to costlier shared plans. And despite the fact that such overage-fee-based plans confuse the living hell out of most customers (who have no idea what a gigabyte is), both companies continue to insist that customers don't actually want unlimited data.


----------



## hewee

My sister has an AT&T unlimited wireless data plan that was done away with years ago and as long as she keeps the plan she can keep it. But only because she had it when they did away with it. Once she changes you can't get it back.


----------



## ekim68

Farmed fish could solve pending population crisis, food experts say



> MONTEREY, Calif. - Farmed fish has gotten a bad rap, but it's the only way the world is going to feed the additional 2.4 billion people expected to be added to the Earth's population in the next 34 years, experts told a sustainable food conference.


----------



## ekim68

Mobile breath analyzer checks oral hygiene on the go



> These days there are a quite a few high-tech ways to keep our oral hygiene in check, from toothbrushes that track your technique to smart floss dispensers that encourage healthy habits. Mint is the latest connected solution to hit bathrooms and beyond, and is said to detect signs of gum disease and poor oral hygiene on your breath in the space of a few seconds.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-elon-musk-plans-to-build-a-city-on-mars-up-1787146547']How Elon Musk Plans to Go to Mars [/URL]



> SpaceX plans to build a "self-sustaining city" on Mars, according to its founder Elon Musk. But, while we now know a lot more about how SpaceX plans to get to Mars, details about how people will actually survive up there remain sketchy.
> 
> Musk dropped the news on Tuesday during an address at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he had promised to reveal how the company planned to send people to live on Mars.
> 
> "I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy," said Musk, but he noted that he saw only two possible paths forward. "One path is to stay on Earth forever, and there will be some extinction event. The alternative is to become a multi-planetary species, which I hope you will agree is the right way to go."


----------



## ekim68

Amazon looking to abandon UPS, FedEx in favor of its own delivery service



> Amazon is already in the business of delivering packages to your door as quickly as possible, but now the company seems intent on cutting out shipping middlemen. A report by _The Wall Street Journal_ claims that Amazon is building its own shipping service to replace FedEx and UPS, giving it more control over its packages and possibly allowing it to ship packages from other retailers.


----------



## ekim68

3D-printed bones? New 'hyperelastic' material could let doctors print implants on demand



> Researchers at Northwestern University develop a new 3D-printable synthetic bone that could one day could help transform major surgery.


----------



## ekim68

David Mayman to take to the skies aboard JB-10 jetpack over Monaco this weekend



> Over the next few days, Monaco is set to get a glimpse of the future of personal flight. Jetpack jockey David Mayman is preparing to undertake three public flights featuring his updated JB-10 jetpack, marking the first time a jetpack has flown in Europe.


----------



## ekim68

26 crazy pictures of micro-apartments around the world



> Humanity is increasingly moving into cities, but the Earth isn't getting any bigger.
> 
> That means our apartments are getting smaller, and our living arrangements denser.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Pro-Fracking Law Ruled Unconstitutional by Pennsylvania Supreme Court



> The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that the state's controversial Act 13 is unconstitutional, calling it a special law that benefits the shale gas industry. The massive Marcellus Shale formation, which underlies a large area of Western Pennsylvania, provides more than 36 percent of the shale gas produced in the U.S.
> 
> The Pennsylvania State Legislature passed Act 13 in 2012 and it was almost immediately challenged by seven of the state's municipalities along with the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and a private physician. The onerous law enabled natural gas companies to seize privately owned subsurface property through eminent domain, placed a gag order on health professionals to prevent them from getting information on drilling chemicals that could harm their patients, and limited notification of spills and leaks to public water suppliers, excluding owners of private wells that supply drinking water for 25 percent of Pennsylvania residents. Act 13 also pre-empted municipal zoning of oil and gas development.


----------



## ekim68

America's super polluters



> EVANSVILLE, Indiana-To see one of the country's largest coal-fired power plants, head northwest from this Ohio River city. Or east, because there's another in the region. In fact, nearly every direction you go will take you to a coal plant - seven within 30 miles.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/our-best-view-yet-of-molecules-moving-inside-living-cel-1787276412']Our Best View Yet of Molecules Moving Inside Living Cells[/URL]



> A new microscope developed at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts is allowing scientists track the position and orientation of individual molecules in living cells. It has the potential to reveal unknown aspects of molecular behavior, including those that turn cells into agents of disease.
> 
> Dubbed the "instantaneous fluorescence polarization" microscope, this new tool is being used to understand how tiny molecules move and assemble inside live cells, including human skin cells. It reveals how individual molecules-which measure just a billionth of a meter across-wiggle around a live cell, bind together to form larger cellular structures, and drive a cell's biological functions.


----------



## ekim68

New California Law Allows Test of Autonomous Shuttle With No Driver



> A bill signed into law on Thursday by California Governor Jerry Brown allows a self-driving vehicle with no operator inside to test on a public road, a key step enabling a private business park outside San Francisco to test driverless shuttles.
> 
> Self-driving cars are already allowed to test on California public roads by 15 automakers, technology companies and startups, including Alphabet's Google, Ford, Honda and Tesla. But under current state regulations, a person must be in the driver's seat for monitoring, and the car must have brakes and a steering wheel.
> 
> The bill introduced by Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla allows testing in Contra Costa County northeast of San Francisco of the first full-autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel, brakes, accelerator or operator.


----------



## ekim68

In Canada's North, a Single Satellite Outage Means Losing Basic Services



> Around 5 PM Eastern time on Sunday, a satellite providing internet services to most of North America went offline due to a technical glitch, the CBC reported. If you live the vast majority of communities in southern Canada or the US, you probably didn't notice.
> 
> But in some parts of Canada's sparsely populated North, losing just one satellite means giving up basic services like access to ATMs or a flight out of town.
> 
> In other words, life went offline before the satellite's function was restored on Monday afternoon.


----------



## ekim68

As Brazil's New Ruler Admits Lie Behind Impeachment, US Press Closes Eyes



> In a September 22 speech to an elite foreign policy group in New York City, Brazil's legislatively installed president, Michel Temer, made the startling admission that President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office because of her position on economic policy, rather than any alleged wrongdoing on her part.


----------



## ekim68

HIV cure close after disease 'vanishes' from blood of British man 



> A British man could become the first person in the world to be cured of HIV using a new therapy designed by a team of scientists from five UK universities.
> 
> The 44-year-old is one of 50 people currently trialling a treatment which targets the disease even in its dormant state.
> 
> Scientists told The Sunday Times that presently the virus is completely undetectable in the man's blood, although that could be a result of regular drugs. However if the dormant cells are also cleared out it could represent the first complete cure. Trial results are expected to be published in 2018.


----------



## ekim68

Sandpoint town square home to first public Solar Roadways panel installation



> Over 2 years after the laying a bunch of solar harvesting hexagonal panels at its Idaho electronics lab, and 11 months after revealing its more powerful and more colorful third generation units, Solar Roadways has completed its first public installation. The City of Sandpoint, Idaho, is playing host to the proof of concept roll out, with 30 tiles now brightening up a town square - though not all of the panels are operational at the moment.


----------



## ekim68

These ten cities are home to the biggest botnets



> According to new data from cybersecurity researchers at Symantec, Turkey plays host to the highest botnet population in EMEA, with its most populous urban centre of Istanbul and capital city Ankara containing the highest and second highest number of botnet controlled devices in EMEA.
> 
> Behind Turkey, Italy ranks as the second-most bot-populated country, with Hungary third. That pattern is also reflected in the ranking of cities with the highest bot population with Italian capital Rome in third, followed by the Hungarian cities of Budapest and Szeged in fourth and fifth, according to the research from Norton by Symantec.


----------



## ekim68

Coal's Last Gamble: A choking industry bets on one more big score



> Squeezing into a wobbly four-seater propeller plane is the only way to reach the tiny tribe of Tyonek, tucked deep in the roadless Alaskan wilderness. Gliding above the long mudflats and the serpentine curves of streams, I spot the fat white backs of beluga whales surfacing at the mouth of a river and an island covered by sunning sea lions.
> 
> As the plane gets closer, the mudflats give way to swamps, which give way to dense evergreens. A towering mountain range materializes from the clouds, and, nestled in an inlet, the gently meandering lines of the Chuitna River come into focus.
> 
> This is the place where a coal company backed by a wealthy Texas family - one whose fabled legacy of gambling on energy markets extends back to a game of cards with an oil rig at stake - wants to sink a 300-foot-deep coal mine over 30 square miles of wetlands and forest. The $700 million project, commonly called the Chuitna mine, currently masquerades under the guise of a tiny Alaskan coal company called PacRim. If the project goes forward, it would all but obliterate Tyonek tribe's fishing and hunting grounds.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon workers can now be fired if they fix copper phone lines



> Verizon has told its field technicians in Pennsylvania that they can be fired if they try to fix broken copper phone lines. Instead, employees must try to replace copper lines with a device that connects to Verizon Wireless's cell phone network.
> 
> This directive came in a memo from Verizon to workers on September 20. "Failure to follow this directive may result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal," the memo said. It isn't clear whether this policy has been applied to Verizon workers outside of Pennsylvania.


----------



## ekim68

NATO Chief Sounds Alarm Over Netflix Deal With iPic



> The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) is sounding the alarm over a recent deal between Netflix and iPic, in which the luxury-theater chain will screen 10 movies simultaneously with their release on the streaming service.
> 
> The lobbying organization represents the country's theater chains and has been a staunch defender of traditional release windows that keep films exclusively on screens for roughly 90 days before they debut on home entertainment platforms. In a statement, NATO chief John Fithian warned that while iPic was free to make its own decisions, "We all should tread lightly and be mindful that over the years, the film industry's success is a direct result of a highly successful collaboration between film makers, distributors and exhibitors."


----------



## ekim68

After two million miles, Google's robot car now drives better than a 16-year-old



> On a foggy Monday morning in Silicon Valley this week, I took a ride in Google's self-driving car and nothing happened.
> 
> That's a big deal.
> 
> That's because the company announced its self-driving car project, which was created in 2009, has racked up over two million miles of driving experience. It's a significant marker for Google - no other company has that many miles of fully self-driving experience.


----------



## ekim68

Doctors' Political Views Affect How They Treat Patients



> A new study finds that if you mention a hot-button issue like abortion or guns, what the doctor tells you might depend on how he or she votes.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/rogue-algorithm-blamed-for-historic-crash-of-the-britis-1787523587']'Rogue' Algorithm Blamed for Historic Crash of the British Pound[/URL]



> The British pound suffered a "flash crash" earlier this morning in which it plummeted six percent against the US dollar within a matter of minutes. All signs point to high frequency stock trading as the culprit-and possibly a single algorithm.


----------



## ekim68

CIA 'Siren Servers' can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance



> The CIA claims to be able to predict social unrest days before it happens thanks to powerful super computers dubbed Siren Servers by the father of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier.
> 
> CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman announced that the agency has beefed-up its "anticipatory intelligence" through the use of deep learning and machine learning servers that can process an incredible amount of data.
> 
> "We have, in some instances, been able to improve our forecast to the point of being able to anticipate the development of social unrest and societal instability some I think as near as three to five days out," said Hallman on Tuesday at the Federal Tech event, Fedstival.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> 'Rogue' Algorithm Blamed for Historic Crash of the British Pound


It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the rogue algorithm was introduced by a Brexit "remainer"


----------



## ekim68

To me, algorithms are cheating....:down: If you're gonna Gamble, do it as yourself without any help from Programming....Investors have become so Lazy...:down: And, Spoiled......:down:


----------



## ekim68

Law-defying transistor smashes industry 'limit', measures just 1nm



> U.S. researchers have unveiled the world's smallest transistor reported to date, combining a new mix of materials, which makes even the tiniest silicon-based transistor appear ginormous in comparison.
> 
> The team, led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, designed the minuscule transistor with a working one-nanometre gate - far surpassing any industry expectation for reducing transistor sizes. In the scientific study, _MoS2 transistors with 1-nanometer gate lengths_, published today in the journal _Science_, the researchers describe a prototype device which uses a novel semiconductor material known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-true-scale-of-nuclear-bombs-is-totally-frightening-1787538060']The True Scale of Nuclear Bombs Is Totally Frightening[/URL]



> Nuclear weapons are already scary enough, but when you dig deeper and find out how powerful the weapons truly are, they get even more terrifying. The weapons we've built after the first atomic bombs are so strong that you can basically use Hiroshima as a unit of measurement. The largest nuclear explosion in human history, the Tsar Bomba, detonated with a force of 50 megatons or the power of 3,333 Hiroshimas.


----------



## ekim68

Protecting Privacy for Broadband Consumers



> The Internet is an indispensable part of our daily lives. At home, at work and on the go, we are constantly tethered to an Internet connection to shop, check email, read news and post on social media websites.
> 
> Seldom do we stop to realize that our Internet Service Provider - or ISP - is collecting information about us every time we go online. Your ISP handles all of your network traffic. That means it has a broad view of all of your unencrypted online activity - when you are online, the websites you visit, and the apps you use. If you have a mobile device, your provider can track your physical location throughout the day in real time. Even when data is encrypted, your broadband provider can piece together significant amounts of information about you - including private information such as a chronic medical condition or financial problems - based on your online activity.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> The True Scale of Nuclear Bombs Is Totally Frightening


...


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/german-lawmakers-vote-to-ban-the-internal-combustion-en-1787574000']German Lawmakers Vote to Ban the Internal Combustion Engine [/URL]



> The modern internal combustion engine first came from Germany and now Germany wants to put a nail in its coffin. The Bundesrat has passed a resolution to ban the ICE beginning in 2030.
> 
> Germany's Spiegel Magazin reported this morning that the country's top legislative body was able to reach a bi-partisan agreement that hopes to allow only zero-emission vehicles on EU roads in 14 years. For the resolution to be instituted across Europe, it will have to be approved by the EU. But according to Forbes, "German regulations traditionally have shaped EU and UNECE regulations."


----------



## ekim68

Baidu replacing QWERTY, defaults to voice-centric keyboard



> A new third-party keyboard app from Chinese web services Baidu is taking the spotlight away from QWERTY with a voice-focused interface.
> 
> Users of the free Android TalkType app are welcomed by a large microphone icon and prompted to 'Speak now' to begin dictating. Baidu claims that the app's speech recognition is more accurate than actual typing, having developed and tested the technology alongside speech software experts at Stanford University.


----------



## ekim68

RedHack leaks reveal the rise of Turkey's pro-government Twitter trolls



> Leaked emails from the Turkish government provide new details of how Turkey's pro-government Twitter troll army targets the opposition and silences media criticism in the media.
> 
> Last Friday, RedHack, a Marxist hacker group, claimed to have hacked personal email accounts of Turkey's Energy Minister and President Erdoğan's son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. They threatened to leak data if Turkey did not release leftist dissidents, including Kurdish political party HDP's deputy, Alp Antınörs, and renowned novelist Aslı Erdoğan, from pre-trial detention.


----------



## ekim68

Silkworms Spin Super-Silk After Eating Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene



> Silk-the stuff of lustrous, glamorous clothing-is very strong. Researchers now report a clever way to make the gossamer threads even stronger and tougher: by feeding silkworms graphene or single-walled carbon nanotubes (_Nano Lett._ 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03597). The reinforced silk produced by the silkworms could be used in applications such as durable protective fabrics, biodegradable medical implants, and ecofriendly wearable electronics, they say.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68,
Mike. My screen saver has suddenly become "Crown Point Oregon" Are you anywhere near this beautiful place?


----------



## ekim68

I'm about 125 miles south of Crown Point but I've been there a few times. It's in the Columbia River Gorge and has a stunning view...


----------



## ekim68

World's biggest defence company builds plant to make energy from landfill



> Lockheed Martin is making progress with its plan to be a global player in the clean energy market. Last month, executives at Lockheed Martin's Owego, New York plant cut the ribbon on a new self-sustaining bioenergy system that is helping power the facility, converting 3,560 tons of waste per year into electricity.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Watch Banned From Cabinet Meetings Over Spy Fears



> Ministers have been forbidden to wear the Apple Watch during cabinet meetings due to the risk they could be hacked by Russian agents, according to a report.
> 
> Prime minister Theresa May imposed the new rules following several high-profile hacks that have been blamed on Russia, according to The Telegraph, which cited unnamed sources.


----------



## ekim68

Google Assistant uses joke writers from Pixar and The Onion



> Future conversations with your intelligent gadgets may be co-authored by your favorite comedy writers.
> 
> It's not too great a leap: according to a Wall Street Journal report, comedy and joke writers from Pixar movies and the Onion are already working on making Google's upcoming Assistant AI voice service feel more loose and vibrant.
> 
> The development of compelling voice AI will need to start drawing from deeper, more entertaining wells, especially as these home hubs try to have conversations all day long.


----------



## ekim68

World's Biggest Data Breaches



> Selected losses greater than 30,000 records
> 
> (updated 24rd September 2016)


----------



## ekim68

Cutting the Cord: 200 channels but only 20 worth watching?



> We have come a long way from the pay-TV scenario Bruce Springsteen bemoaned in _57 Channels (And Nothin' On)_. But after a look at the most recent Nielsen TV viewing data you certainly can understand why consumers are crying out for slimmer pay-TV bundles.
> 
> With more than 200 channels available on their cable, satellite or telco-delivered service, viewers are actually watching, on average, only about 20 channels, according to recent research from Nielsen.


----------



## ekim68

World's longest sightseeing escalator awaits you in Central China



> A 688-meter-long sightseeing escalator made its debut during the past week-long National Day holiday, contributing to tourists' visits at Enshi Grand Canyon in Enshi city, Central China's Hubei province.
> 
> "The escalator is the world's longest sightseeing one, costing each visitor 20 yuan ($2.98)", said an insider, who went on saying that visitors can enjoy the beautiful sights by taking less time and effort thanks to the escalator.


----------



## ekim68

Yasuni Man film is an intimate portrait of a beautiful land under siege for its oil



> US biologist Ryan Killackey spent seven years filming a polemical account of a remote forest community under pressure from US and Chinese oil companies


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> World's longest sightseeing escalator awaits you in Central China


...


----------



## ekim68

Smaller, better, safer: The new 'almost perfect' batteries coming to your gadgets soon



> Solid-state batteries could offer a viable alternative to the types of batteries that caused Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 woes.


----------



## ekim68

Senator wants nationwide, all-mail voting to counter election hacks



> "It's not a question of if you're going to get hacked-it's when you're going to get hacked."
> 
> Those were the words of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam as he sought to assure investors last week that the company is still interested in purchasing Yahoo despite the massive data breach of Yahoo consumer accounts.
> 
> Whether McAdam's words ring true for the hodgepodge of election systems across the US is anybody's guess. But in the wake of the Obama administration's announcement that the Russian government directed hacks on the Democratic National Committee and other institutions to influence US elections, a senator from Oregon says the nation should conduct its elections like his home state does: all-mail voting.


----------



## ekim68

Landmark Paris Climate Pact to Take Effect in 30 Days



> Moving with a diplomatic haste rivaling the rapid recent rise in global temperatures, the European Union on Wednesday joined dozens of countries in signing onto a United Nations climate treaty, pushing it to within a month of taking legal force.
> 
> Following the filing of paperwork in recent weeks by 73 countries, collectively responsible for 57 percent of annual climate emissions, a key threshold for the Paris agreement was passed Wednesday. The U.N. said the treaty will take effect Nov. 4.


----------



## ekim68

Most drivers who own cars with built-in GPS systems use phones for directions




> Many new cars today come with built-in navigation systems, but a lot of frustrated new car owners just use their phones for directions, according to a new survey.


----------



## ekim68

Google and Facebook are building the fastest trans-Pacific cable yet



> Google and Facebook are teaming up to build a 120 Terabits per second (Tbps) submarine cable that will connect Los Angeles with Hong Kong. The two companies are working with Pacific Light Data Communication - a wholly owned subsidiary of China Soft Power Technology that's relatively new to the sub-sea cable game.
> 
> Once the new 12,800 km cable is at full capacity, it'll be the highest-capacity trans-Pacific cable yet. Until now, that record was held by the FASTER cable, which Google also has a stake in.


----------



## ekim68

One Big Question: Will kids being born today need to learn how to drive?



> With companies like Google and Volvo working hard to bring self-driving cars to reality, the question of "if" has solidly morphed into one of "when" regarding the technology. Will robotic cars be so prevalent in the next decade or two that our children won't ever need to get driver's licenses?


----------



## ekim68

Robotic arm gives quadriplegic man a new sense of touch



> In 2012, quadriplegic Jan Scheuermann used her own thoughts to control a robotic arm and feed herself a chocolate bar thanks to a system developed by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Now, the same team has recreated the physical feeling of touch through a robotic hand, allowing a quadriplegic man to feel "his" fingers and hand for the first time in 10 years.


----------



## ekim68

An accidental shooting kills a child every other day




> The Associated Press





> and the USA TODAY Network set out to determine just how many others there have been.
> 
> The findings: During the first six months of this year, minors died from accidental shootings - at their own hands, or at the hands of other children or adults - at a pace of one every other day, far more than limited federal statistics indicate.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Robotic arm gives quadriplegic man a new sense of touch


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> An accidental shooting kills a child every other day


Sad..


----------



## ekim68

Can AI really be ethical and unbiased?



> Artificial intelligence will change industries and our lives and a variety of camps will be talking about combining algorithms and ethics. The questions surrounding AI will proliferate.


----------



## ekim68

Posting on Facebook is now a crime under Ethiopia's state of emergency



> A state of emergency declared in Ethiopia last week is growing more draconian by the day. Posting updates on the current status of the country, hit by anti-government protests since last November, is now a crime, the government said over the weekend.
> 
> Watching Oromia Media Network and Ethiopian Satellite Television and Radio, outlets run by the Ethiopian diaspora supportive of the protesters, is also illegal.


----------



## ekim68

Greenland Is Very Mad About the Toxic Waste the US Left Buried Under Its Ice



> Greenland isn't happy about being treated as a dumping ground for abandoned US military bases established at the height of the Cold War-and in a newspaper editorial, it's calling on Denmark to deal with the mess left behind by the Americans, since the Danish long ago took responsibility for them. This editorial notes that, after decades, Greenland is "losing its patience."
> 
> One of the abandoned bases, called Camp Century, is full of nasty chemicals and some radioactive material, as Motherboard previously reported.
> 
> At Camp Century, which was built in 1959, soldiers called "Iceworms" practiced deployment of missiles against Russia and literally lived inside the ice. When the US decommissioned the base in the 1960s, the military left basically everything behind, thinking that its waste would stay locked up in the Greenland ice sheet forever.
> 
> Well, climate change has made that unlikely. Melting ice threatens to expose all kinds of toxic debris in decades to come, and Greenland wants it cleaned up, now.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft claims its speech transcription AI is now better than human professionals



> Transcribing a conversation between two humans is one of those tasks that's deceptively difficult for machines to tackle. Even if the audio file is high quality and doesn't have any background noise, the algorithm needs to contend with different voices, interruptions, hesitations, corrections, and a litany of common conversational nuances.
> 
> A new paper from Microsoft Research claims to slightly beat human-level transcription of conversation, even when the human transcript is double-checked by a second human for accuracy. The team doesn't attribute this achievement to any breakthrough in algorithm or data, but the careful tuning of existing AI architectures.


----------



## ekim68

Soybean nitrogen breakthrough could help feed the world



> PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University biologist Mechthild Tegeder has developed a way to dramatically increase the yield and quality of soybeans.
> 
> Her greenhouse-grown soybean plants fix twice as much nitrogen from the atmosphere as their natural counterparts, grow larger and produce up to 36 percent more seeds.
> 
> Tegeder designed a novel way to increase the flow of nitrogen, an essential nutrient, from specialized bacteria in soybean root nodules to the seed-producing organs. She and Amanda Carter, a biological sciences graduate student, found the increased rate of nitrogen transport kicked the plants into overdrive.


----------



## ekim68

Abundant silicon at the heart of cheaper renewable energy storage system



> A team of researchers from Madrid is developing a thermal energy storage system that uses molten silicon to store up to 10 times more energy than existing thermal storage options. The hope is to develop the technology into a new generation of low-cost solar thermal stations to store solar energy in urban centers.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. economy surges to strongest growth in two years



> The U.S. economy grew at its strongest pace in two years in the third quarter, according to government data released Friday morning, helping to allay fears that the world's largest economy might be stalling after a sustained period of weakness.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Internet Archive, repository of modern culture, turns 20



> When the Internet Archive was created 20 years ago, few envisioned how a small galaxy of about 500,000 websites would evolve into the center of human communication and culture.
> 
> Now, the nonprofit San Francisco organization - which celebrated the milestone with a party Wednesday night - curates a vast digital archive that includes more than 370 million websites and 273 billion pages, many captured before they disappeared forever.


----------



## ekim68

Russia Ousted From UN Human Rights Council in Historic Vote



> Russia lost its bid to retain a seat on the UN Human Rights Council amid daily accusations that the country may be guilty of war crimes for its support of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's assault on the city of Aleppo.
> 
> The 193-member General Assembly on Friday elected 14 countries to the 47-member council. With 112 votes, Russia lost to Hungry and Croatia. As many as 87 human rights groups had objected to Russia's candidacy, said Akshaya Kumar, deputy UN director for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.


----------



## ekim68

Zombie wind and solar? How repowering old facilities helps renewables keep cutting costs



> Renewable energy is a growth industry, so most media attention goes to installment numbers, expansion rates, and cost declines. Less is paid to the other side of the equation - what happens to facilities when they reach the end of their productive lives.
> 
> For most fossil facilities, reaching a retirement age means being decommissioned and demolished, if not retrofitted with a new turbine and cleaner fuel. But despite some persistent media rumors of "abandoned" wind turbines or assertions from a certain presidential candidate that "half of [turbines] are broken" or "rusted and rotting," the end of one renewable energy facility's life most often marks the beginning of another.
> 
> Most solar farms are too new to be retired yet, but the first U.S. wind projects, built in the 1980s and 1990s, are reaching the end of their productive lives. Output is dwindling, maintenance costs are climbing, and new technologies make the turbines obsolete.
> 
> But the existing sites, with ready transmission connections and high wind potential, make them ideal candidates for what the industry calls "repowering."


----------



## ekim68

Do Wars Make Us Safer? The People Aren't Feeling It



> A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the US public and the US media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace.


----------



## ekim68

UK government wants prisons geoblocked by drone manufacturers



> The UK Ministry of Justice, in an attempt to address growing concerns with the prevalence of illegal drone activities at prisons, is working with drone manufacturers to include prison coordinates in pre-programmed no-fly zones.


----------



## ekim68

White House, 35 states to boost electric vehicle charging stations




> The White House





> said on Thursday it will establish 48 national electric-vehicle (EV) charging networks on nearly 25,000 miles of highways in 35 U.S. states.
> 
> The Obama administration said 28 states, utilities and vehicle manufactures, including General Motors, BMW and Nissan Motor, and EV charging firms have agreed to work together to jump-start the additional charging stations.
> 
> The corridors were required to be established by December under a 2015 highway law.


----------



## ekim68

This nanotechnology microsensor is so sensitive it can detect beat of insect wings



> Spanish researchers knew they had an extremely sensitive device on their hands when even the footsteps of someone entering the lab were enough to distort test results.
> 
> In fact the thermoelectric sensor based on silicon nanotechnology can detect the flutter of butterfly wings, according to its creators at Barcelona's UAB, IMB CNM-CSIC, and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
> 
> They believe the device could have a number of applications in a range of fields, including the health sector.


----------



## ekim68

2016's Fattest States in America



> "Fat" may be the new normal in America. Drawing on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a report from JAMA Internal Medicine found that more than three quarters of American adults today are either overweight or obese. And for the first time in history, the number of obese people has surpassed that of the overweight.


----------



## ekim68

Clergy join Dakota Access pipeline protesters for ceremony



> CANNON BALL, N.D. (AP) -- Hundreds of clergy of various faiths joined protests Thursday against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in southern North Dakota, singing hymns, marching and ceremonially burning a copy of a 600-year-old document.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Clergy join Dakota Access pipeline protesters for ceremony


----------



## ekim68

5 viruses, 1 metal and 1 solvent tagged as new cancer causers in US agency report



> You likely already know that cigarettes and certain types of radiation cause cancer, but there are actually over 200 other substances in the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) just-released 14th annual Report on Carcinogens (ROC) that are believed to lead to malignant tumors in human beings. And seven of those were just added.


----------



## ekim68

Digital Life aims to make a 3D scan of every animal species on Earth



> A recent study suggested that the total number of unique species that call Earth home may be as mind-bogglingly high as 1 trillion. Granted, the vast majority of those are microscopic organisms, but still, that number makes the Digital Life project's goal, to make 3D scans of every kind of living animal, sound ridiculously ambitious. Nevertheless, the team believes that digitally preserving the biodiversity of the planet is increasingly important.


----------



## ekim68

Face electrodes let you taste and chew in virtual reality



> You're having dinner in a virtual reality game. The banquet scene in front of you looks so real that your mouth is watering. Normally, you would be disappointed, but not this time. You approach the food, stick out your tongue - and taste the flavours on display. You move your jaw to chew - and feel the food's texture between your teeth.
> 
> Experiments with "virtual food" use electronics to emulate the taste and feel of the real thing, even when there's nothing in your mouth. This tech could add new sensory inputs to virtual reality or augment real-world dining experiences, especially for people with restricted diets or health issues that affect their ability to eat.


----------



## ekim68

Hate daylight saving time? Here's what it would take to ditch it.



> People across the country will go through the mild torture of circadian disruption as daylight saving time (DST) comes to an end on Sunday morning. In preparation, writers from all corners of the internet have started debating the merits of falling back and springing forward. They cite various studies proving that adjusting our clocks either increases or decreases energy use, saves lives or costs them, and makes crime rates go up or down.
> 
> But no matter the evidence, a whole lot of people just hate DST, complaining that springing ahead leads to more car crashes, sleepier students, and added stress. The haters have launched many, many online petitions to scrap it entirely. One petition asks Congress to "please stop the messing with our schedules." A 2014 poll found that half of Americans simply don't see the point.


----------



## ekim68

King of chess Magnus Carlsen fears being a pawn in hackers' game



> Magnus Carlsen, the reigning king of chess, has called on Microsoft for help as fears grow Russian hackers will target him before next week's World Championship.
> 
> The man dubbed the "Mozart of chess" has spent months using high-powered chess computers to meticulously prepare moves for his gruelling 12-game match against challenger Sergey Karjakin.
> 
> But any leak of his analysis would hand a significant advantage to Crimean-born Karjakin, the fiercely-patriotic darling of Russian president Vladimir Putin.


----------



## ekim68

Uber, Lyft, Zipcar Offer Free Or Discounted Rides To Polls On Election Day



> Election Day is nearly here, and millions of Americans will head to their respective polling places on Tuesday. You might be able to drive, walk, bike, or jetpack to your voting site, but for those who need a ride (or just a car), a handful of companies are offering free or discounted options.
> 
> Lyft, Uber, Zipcar, and Maven have unveiled a variety of discounts and promotions aimed at enabling voters to get to the polls on Tuesday.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Uber, Lyft, Zipcar Offer Free Or Discounted Rides To Polls On Election Day


----------



## ekim68

NASA reveals why New Delhi is blanketed with deadly smog



> The festival Diwali may have contributed to severe air pollution in India's capital New Delhi, but a far more worrisome practice in the country could be its major cause.
> 
> Four days after Diwali, Delhiites continue to grapple with a heavy smog blanket with poor visibility and the air quality index reaching alarming levels across the city.
> 
> Until now, many were pointing to bursting of crackers (a norm during Diwali) as the main cause of the severe air pollution, but images published by NASA suggest that burning of crops in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana could be the biggest reason why the air quality in the world's most polluted city refuses to clear.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One will build the first Hyperloop system to go from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in twelve minutes




> Hyperloop One





> and the United Arab Emirates are on the fast track to building out the first hyperloop system. Just today H1 announced it would build the first commercial hyperloop transportation system from Dubai to Abu Dhabi.
> 
> The journey is 99 miles (159.4 km) long and normally takes about two hours by car but H1 promises it would take a mere 12 minutes in the hyperloop.


----------



## ekim68

Perovskite combination rivals silicon solar cell efficiency



> Scientists working at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have created a hybrid photovoltaic cell from multiple layers of different perovskite materials that has a claimed a peak efficiency of 26 percent. It's said that the cell can easily be sprayed onto flexible surfaces to make bendable, high-efficiency solar panels.
> 
> A hybrid organic-inorganic conglomerate, perovskite is used in solar cells to capture light in a similar way to common silicon-based solar cells by converting incoming photon energy into electrical current. Unlike rigid silicon semiconductor materials that require a great deal of expensive processing and manipulation to turn them into solar cells, however, perovskite photovoltaic devices are said to be cheaper and easier to make, in addition to being much more flexible.


----------



## ekim68

Minnesota Elects First Somali-American Female Legislator



> Although the U.S. did not elect its first female president Tuesday night, one woman still made history.
> 
> Former refugee Ilhan Omar, who proudly wears the hijab, became America's first Somali-American Muslim woman legislator after she claimed a strong victory in the Minnesota House race.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-usb-stick-performs-an-hiv-test-1788808322']This USB Stick Performs an HIV Test[/URL]



> Scientists in the UK have developed a USB stick that can quickly and accurately measure the amount of HIV is in a patient's blood.
> 
> The medical device was created by scientists at Imperial College London and tech firm DNA Electronics, and all it needs is a simple drop of blood to measure HIV-1 levels. It then creates an electrical signal that's fed into a computer, laptop, or handheld device. The disposable test could be used by HIV patients to monitor their own treatment and help patients in remote regions of the world, where more standard HIV tests are inaccessible.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook achieves 20Gbps data rate over radio spectrum



> Facebook's Connectivity Lab has announced that it has achieved data transmission rates of a record-breaking 20Gbps over the millimetre-wave (MMW) section of the radio spectrum; however, the transceiving stations need to be incredibly tightly calibrated to each other, with the team describing the margin for error as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.


----------



## ekim68

Daily soda boosts risk for prediabetes, study finds



> THURSDAY, Nov. 10, 2016 -- Drinking a can of sugary soda every day can dramatically heighten a person's risk of developing prediabetes, a "warning sign" condition that precedes full-blown type 2 diabetes, a new study reports.
> 
> A person who drinks a daily can of sugar-sweetened beverage has a 46 percent increased risk of developing prediabetes, said senior researcher Nicola McKeown, a scientist with the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/these-fake-fingerprint-stickers-let-you-access-a-protec-1788710313']These Fake Fingerprint Stickers Let You Access a Protected Phone While Wearing Gloves[/URL]



> After applying a textured stick to the tip of your glove, you just have to register the it as an approved fingerprint using your smartphone's security settings.


----------



## ekim68

Nuclear weapon missing since 1950 'may have been found'



> A commercial diver may have discovered a lost decommissioned US nuclear bomb off the coast of Canada.
> 
> Sean Smyrichinsky was diving for sea cucumbers near British Columbia when he discovered a large metal device that looked a bit like a flying saucer.
> 
> The Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) believes it could be a "lost nuke" from a US B-36 bomber that crashed in the area in 1950.
> 
> The government does not believe the bomb contains active nuclear material.


----------



## ekim68

Las Vegas gets "kinetic tiles" that power lights with foot traffic



> A New York-based startup called EnGoPlanet has installed four streetlights in a plaza off the Las Vegas Strip that are powered exclusively by solar and kinetic energy. The installations aren't mere streetlights though-they also power a variety of environmental monitors, support video surveillance, and, for the masses, offer USB ports for device charging.
> 
> The streetlights are topped by a solar panel crest, and have "kinetic tiles" on the ground below them. These panels reportedly can generate 4 to 8 watts from people walking on them, depending on the pressure of the step.


----------



## ekim68

Toxic Air -- the "Invisible Killer" That Stifles 300 Million Children



> Rome-About 300 million children in the world are living in areas with outdoor air so toxic -- six or more times higher than international pollution guidelines -- that it can cause serious health damage, including harming their brain development.
> 
> This shocking finding has just been revealed by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in a new report -- 'Clear the air for children.' "Pollutants don't only harm children's developing lungs -- they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their developing brains -- and, thus, their futures," UNICEF's executive director Anthony Lake on Oct 31 said while announcing the report.


----------



## ekim68

Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change



> A bright speck of climate news was quickly overshadowed by the presidential election this week-America's children have officially won the right to sue their government over global warming.
> 
> Yesterday, a lawsuit filed by 21 youth plaintiffs was ruled valid by US District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon. A group of citizens, whose ages range from nine to 20, charged President Obama, the fossil fuel industry, and other federal agencies with violating their constitutional rights by declining to take action against climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Sign of the Future Times, eh? 


[URL='http://io9.gizmodo.com/10-mindblowingly-futuristic-technologies-that-will-appe-673136756']10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s[/URL]



> Two decades is not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but owing to accelerating change we can expect to see the emergence of some fairly disruptive technological innovations in the coming years. Here are 10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that should appear by the 2030s.


----------



## ekim68

First home brain implant lets 'locked-in' woman communicate



> A paralysed woman has learned to use a brain implant to communicate by thought alone. It is the first time a brain-computer interface has been used at home in a person's day-to-day life, without the need for doctors and engineers to recalibrate the device.


----------



## ekim68

Did Facebook Really Tolerate Fake News to Appease Conservatives?



> Facebook has spent the past week denying that fake pro-Trump news on its platform played a role in the outcome of the U.S. election. On Monday, _Gizmodo_ published a report that, if true, would severely puncture Facebook's credibility. The tech site reports:


----------



## ekim68

Time Warner Cable Sued Again Over Sneaky Hidden Fees...By Plaintiff Not Seeking Monetary Damages



> For some time now broadband providers have taken a page out of the banking playbook and hitting consumers with sneaky, below-the-line fees for TV and broadband service. Whether it's the use of "regulatory recovery fee" (a bogus fee designed to sound like it's government-mandated to misdirect blame) or an entirely pointless and nonsensical fee like CenturyLink's "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," these surcharges exist for one purpose: they let the ISP advertise one price, then charge something dramatically different.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/chernobyls-gigantic-radiation-shield-is-now-being-moved-1788967188']Chernobyl's Gigantic Radiation Shield Is Now Being Moved Into Place[/URL]



> A giant metal shield designed to contain radioactive waste at Chernobyl's damaged nuclear reactor is being moved into place.
> 
> Workers at the site of the world's deadliest nuclear accident have started to move a shield, called the New Safe Confinement, that should prevent further radioactive material from leaking out of the damaged reactor over the next century.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's new MacBook Pro may be the world's fastest stock laptop




> New PCIe solid-state drives could double the read/write performance of last year's model


----------



## ekim68

Online bullying counselling on increase, says Childline



> The number of children and young people needing counselling about online bullying has increased by 88% over five years, according to a helpline.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Online bullying counselling on increase, says Childline


...


----------



## ekim68

U.S. finalizes 'quiet cars' rules to prevent injuries



> The U.S. government on Monday finalized long-delayed rules that will require "quiet cars" like electric vehicles and hybrids to emit alert sounds when they are moving at speeds of up to 18.6 miles per hour (30 km per hour) to help prevent injuries among pedestrians, cyclists and the blind.
> 
> The rules, which were required by Congress, will require automakers like Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O), Nissan Motor Co (7201.T) and Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) to add the sounds to all vehicles by September 2019. The U.S. Transportation Department said it expects the rules would prevent 2,400 injuries a year by 2020 and require the addition of alert sounds to about 530,000 2020 model vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese Scientists Become First to Use CRISPR Gene-Editing on Humans




> Chinese scientists are attempting to use CRISPR to develop a new treatment for cancer patients, and the U.S. will soon follow their lead.


----------



## ekim68

Stephen Hawking: We might have 1,000 years left on Earth



> Science celebrity Stephen Hawking says the only way humankind can escape mass extinction is to find another planet.
> 
> And the clock is ticking.
> 
> During a speech Tuesday at Britain's Oxford University Union, Hawking detailed the history of man's understanding of the universe and reiterated that the future of humankind lies in space


----------



## ekim68

Office Depot Allegedly Diagnosing Computers With Nonexistent Viruses To Meet Sales Goals



> Retailers upselling customers on services they don't need is nothing new, but a new report claims that some Office Depot employees are falsely claiming computers are infected with viruses in order to meet sales goals.
> 
> According to KIRO-TV in Seattle, employees of the office supply retailer allege that pressure to sell protection plans and other services has led store staffers to misdiagnose computers with viruses.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Office Depot Allegedly Diagnosing Computers With Nonexistent Viruses To Meet Sales Goals


...


----------



## ekim68

Britain has passed the 'most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy'



> The law forces UK internet providers to store browsing histories -- including domains visited -- for one year, in case of police investigations.


----------



## ekim68

When a city has gigabit Internet, prices for slower speed tiers drop



> The mere presence of gigabit Internet speeds in a metro area drives down the price of plans with slower speeds, according to new industry-funded research. Thus, the data suggests that even customers who don't purchase gigabit Internet benefit from its availability.


----------



## ekim68

Kaspersky OS: Antivirus Firm Launches Its Own "Hackproof" OS, Based On Microkernel



> Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity and antivirus company, has announced their new operating system which was in development for the last 14 years. Dubbed as Kaspersky OS, it has made its debut on a Kraftway Layer 3 Switch.
> 
> Not many details have been revealed by the CEO Eugene Kaspersky in his blog post. The GUI-less OS - as it appears in the image - has been designed from scratch and Eugene said it doesn't have "even the slightest smell of Linux". He actually tagged "Kaspersky OS being non-Linux" as one of the three main distinctive features he mentioned.


----------



## ekim68

NIH Scientists Identify Potent Antibody that Neutralizes Nearly All HIV Strains



> Scientists from the National Institutes of Health have identified an antibody from an HIV-infected person that potently neutralized 98 percent of HIV isolates tested, including 16 of 20 strains resistant to other antibodies of the same class. The remarkable breadth and potency of this antibody, named N6, make it an attractive candidate for further development to potentially treat or prevent HIV infection, say the researchers.


----------



## ekim68

Fiat Chrysler teams up with Amazon to sell cars online



> Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) (FCHA.MI) said it has teamed up with U.S. internet giant Amazon (AMZN.O) to start selling cars online offering an additional discount.
> 
> Initially only Italian buyers will be able to purchase their cars with a simple click online and the offers on Amazon.it will be limited to three models - the 500, the Panda and the 500L.


----------



## ekim68

Canada plans to phase out coal-powered electricity by 2030




> Canada





> has announced plans to phase out the use of coal-fired electricity by 2030.
> 
> The move is in stark contrast to President-elect Donald Trump's vow to revive the American coal industry.
> 
> The environment minister, Kathleen McKenna, said the goal is to make sure 90% of Canada's electricity comes from sustainable sources by that time - up from 80% today.
> 
> The announcement is one of a series of measures Justin Trudeau's Liberal government is rolling out as part of a broader climate change plan. Trudeau also has plans to implement a carbon tax.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese solar firm to build plant in Chernobyl exclusion zone



> Two Chinese firms plan to build a solar power plant in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which has been off limits since a devastating explosion contaminated the region with deadly radiation in 1986.
> 
> GCL System Integration Technology (GCL-SI), a subsidiary of the GCL Group, said it would cooperate with China National Complete Engineering Corp (CCEC) on the project in Ukraine, with construction expected to start next year.
> 
> "There will be remarkable social benefits and economic ones as we try to renovate the once damaged area with green and renewable energy," Shu Hua, the chairman of GCL-SI, said in a press release.


----------



## ekim68

Aussie engineers unveil their entry in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition



> Since Elon Musk revealed details of his proposed Hyperloop in a white paper in 2013, the idea of supersonic travel through vacuum tubes has captured the imagination of the public and engineers around the world - which was exactly the point. SpaceX may not be building the system itself, but it's playing a big part in getting the idea off the ground, including hosting a pod design competition for teams of university students.


----------



## ekim68

Google's AI translation tool seems to have invented its own secret internal language



> All right, don't panic, but _computers have created their own secret language and are probably talking about us right now_. Well, that's kind of an oversimplification, and the last part is just plain untrue. But there _is_ a fascinating and existentially challenging development that Google's AI researchers recently happened across.


----------



## ekim68

Japan plans supercomputer to leap into technology future



> Japan plans to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country's manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics.
> 
> The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world's current best-performing machine.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists propose 10 policies to protect vital pollinators



> Pesticide regulation, diversified farming systems and long-term monitoring are all ways governments can help to secure the future of pollinators such as bees, flies and wasps, according to scientists.
> 
> In an article published today in the journal _Science_, a team of researchers has suggested ten clear ways in which governments can protect and secure pollination services - vital to the production of fruits, vegetables and oils.


----------



## ekim68

For the first time, living cells have formed carbon-silicon bonds



> Scientists have managed to coax living cells into making carbon-silicon bonds, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon - one of the most abundant elements on Earth - into the building blocks of life.
> 
> While chemists have achieved carbon-silicon bonds before - they're found in everything from paints and semiconductors to computer and TV screens - they've so far never been found in nature, and these new cells could help us understand more about the possibility of silicon-based life elsewhere in the Universe.
> 
> After oxygen, silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth's crust, and yet it has nothing to do with biological life.


----------



## ekim68

Sugar-free products stop us getting slimmer



> Many people believe that synthetic sweeteners will help them lose weight. But it turns out that one common substitute for sugar actually blocks the function of an enzyme that is essential for preventing obesity.


----------



## ekim68

Diamonds turn nuclear waste into nuclear batteries



> One problem with dealing with nuclear waste is that it's often hard to tell what's waste and what's a valuable resource. Case in point is the work of physicists and chemists at the University of Bristol, who have found a way to convert thousands of tonnes of seemingly worthless nuclear waste into man-made diamond batteries that can generate a small electric current for longer than the entire history of human civilization.
> 
> How to dispose of nuclear waste is one of the great technical challenges of the 21st century. The trouble is, it usually turns out not to be so much a question of disposal as long-term storage. If it was simply a matter of getting rid of radioactive material permanently, there are any number of options, but spent nuclear fuel and other waste consists of valuable radioactive isotopes that are needed in industry and medicine, or can be reprocessed to produce more fuel. Disposal, therefore is more often a matter of keeping waste safe, but being able to get at it later when needed.


----------



## ekim68

Europol closes 4,500 websites peddling fake brands



> In a massive crackdown, police and law enforcement agencies across Europe have seized more than 4,500 website domains trading in counterfeit goods, often via social networks, officials said on Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Inside the project to rebuild the EDSAC, the world's first general purpose computer



> Imagine building a computer you'd never seen, with no plan for putting it together and only grainy black-and-white photos and decades-old memories to guide you.
> 
> This was precisely the situation that the British team rebuilding the almost 70-year-old Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) found themselves in.
> 
> The EDSAC was a room-sized relic from the earliest days of computing, and some of the parts that made up the sprawling machine hadn't been available for years, requiring the team to manufacture their own replacements. It's no wonder the project almost never came to pass.


----------



## ekim68

Europe is getting a network of 'ultra-fast, high-powered' EV chargers



> BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford, and Volkswagen have entered into a partnership to create a network of high-speed charging stations for electric vehicles across Europe. The new chargers will be capable of doling out up to 350 kW of power - which would make them almost three times as powerful as Tesla's Supercharging stations. The result will be "the highest-powered charging network in Europe," according to a statement released by the manufacturers.


----------



## ekim68

India unveils the world's largest solar power plant



> Images have been released showing the sheer size of a new solar power plant in southern India.
> 
> The facility in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu, has a capacity of 648 MW and covers an area of 10 sq km.
> 
> This makes it the largest solar power plant at a single location, taking the title from the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which has a capacity of 550 MW.
> 
> The solar plant, built in an impressive eight months and funded by the Adani Group, is cleaned every day by a robotic system, charged by its own solar panels.


----------



## ekim68

It will soon be illegal to punish customers who criticize businesses online



> Congress has passed a law protecting the right of US consumers to post negative online reviews without fear of retaliation from companies.
> 
> The bipartisan Consumer Review Fairness Act was passed by unanimous consent in the US Senate yesterday, a Senate Commerce Committee announcement said. The bill, introduced in 2014, was already approved by the House of Representatives and now awaits President Obama's signature.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands of British TV programmes are to be digitised before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says.



> Anarchic children's show *Tiswas *and *The Basil Brush Show* are among the programmes in line for preservation.
> 
> The initiative was announced as part of the BFI's five-year strategy for 2017-2022.
> 
> "Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk," said Heather Stewart, the BFI's creative director.
> 
> "It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don't do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in.


----------



## ekim68

Google Earth Timelapse: Now you can see how the planet has changed since 1984



> Global warming might be a Chinese conspiracy to president-elect Donald Trump, but Google's new 30-year time-lapse view from space still underlines the big changes that Earth has undergone.
> 
> Even if you don't believe humans have caused climate change, the new set of time-lapse satellite images from 1984 to 2016 offers a fresh insight into our shifting environment.


----------



## poochee

Many interesting informative articles in this thread.


----------



## hewee

ekim68 said:


> Google Earth Timelapse: Now you can see how the planet has changed since 1984


Can not see it. I get this here with Pale Moon, Firefox and Chrome. 



> Sorry, but it looks like your browser is not currently supported by our viewer.
> 
> At this time, we support the desktop versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer 9+.


----------



## ekim68

Hmm, it works for me and it's rather short. Using Firefox 50.0.2.


----------



## hewee

Maybe it does not like XP.


----------



## ekim68

Chevy beats Tesla to a sub $30,000 long-range EV



> Oregon and California residents can now buy an electric car with an EPA range of 238 miles for under $30,000. Chevy's pricing configurator for its Bolt EV is now online, and as expected, the base LT model with a 10.2-inch touchscreen, Apple CarPlay (or Android Auto) and a rear vision camera costs $37,495, or exactly $29,995 after the $7,500 federal tax credit. If you get the premier model with all the options (including driver assist features) it'll cost $44,950, or $37,450 after US tax credits. As Chevy warned earlier, the DC fast charge option is $750 extra on all models.


----------



## ekim68

Legal raids in five countries seize botnet servers, sinkhole 800,000+ domains



> A botnet that has served up phishing attacks and at least 17 different malware families to victims for much of this decade has been taken down in a coordinated effort by an international group of law enforcement agencies and security firms. Law enforcement officials seized command and control servers and took control of more than 800,000 Internet domains used by the botnet, dubbed "Avalanche," which has been in operation in some form since at least late 2009.


----------



## ekim68

Spain is getting rid of streets named after fascist leaders, dedicating them to women instead



> Though Francisco Franco's totalitarian Spanish regime was toppled nearly 40 years ago, its legacy is still present in the country. Walk through the cities of Spain, and you're likely to find streets named after regime members like general José Millán Astray, attorney Adolfo Muñoz Alonso, minister José Enrique Varela, and many more (link in Spanish).
> 
> But not for long.
> 
> In February, the government-applying a 2007 law that promised to get rid of the marks of autocratic heritage in public spaces-announced it would retire these street names. Now, cities around the country are renaming them after women, answering the complaint that about 90% of streets in Spain's cities are named after men-and those honoring women usually reference saints (link in Spanish).


----------



## ekim68

Earthquake-sensing mobile app MyShake captures hundreds of temblors large and small



> Back in February, seismologists at UC Berkeley released MyShake, an app that passively monitors for seismic activity, both watching for earthquakes and warning users if one is underway. In the months since its introduction, the app has outperformed its creators' expectations, detecting over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries.
> 
> The app has received nearly 200,000 downloads, though only a fraction of those are active at any given time; it waits for the phone to sit idle so it can get good readings. Nevertheless, over the first six months the network of sensors has proven quite effective.


----------



## ekim68

FCC doesn't like AT&T, Verizon 'zero rating' their own video apps



> The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sent letters to AT&T and Verizon on Thursday voicing displeasure with the practice of exempting their own video services from customers' data caps.
> 
> Specifically, the regulators said "zero rating" can hurt competition and competitors. In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, regulators make the case that other services could pay Verizon and AT&T to not eat into customers' cell data. This could be bad for competing video services who aren't in favor with the carriers, the FCC argues.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea to kill the coin in path towards 'cashless society'



> Hand over your coins. That is the message being sent by the central bank in South Korea as one of the world's most technologically advanced and integrated nations eyes the advent of a "cashless society."
> 
> The first step is to get rid of the metal, a feat authorities hope to achieve by 2020.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/here-are-the-worlds-most-effective-charities-1789606220']Here Are The World's Most Effective Charities[/URL]



> The holidays are here, which means it's time for you to make your annual charitable donations in a desperate attempt to cleanse the stains your dark soul has accumulated this year. Below is a thoroughly vetted list of the most effective life-saving charities in the world.


----------



## ekim68

New efficiency record for large perovskite solar cell



> "Perovskites came out of nowhere in 2009, with an efficiency rating of 3.8 percent, and have since grown in leaps and bounds," said Anita Ho-Baillie, a Senior Research Fellow at the UNSW's Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics. "I think we can get to 24 percent within a year or so."
> 
> The solar cells are made from crystals grown into a particular structure called perovskite. Smooth layers of perovskite with large crystal grain sizes allow the cells to absorb more light. The technology has been advancing fast and attracting plenty of attention thanks to its ease of production and low cost compared to silicon cells.


----------



## ekim68

California bill would require reporting of 'superbug' infections, deaths



> A California state senator introduced a bill on Monday that would mandate reporting of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and require doctors to record the infections on death certificates when they are a cause of death.
> 
> The legislation also aims to establish the nation's most comprehensive statewide surveillance system to track infections and deaths from drug-resistant pathogens. Data from death certificates would be used to help compile an annual state report on superbug infections and related deaths.
> 
> In September, a Reuters investigation revealed that tens of thousands of superbug deaths nationwide go uncounted every year. The infections are often omitted from death certificates, and even when they are recorded, they aren't counted because of the lack of a unified national surveillance system.


----------



## ekim68

Brains can recover some 'lost' memories



> For the longest while, researchers believed that you could only preserve a memory in your brain if the relevant neurons were active. However, it now looks like this isn't always the case -- and that could be a tremendous help to anyone suffering from short-term memory loss. Scientists have discovered that small jolts of electricity to the brain (specifically, a pulse of transcranial magnetic stimulation) can revive recent memories. Your mind can slow near-term memories down to a dormant state where they're in the background, but remain ready to come back when necessary.


----------



## ekim68

Millions in US still living life in Internet slow lane



> Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps, about 47.5 million home or business Internet connections provided speeds below that threshold.
> 
> Dealing with speeds a bit lower than the broadband standard isn't too horrible, but there are still millions with speeds that just aren't anywhere close to modern. Out of 102.2 million residential and business Internet connections, 22.4 million offered download speeds less than 10Mbps, with 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps. About 25.1 million connections offered at least 10Mbps but less than 25Mbps.


----------



## ekim68

Google to use 100 percent renewable energy for all operations by 2017



> Alphabet's Google on Tuesday announced it will be operating 100 percent on renewable energy for all its operations by 2017, including data centers and offices worldwide, ahead of its previous goal of 2025.


----------



## ekim68

Lentils, chickpeas can help reverse dangerous trend of soil erosion: U.N.



> Pulses transfer nitrogen from the atmosphere to the soil and can be grown practically anywhere. Cereals grown after pulses yield 1.5 tonnes more per hectare, equivalent to adding 100 kilos of nitrogen fertilizer, the FAO report said.
> 
> "Soils and pulses embody a unique symbiosis that protects the environment, enhances productivity, contributes to adapting to climate change and provides fundamental nutrients to the soil and subsequent crops," FAO director-general Jose Graziano da Silva said in a statement.
> 
> The main form of degradation is soil erosion - the loss of the topsoil by wind, rain or excessive use of machinery. The world is currently losing soil 10 to 20 times faster than it is replenishing it, according to the FAO report.


----------



## ekim68

Relocation of Halley Research Station



> British Antarctic Survey is getting ready to move its Halley VI Research Station 23 km across the ice. This is the first time that the station, which has a re-locatable design to cope with life on a floating ice shelf, has been moved since it was towed from its construction site to its present location in 2012.


----------



## ekim68

This edible food drone could offer aid in disaster zones



> A UK company is developing lightweight and edible food drones to bring supplies to hard-to-reach areas in times of disaster.
> 
> The Somerset-based Windhorse Aerospace last week presented its Pouncer design to Priti Patel, the UK's Secretary of State for International Development. The drone is nine feet wide, self-navigating, and capable of a 50 Kg payload, the company said.
> 
> Next year Windhorse plans to demonstrate Pouncer being launched from a C130 Hercules cargo aircraft, carrying 30 drones which will glide "a minimum of 35Kms from 10,000ft and landing to an accuracy of seven meters", the company said.


----------



## ekim68

Paris makes all public transport free in battle against 'worst air pollution for 10 years'



> Parisians can use public transport for free for the second day running due to a spike in air pollution and some cars have been barred from the roads.
> 
> The city is suffering its worst and most prolonged winter pollution for at least 10 years, the Airparif agency which measures the levels said on Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T to cough up $88M for 'cramming' mobile customer bills



> Some 2.7 million AT&T customers will share $88 million in compensation for having had unauthorized third-party charges added to their mobile bills, the Federal Trade Commission announced this morning.


----------



## ekim68

Every US taxpayer has effectively paid Apple at least $6 in recent years



> Apple has received at least $6 per American taxpayer over the last five years in the form of interest payments on billions' worth of United States Treasury bonds, according to a Wednesday report by _Bloomberg_.
> 
> Citing Apple's regulatory filings and unnamed sources, the business publication found "the Treasury Department paid Apple at least $600 million and possibly much more over the past five years in the form of interest." By taking advantage of a provision in the American tax code, _Bloomberg_ says that Apple has "stashed much of its foreign earnings-tax-free-right here in the US, in part by purchasing government bonds."


----------



## ekim68

Bitcoin hits highest levels in almost three years



> Web-based digital currency bitcoin hit its highest levels in almost three years on Friday, extending gains since India sparked a cash shortage by removing high-denomination bank notes from circulation a month ago.
> 
> Bitcoin was trading as high as $774 on the New York-based itBit exchange, up almost 1 percent on the day and the highest since February 2014, having climbed almost 9 percent in the past month.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter cuts off third surveillance firm for encouraging police to spy on activists



> Police have lost yet another tool used to monitor users of social networks.
> 
> Twitter has cut ties with a third social network surveillance firm, citing company policies intended to safeguard users against the surreptitious collection of data by law enforcement agencies, the Daily Dot has confirmed.


----------



## ekim68

Michigan Lets Autonomous Cars on Roads Without Human Driver



> Companies can now test self-driving cars on Michigan public roads without a driver or steering wheel under new laws that could push the state to the forefront of autonomous vehicle development.
> 
> The package of bills signed into law Friday comes with few specific state regulations and leaves many decisions up to automakers and companies like Google and Uber.
> 
> It also allows automakers and tech companies to run autonomous taxi services and permits test parades of self-driving tractor-trailers as long as humans are in each truck. And they allow the sale of self-driving vehicles to the public once they are tested and certified, according to the state.


----------



## ekim68

Why Apple is investing in wind turbines in China



> The tech giant is investing in the Chinese wind power industry, turning to the world's most populous country to help it achieve its goal of getting 100% of its energy from renewable sources.
> 
> The iPhone maker struck a deal this week to buy a 30% stake in three subsidiaries of Goldwind, China's biggest wind-turbine manufacturer.


----------



## ekim68

Six places where renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels



> In the race to reduce the world's reliance on fossil fuels, cost is a huge factor. It's taken years, but advances in technology and increases in both efficiency and output have helped bring down the expense of renewable energy, which has in turn increased demand. Globally, fossil fuels are still cheaper than these alternative sources, but there are a few places around the world where clean energy is winning, dollar for dollar. Sometimes, too, there's so much of it that the market price drops to zero. With the cost of renewable energy getting lower by the year, if not the month, environmental advocates are hopeful that energy sources like solar and wind power can eventually edge out fossil fuels entirely. Let's take a look at some of the locales where renewable energy is proving that a clean world doesn't have to be more expensive.


----------



## ekim68

Can $300 Billion Make Companies Behave?



> Are U.S. authorities being overzealous in their efforts to extract money from corporate miscreants? Actually, the right question might be why, despite the advent of multi-billion-dollar penalties, *companies keep breaking the law.*


----------



## ekim68

Panasonic's new shopping system automatically bags and tallies your bill



> For some reason I hate everything about grocery shopping, but I must share this hate with others because companies like Amazon, and now Panasonic, are throwing a lot of tech at the problem. WSJ reports that Panasonic is working on a checkout setup for convenience stores that will scan items as you place them into your basket, and then automatically bag it all up for you at checkout so that all you have to do is pay.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/the-exact-thing-standing-rock-protesters-didnt-want-to-1790018392']The Exact Thing Standing Rock Protesters Didn't Want to Happen Already Happened[/URL]



> The key concern of protesters at Standing Rock has been and remains the environmental hazard posed by Energy Transfer Partners' 1,200-mile pipeline, which would have the potential to taint local water supplies and destroy sacred grounds. Confirming those exact fears, a pipeline in North Dakota has spilled some 176,000 gallons of crude into a creek 150 miles north of the protest encampments.


----------



## ekim68

Mitigating the risk of geoengineering



> The planet is warming at an unprecedented rate, and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases alone is not enough to remove the risk.
> 
> Last year's historic Paris climate agreement set the goal of keeping global temperatures no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Emission reductions will be central to achieving that goal, but supplemental efforts can further reduce risks.
> 
> One drastic idea is solar geoengineering - injecting light-reflecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet. Researchers know that large amounts of aerosols can significantly cool the planet; the effect has been observed after large volcanic eruptions. But these sulfate aerosols also carry significant risks. The biggest known risk is that they produce sulfuric acid in the stratosphere, which damages ozone. Since the ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet light from the sun, its depletion can lead to increased rates of skin cancer, eye damage, and other adverse consequences.
> 
> Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have identified an aerosol for solar geoengineering that may be able to cool the planet while simultaneously repairing ozone damage.


----------



## ekim68

Feds unveil rule requiring cars to 'talk' to each other



> The Obama administration released a long-awaited rule on Tuesday requiring all new vehicles to have communication technology that allows them to "talk" to each another, which officials say could prevent tens of thousands of crashes each year.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft formally introduces Zo, its latest AI-powered chatbot



> Microsoft is surging forward with its commitment to artificial intelligence (AI), formally announcing its latest chatbot, Zo. In a post outlining its commitment to AI, Microsoft introduced Zo as the next chapter in the evolution of its attempts to create a social chatbot.


----------



## ekim68

It's take-off for Amazon's drone delivery service



> Amazon has made its first-ever delivery to a customer using a drone. Amazon Prime Air, which was first announced in 2013 and for which drones have been tested in Canada and the US, is now being trialled in Cambridge, UK, where the first delivery was made on December 7th and took just 13 minutes.
> 
> The trial is currently being run with just two customers, although Amazon plans to expand that to dozens in the coming months and, eventually, hundreds. Its aim is to gather data that can subsequently be used to improve the safety and reliability of the service and its systems.


----------



## ekim68

California adopts first U.S. energy-saving rules for computers



> California regulators on Wednesday adopted the nation's first mandatory energy efficiency rules for computers and monitors - devices that account for 3 percent of home electric bills and 7 percent of commercial power costs in the state.
> 
> The state Energy Commission said that when fully implemented the industry-backed plan will save consumers $373 million a year and conserve at least as much electricity annually as it takes to power all of San Francisco's households.


----------



## ekim68

These are the world's most valuable brands - and this is what they're worth



> Apple is the world's most valuable brand, according to the latest Interbrand ranking.
> 
> Measured across three components, the ranking looks at the impact of brand on business growth. A brand value of over $178 billion sees Apple top the ranking.
> 
> Tech is the most valuable sector in this year's ranking. Fourteen brands are valued in excess of $600 billion.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/69-viral-images-from-2016-that-were-totally-fake-1789400518']69 Viral Images From 2016 That Were Totally Fake[/URL]



> The year 2016 will probably go down in history as the year of the fakes. There were plenty of fake news articles, and even plenty of debate about the definition of the word "fake."


----------



## ekim68

Sandy Hook conspiracy watch: Four years after the massacre, lunatic ravings become even more sinister




> Conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting are still churning, and they're becoming a threat to the families


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Sandy Hook conspiracy watch: Four years after the massacre, lunatic ravings become even more sinister


...


----------



## ekim68

YouTube bans North Korea's state-owned TV channel



> POPULAR video-sharing site YouTube has blocked North Korea's state television channel, purportedly to avoid breaching U.S. sanctions against the totalitarian state.
> 
> The Korean Central Television's page, which broadcasts breaking news videos including Pyongyang's nuclear tests and leader Kim Jong Un's outings, now has a message saying "the account has been terminated for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines".


----------



## ekim68

Superbugs killing twice as many people as government says



> Superbugs are now killing more patients than breast cancer and at least twice as many people as the government estimate, experts have warned.
> 
> The Bureau has also established that the government's stated figure of 5,000 people a year dying from superbugs is based on guesswork. And we have obtained official NHS data confirming that significantly more people than that died with drug-resistant infections last year.


----------



## ekim68

2016 from above: Some of the year's finest drone photography


----------



## ekim68

China chokes on smog so bad that planes can't land



> Major cities across northern China choked Monday under a blanket of smog so thick that industries were ordered shut down and air and ground traffic was disrupted.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo's 100 autonomous Chrysler minivans are here



> Chrysler has completed the 100 autonomous Pacifica minivans that will join the Waymo (née Google) fleet in early 2017. The vans, which are plug-in hybrid variants with Waymo's self-driving hardware and software built in, are part of a partnership between Fiat Chrysler (FCA) and Waymo that was announced earlier this year.
> 
> Waymo CEO John Krafcik said last week that his company is not interested in "making better cars." Instead, it wants make "better drivers." That's why Waymo has partnered with FCA, which has not been as active in showing off its autonomous chops as other major automakers like Ford and GM.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> China chokes on smog so bad that planes can't land


...


----------



## ekim68

Alzheimer's hope in new memory-restoring drug



> Our arsenal against Alzheimer's disease contains a motley mix of potential weapons, including blood tests and "sniff tests" for early detection, implants that release antibodies, and compounds that could treat the disease in a similar fashion to high cholesterol. Now, researchers at the University of Leicester have developed a new class of drug that has been shown to restore memory loss, slow progression and increase the lifespan of mice with a similar degenerative disease. The team hopes that the finding could lead to new treatment options for Alzheimer's in humans.


----------



## ekim68

CRTC declares broadband internet access a basic service



> The CRTC has declared broadband internet a basic telecommunications service.
> 
> In a ruling handed down Wednesday, the national regulator ordered the country's internet providers to begin working toward boosting internet service and speeds in rural and isolated areas.
> 
> "The future of our economy, our prosperity and our society - indeed, the future of every citizen - requires us to set ambitious goals, and to get on with connecting all Canadians for the 21st century," said Jean-Pierre Blais, the CRTC's chair, at a news conference in Gatineau, Que.


----------



## ekim68

Norway aims to allow testing of self-driving cars in 2017



> The Norwegian government aims to pass a law in the spring of next year to allow testing of self-driving vehicles on Norwegian roads, it said on Thursday.
> 
> Norway is one of the largest markets for Tesla Motors electric vehicles, thanks to generous government subsidies. Tesla said in October its new models will come with hardware, including cameras and a radar, to enable them to be fully-self driving.
> 
> The move to permit testing of self-driving vehicles is also aimed at giving a competitive edge to Norwegian technology companies as the country seeks to diversify away from the offshore petroleum sector, hit by a plunge in global oil prices.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2016/12/21/tesla-china-other-foreign-automakers-electric-vehicles-production/']China opens the doors for Tesla and other foreign automakers to produce electric vehicles in the country[/URL]



> China has strong protectionism laws in place that require any automaker wanting to establish production capacity in the country to partner and share its technology with a local manufacturer - something several automakers have decided to do in order to tap into what is now the largest auto market in the world.
> 
> But in an attempt to accelerate electric vehicle production in the country and fight its air pollution problem, China is now proposing to relax those laws for what they call "new energy vehicles," a.k.a. electric vehicles, in order to attract more foreign investments. The new rules are expected to open the door to Tesla and other automakers who recently expressed desires to establish manufacturing capacity in China to produce electric vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

The Countries With the Fastest Internet


----------



## poochee

Same here.


----------



## ekim68

The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model From its Employees' Brains




> Bridgewater wants day-to-day management-hiring, firing, decision-making-to be guided by software that doles out instructions


----------



## ekim68

Apple publishes its first AI research paper



> When Apple said it would publish its artificial intelligence research, it raised at least a couple of big questions. When would we see the first paper? And would the public data be important, or would the company keep potential trade secrets close to the vest? At last, we have answers. Apple researchers have published their first AI paper, and the findings could clearly be useful for computer vision technology.
> 
> The paper tackles the problem of teaching AI to recognize objects using simulated images, which are easier to use than photos (since you don't need a human to tag items) but poor for adapting to real-world situations. The trick, Apple says, is to use the increasingly popular technique of pitting neural networks against each other:


----------



## ekim68

Brexit leads to more than 100 firms looking to move business from Britain to Ireland



> Ireland has said it has received more than 100 inquiries from major firms looking to move from the UK because of Brexit .
> 
> Martin Shanahan, the chief executive of the Industrial Development Agency (IDA), said the bulk of the interest came from banks and financial institutions based in the City of London.


----------



## ekim68

Flickering lights may illuminate a path to Alzheimer's treatment



> New research demonstrates that, in mice whose brains are under attack by Alzheimer's dementia, exposure to lights that flicker at a precise frequency can right the brain's faulty signaling and energize its immune cells to fight off the disease.
> 
> Light therapy for Alzheimer's is miles from being ready to treat patients - even those with the earliest signs of the disease. But the new research has already prompted creation of a start-up company - Cognito Therapeutics Inc. - to approach the Food and Drug Administration about clinical trials, and to explore ways to deliver precisely calibrated flickers of light to human research subjects.


----------



## ekim68

Uber has launched a website for a service called Uber Freight.



> Little has been revealed about the company's expansion from ride-hailing, but if the announcements it's made over the last year are any indicator, chances are good that Uber Freight is meant to prepare the world for autonomous delivery trucks.
> 
> Uber acquired a startup called Otto, which planned to bring the first self-driving trucks to market, in August. Since then the company has used its trucks to deliver 50,000 cans of beer and hundreds of Christmas trees in San Francisco.


----------



## ekim68

Drone air traffic control system being developed in Singapore



> The skies of the near future will be increasingly packed with drones, surveying, snapping photos and delivering an array of goods. A network with that many moving parts needs some structure, so Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is developing an air traffic control system for drones in Singaporean airspace, exploring ideas like geofencing, designated flight lanes and ground stations that track all airborne UAVs.


----------



## poochee

Lots of info in this thread about how drones are being used .


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/obama-wrote-the-most-popular-scientific-journal-article-1790551625']Obama Wrote the Most Popular Scientific Journal Article of 2016[/URL]



> The hottest scientific journal article of 2016 wasn't on black holes or dinosaur-killing asteroids: it was on the Affordable Care Act, and it was penned by sitting President Barack Obama. Imagine _that_ ever happening again.
> 
> Scholarly analytics tracker Altimetric recently released its annual "top 100" list detailing the most widely-discussed scientific articles of 2016.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Water guzzlers face more fines, public shaming under new state law



> Despite five years of record drought, many Californians have not been required to cut their water use. Some wielded a heavy hand at the tap, enjoying green lawns and showy landscapes even as water supplies dried up.
> 
> This could soon change. If the rains fall short this winter - or whenever the next bad drought descends on California - households are in for a far more serious crackdown on water waste.
> 
> In response to a state law that takes effect New Year's Day, water agencies are drafting plans to penalize big residential water users and, in many cases, divulge their names in what amounts to a strategy of public shaming.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft HoloLens could help you find your keys, and also stalk your every move



> You know the trope in _Sherlock_-esque detective shows where some brilliant sleuth cracks a case by drawing on their nigh-photographic memory? Well, one of the most fascinating and terrifying things about augmented reality glasses is that they turn _everybody_ into that sleuth - and as a new Microsoft patent filing shows, that can be used for things besides crime-solving. The recently published application covers a system that would let its HoloLens glasses track small items like car keys, stopping wearers from misplacing them. More broadly, the patent describes a system that can monitor the status of objects without any instructions from users, keeping tabs on anything that's important to their lives.


----------



## ekim68

Once mocked, Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram was a stroke of genius



> In April of 2012, Facebook shocked the tech world when it acquired Instagram for $1 billion. At the time, the acquisition raised quite a few eyebrows, along with many more questions than answers. Not only did people wonder how Instagram would fit into Facebook's existing business, many also questioned if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had lost his mind by outlaying $1 billion for a company that, at the time, had no revenue.


----------



## ekim68

China smog: millions start new year shrouded by health alerts and travel chaos



> Millions in China rang in the New Year shrouded in a thick blanket of toxic smog, causing road closures and flight cancellations as 24 cities issued alerts that will last through much of the week.
> 
> On the first day of 2017 in Beijing, concentrations of tiny particles that penetrate deep into the lungs climbed as high as 24 times levels recommended by the World Health Organization. More than 100 flights were cancelled and all intercity buses were halted at the capital's airport.


----------



## ekim68

Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest faces fracking threat



> The latest battleground for the future of fracking in Britain looks set to be Sherwood Forest, the legendary home of folk hero Robin Hood and now the target of a seismic survey by Ineos.
> 
> The chemical multinational, which relocated its headquarters back to the UK last month, appears to have agreed terms with the Forestry commission to start burying charges and spend up to two years using "thumper trucks" or vibroseis machines to search for shale gas.
> 
> Campaigners have called on the government to block any possible fracking and protect the forest.
> 
> According to documents obtained under freedom of information request by Friends of the Earth, Ineos could be working within 200 metres of the Major Oak, a 1,000-year old tree that in folklore sheltered Robin Hood and his merry men.


----------



## ekim68

Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence



> Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work are also becoming increasingly competent.
> 
> One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by January 2017.


----------



## ekim68

CloudFlare Gets Caught Out By 2016 Leap Second



> The extra leap second added on to the end of 2016 may not have had an effect on most people, but it did catch out a few web companies who failed to factor it in.
> 
> Web services and security firm CloudFlare was one such example. A small number of its servers went down at midnight UTC on New Year's Day due to an error in its RRDNS software, a domain name service (DNS) proxy that was written to help scale CloudFlare's DNS infrastructure, which limited web access for some of its customers.
> 
> As CloudFlare explained in a blog post, a number went negative in the software when it should of been zero, causing RRDNS to "panic" and affect the DNS resolutions to some websites.


----------



## ekim68

Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate GT 2TB is world's largest capacity USB flash drive



> As more and more people embrace cloud storage, USB flash drives are becoming less essential. This is unfortunate, as it can be empowering to store your own data locally -- not needing an internet connection to access things like family photos and movies.
> 
> Today, Kingston announces a product that may get people excited about flash drives again. The company has created a 2TB pocket flash drive (also available in 1TB), called DataTraveler Ultimate GT (Generation Terabyte). This is now the world's largest capacity USB flash drive.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Flips the Switch on the Gigafactory



> Musk meets a deadline: Battery-cell production begins at what will soon be the world's biggest factory-with thousands of additional jobs.


----------



## ekim68

California Law Makes Ransomware Use Illegal



> It was nice to see the calendar turn over to 2017, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that on Jan. 1 a new law went into effect in California that outlaws the use of ransomware.
> 
> The idea of needing a new law to make a form of hacking illegal may seem counterintuitive, but ransomware is a case of criminals outflanking the existing laws. Ransomware emerged in a big way a few years ago and the law enforcement community was not prepared for the explosion of infections. While there have been takedowns of ransomware gangs, they often involve charges of money laundering or other crimes, not the installation of the ransomware itself.


----------



## ekim68

A Coal-Fired Power Plant in India Is Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Baking Soda



> In the southern Indian city of Tuticorin, locals are unlikely to suffer from a poorly risen cake. That's because a coal-fired thermal power station in the area captures carbon dioxide and turns it into baking soda.
> 
> Carbon capture schemes are nothing new. Typically, they use a solvent, such as amine, to catch carbon dioxide and prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere. From there, the CO2 can either be stored away or used.
> 
> But the _Guardian_ reports that a system installed in the Tuticorin plant uses a new proprietary solvent developed by the company Carbon Clean Solutions. The solvent is reportedly just slightly more efficient than those used conventionally, requiring a little less energy and smaller apparatus to run. The collected CO2 is used to create baking soda, and it claims that as much as 66,000 tons of the gas could be captured at the plant each year.


----------



## ekim68

CES 2017: Dell's 2-in-1 Latitude 7285, the world's first wireless charging laptop



> Tired of having to plug a cable into your laptop to charge it? Dell's new 2-in-1 Latitude 7285 brings wireless charging to laptops.


----------



## ekim68

Origin PC's custom, professional overclocking will push your Kaby Lake chip past 5GHz



> Intel's new Kaby Lake desktop processors may not be huge improvements over their Skylake predecessors in terms of raw speed, but they've got it where it counts in one enthusiast-friendly area: overclocking. Before Kaby Lake's launch, two PC makers and a motherboard vendor told us that the chips overclocked to the vaunted 5GHz milestone with shocking regularity. Now the high-end custom PC builder Origin is putting its (and your) money where its mouth is.


----------



## ekim68

What Kerry did



> Secretary of State John Kerry's valedictory speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unleashed a firestorm of criticism from the very same folks, who had just finished hyperventilating over the US abstention on a Security Council resolution a few days earlier.
> 
> The speech, itself, was divided into three parts. Kerry opened with an accounting of all that the Obama administration had done for Israel in the past eight years and closed with a list of principles he said should serve as the basis for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace.
> 
> The largest part, the middle, was a passionate indictment of Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - the most comprehensive criticism ever given by an American political leader.
> 
> During the past 50 years, successive US administrations did their best to avoid public criticism of Israel.


----------



## Brigham

For years I had sympathy for the Jews. Then they started to build where they shouldn't. Now I think they are no better than the Arabs. Oh, by the way aren't the semites just another arab tribe?


----------



## ekim68

How Japan has almost eradicated gun crime



> Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world. In 2014 there were just six gun deaths, compared to 33,599 in the US. What is the secret?
> 
> If you want to buy a gun in Japan you need patience and determination. You have to attend an all-day class, take a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95%.
> 
> There are also mental health and drugs tests. Your criminal record is checked and police look for links to extremist groups. Then they check your relatives too - and even your work colleagues. And as well as having the power to deny gun licences, police also have sweeping powers to search and seize weapons.


----------



## ekim68

Kodak Ektachrome Film is Coming Back from the Dead



> It's not every day that you hear about a classic film line being brought back from the dead, but that's what's being announced today. Kodak Ektachrome film is coming back for film photographers.
> 
> The announcement was made today at CES in Las Vegas by Kodak Alaris, the separate company owned by the Kodak Pension Plan in the UK that runs Kodak's old Personalized Imaging division.


----------



## ekim68

A vast new tomb for the most dangerous disaster site in the world.



> Chernobyl's new sarcophagus took two decades to make. Bigger than Wembley Stadium and taller than the Statue of Liberty, it will seal in the entire disaster site for 100 years.


----------



## ekim68

Jokowi grants first-ever indigenous land rights to 9 communities



> For the first time, Indonesia's central government has recognized the rights of nine indigenous communities to the forests they call home, a milestone for a national indigenous peoples movement that is seeking to bring to a close an era of abuse and discrimination at the hands of the state.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> A vast new tomb for the most dangerous disaster site in the world.


...


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft's OS supremacy over Apple to end in 2017



> Apple will steal a march on Microsoft this year when for the first time this century shipments of devices powered by its operating systems outnumber those running Windows, research firm Gartner said today.
> 
> In 2017, Apple's combination of iOS and macOS -- the former on iPhones and iPads, the latter on Macs -- will take second place from Windows on the devices shipped during the year. The gap between the two will widen in 2018 and 2019, with Apple ahead of Microsoft both years.


----------



## ekim68

Google's new self-driving minivans will be hitting the road at the end of January 2017



> Waymo, the self-driving car startup spun-off from Google late last year, will be deploying its fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans onto public roads for the first time later this month, the company announced at the North American International Auto Show today.





> But here's the thing about these minivans. Waymo says that for the first time, its producing all the technology that enables its cars to completely drive themselves in-house. That means for the first time, the Google spin-off is building all its own cameras, sensors, and mapping technology, rather than purchasing parts off the shelf as it had done in the past.


----------



## ekim68

Much-Delayed 'Email Privacy Act' Reintroduced In Congress



> Representatives Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and Jared Polis (D-CO) reintroduced the Email Privacy Act in Congress. The bill would update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which governs the rules for how digital information can be obtained by the government and would require a warrant for any request made by the government for people's private communications.


----------



## ekim68

New world record set for converting sunlight to electricity



> An Australian team has set a new record for squeezing as much electricity as possible out of direct, unfocused sunlight via a new solar cell configuration. Engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) achieved 34.5 percent sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency, a new mark that also comes closer than ever to the theoretical limits of such a system.


----------



## ekim68

MIT Unveils New Material That's Strongest and Lightest On Earth



> For years, researchers have known that carbon, when arranged in a certain way, can be very strong. Case in point: graphene.
> 
> Graphene, which was heretofore, the strongest material known to man, is made from an extremely thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in two dimensions. But there's one drawback: while notable for its thinness and unique electrical properties, it's very difficult to create useful, three-dimensional materials out of graphene.
> 
> Now, a team of MIT researchers discovered that taking small flakes of graphene and fusing them following a mesh-like structure not only retains the material's strength, but the graphene also remains porous. Based on experiments conducted on 3D printed models, researchers have determined that this new material, with its distinct geometry, is actually _stronger_ than graphene - making it 10 times stronger than steel, with only five percent of its density.


----------



## ekim68

LinkedIn's and eBay's founders are donating $20 million to protect us from artificial intelligence



> Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's nonprofit, have each committed $10 million to fund academic research and development aimed at keeping artificial intelligence systems ethical and prevent building AI that may harm society.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Researchers reveal world's most precise metronome



> HAMBURG, Germany, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- Scientists in Germany have synchronized a system of lasers with record precision. The metronome's laser-microwave network stretches a kilometer wide, or 3,280 feet, and is synched within 950 attoseconds.
> 
> One attosecond is a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second, or a quintillionth of a second. One femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second, or a millionth of one billionth.


----------



## ekim68

Can environmental police keep Beijing's smog in check?



> January 8, 2017 -A new police force will crack down on environmental offenders in Beijing, city officials announced Saturday, marking the Chinese government's latest attempt to reduce smog.
> 
> The environmental police squad was one of several new measures introduced by Cai Qi, acting mayor of Beijing, this weekend. Other measures included cutting coal use by 30 percent in 2017, shutting down 500 higher-polluting factories and upgrading 2,500 others, phasing out 300,000 higher-polluting older vehicles, and supplying cleaner gas and diesel at fuel stations starting Feb. 15. The announcement came one day after municipal authorities in Beijing announced they would install air purifiers in the city's schools and kindergartens.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla to power Gigafactory with world's largest solar rooftop installation



> Just last week Tesla announced battery production had started at their Nevada Gigafactory, but didn't mention one thrilling detail in their January 4 announcement: the Gigafactory could be powered by the world's largest solar rooftop installation. An investor handout revealed a 70-megawatt (MW) solar array along with ground solar panels could enable the massive factory to operate entirely on clean energy.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's big iPhone payoff? It's on track to top $1 trillion from iOS by mid-year



> At some point before June, Apple's revenues from its mobile platform, iOS, will exceed $1 trillion, according to Asymco mobile analyst Horace Dediu.
> 
> The bulk of that revenue has come from the 1.2 billion iPhones that Dediu estimates Apple will have sold by the end of the first half of 2017, which, as he's previously calculated, is by far more than any other product ever sold.


----------



## ekim68

US Army wants biodegradable bullets which transform into plants



> Firearms are an accepted part of modern warfare and military operations, but after the job is done, the environment suffers.
> 
> Not only do spent shells and casings litter the landscape, but they can also prove to be a hazard to local wildlife -- not to mention the impact that chemical residues, such as bullet metals and rust, can have on future plant growth and sustainability.
> 
> The US military recognizes that this is a problem and is now asking for proposals to mitigate the issue through biodegradable bullets and ways to seed growth as operations in the field continue.


----------



## ekim68

Virginia "Broadband Deployment Act" would kill municipal broadband deployment



> Virginia lawmakers are considering a bill called the "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act," but instead of resulting in more broadband deployment, the legislation would make it more difficult for municipalities to offer Internet service.


----------



## ekim68

Vinyl on track to become a billion-dollar industry in 2017



> If someone told you 10 years ago that Vinyl would become a billion-dollar industry by the end of 2017, what would you say? If the answer is somewhere along the lines of "no way," you should probably check out the data compiled by Deloitte and reported by the _Financial Times_.


----------



## ekim68

Cuba sees explosion in internet access as ties with US grow



> HAVANA (AP) - Two days before Christmas, Luis Gonzalez received a little Chinese modem from Cuba's state-owned telecommunications company.
> 
> The 55-year-old theater producer connected the device to his phone and his laptop computer, which instantly lit up with a service unimaginable in the Cuba of just a few years ago - relatively fast home internet.


----------



## ekim68

Outer layer of human heart regrown using stem cells



> A multidisciplinary team working at Pennsylvania State University claim to have used human stem cells to regenerate the cells that cover the external surface of a human heart. The new research may one day help replace damaged tissues caused by a heart attack or genetic defects.


----------



## ekim68

Biometrics leads to arrest of accused child molester on the lam 17 years



> A fugitive suspected of molesting a 10-year-old Indiana girl 17 years ago has been arrested after the Federal Bureau of Investigation employed facial recognition technology, according to court documents. The bureau said the suspect's US passport photo in December was run though a Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) test, and it matched photos taken before he disappeared nearly two decades ago.


----------



## ekim68

China, Europe drive shift to electric cars as U.S. lags



> Electric cars will pick up critical momentum in 2017, many in the auto industry believe - just not in North America.
> 
> Tighter emissions rules in China and Europe leave global carmakers and some consumers with little choice but to embrace plug-in vehicles, fuelling an investment surge, said industry executives gathered in Detroit this past week for the city's annual auto show.
> 
> "Car electrification is an irreversible trend," said Jacques Aschenbroich, chief executive of auto supplier Valeo (VLOF.PA), which has expanded sales by 50 percent in five years with a focus on electric, hybrid, connected and self-driving cars.


----------



## ekim68

Blockchain Tech 'Could Save' Banks £9.7bn Billion A Year



> Blockchain, most commonly known as the technology underpinning the digital currency Bitcoin, is a highly secure database system which enables an organisation to create a digital ledger of information and share it with multiple parties.
> 
> Although still mysterious to many, new research has found that blockchain technology has the potential to reduce infrastructure costs by an average of 30 percent for eight of the world's ten biggest banks.


----------



## ekim68

Ambulances in Sweden will be able to hijack car radios during emergencies



> The Swedish government wants to make it impossible to be caught off guard by a speeding ambulance. Sure, their sirens are loud-but soon they'll be able to take over your car's radio.
> 
> Swedish students at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have developed a way for emergency vehicles to transit radio signals to warn other vehicles of an approaching truck. It's called the EVAM System, according to Phys.org, and it's designed to send a signal over a specific FM radio band that'll interrupt music or radio and display a test message over the system's tuner display - so long as the car is equipped with a Radio Data System (RDS).


----------



## ekim68

Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting



> NEUROSCIENCE, like many other sciences, has a bottomless appetite for data. Flashy enterprises such as the BRAIN Initiative, announced by Barack Obama in 2013, or the Human Brain Project, approved by the European Union in the same year, aim to analyse the way that thousands or even millions of nerve cells interact in a real brain. The hope is that the torrents of data these schemes generate will contain some crucial nuggets that let neuroscientists get closer to understanding how exactly the brain does what it does.
> 
> But a paper just published in _PLOS Computational Biology_ questions whether more information is the same thing as more understanding. It does so by way of neuroscience's favourite analogy: comparing the brain to a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling electricity around complicated circuits. Unlike the workings of brains, though, those of computers are understood on every level.


----------



## ekim68

Tech firm creates Trump monitor for stock markets



> Just in time for his inauguration, London-based fintech firm Trading.co.uk is launching an app that will generate trading alerts for shares based on comments made on social media by Donald Trump.
> 
> Keeping one eye on the U.S. President-elect's personal Twitter feed has become a regular pastime for the fund managers and traders who invest billions of dollars daily on world stock, currency and commodity markets.
> 
> Trump knocked several billion off the value of pharmaceutical stocks a week ago by saying they were "getting away with murder" with their prices. Comments earlier this week on China moved the dollar and a pair of December tweets sent the share prices of Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) and Boeing (BA.N) spiraling lower.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Targets Chrome Users With Windows 10 Pop-up Ad



> Microsoft really wants you to use its software products as well as running Windows 10, and that includes the Edge browser. But it can't stop you choosing to use an alternative web browser. However, if you opt to use Chrome, then expect to start seeing adverts right on your Windows desktop.


----------



## ekim68

Good grief.....!


New Wyoming bill forbids utilities from using renewables




> Republican legislators recently introduced a bill that would essentially ban large-scale renewable energy in the state by 2019.


----------



## ekim68

FTC Cracks Down on Two Huge Robocall Groups



> Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations that the commission alleges were making hundreds of millions of calls over the course of several years to consumers who were on the Do Not Call registry.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's Autopilot Vindicated With 40% Drop in Crashes



> A U.S. crash investigation ends up suggesting the feature actually increases safety-significantly.


----------



## ekim68

We Already Grow Enough Food For 10 Billion People - and Still Can't End Hunger



> Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day - most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land - can't afford to buy this food.
> 
> In reality, the bulk of industrially-produced grain crops goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the 1 billion hungry.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Bill introduced to remove US from United Nations



> WASHINGTON (WCMH) - A proposed House Resolution would set the stage for the United States to remove itself from the United Nations.
> 
> The proposed "American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2017" is sponsored by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL). It was introduced in the House on Jan. 3 and referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, according to the Congress website.


----------



## ekim68

With tech skills but not enough electricity, meet Gaza's first startup accelerator



> Gaza may seem an unlikely place to want to create a tech startup, but accelerator and co-working hub Gaza Sky Geeks is aiming to change that perception.
> 
> GSG's most recent effort is a crowdfunding campaign to launch Gaza's first coding academy. It's so far raised about $279,000, comfortably exceeding the initial $95,000 target.
> 
> The funds will help staff the academy, as well as purchase a generator and fuel, so that coders and entrepreneurs can work during Gaza's frequent power outages.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea plans 1,000km/h, near-supersonic, 'hyper-tube train' that would leave maglev in the dust



> South Korea is seeking to develop a train-like public transport concept that is almost as fast as the speed of sound reaching 1,000km/h, the Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) said Tuesday.
> 
> The state-run institute will join forces with other research groups and Hanyang University to build the near-supersonic "train", which would be able to travel from Seoul to Busan in half an hour.


----------



## ekim68

China Is Splashing $168 Million to Make It Rain



> China, the world's second largest economy, is pouring 1.5 billion yuan ($168 million) into a program aimed at making it rain in its usually arid northwestern region.
> 
> No stranger to using technologies like cloud seeding to influence and even control weather patterns, China's top economic planners recently gave the go ahead for what will be one of the country's largest weather-modification projects, reports the _South China Morning Post_.
> 
> According to the _Post_, a feasibility study by the country's meteorological agency concluded that the three-year program could see a rise in precipitation over an area of 960,000 sq km, or as much as 10% of the country's landmass.


----------



## ekim68

Residential turbine design inspired by hummingbird wings



> As unconventional wind turbines go, the flapping machine introduced by Tunisian company Tyer Wind is on the far edge of quirky. Employing dual oscillating blades that mimic the figure-8 motion of the wings of a hovering hummingbird, the turbine's relatively compact design make it a potential fit for residential use.


----------



## ekim68

What each incoming president thought was the biggest problem facing America, in one chart



> I've spent the past few days reading through every inauguration speech from an incoming president, going back to George Washington in 1789. And I noticed that presidents' inaugural addresses almost always follow the same anatomy.
> 
> There's the beginning, where they talk about the importance of unifying the country - often by talking about what it means to be America or the peaceful transfer of power. Sometimes they also try to recast a common narrative of what American has been through.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/01/25/gmail-wont-allow-javascript-file-attachments-starting-february-13/']Gmail won't allow JavaScript file attachments starting February 13[/URL]



> Malicious emails often attach various forms of executable programs and trick users into running them. These include standard Windows executables (.exe), batch files (.bat), and even JavaScript files (.js). Starting February 13, 2017, Google will not allow JS files to be sent as an attachment, including JS files detected within archives.


----------



## ekim68

N.Y. okays largest U.S. offshore wind farm off Long Island



> New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has approved what will be the largest U.S. offshore wind farm when it's built off the east end of Long Island. It will generate enough electricity to power more than 50,000 homes on Long Island's South Fork.


----------



## ekim68

Whoa, my first hard drive was 135 Megs.....


Seagate will bring a 16TB hard drive to market within 18 months



> Cloud-based storage is a popular alternative to maintaining local data backups or as part of a multi-location / off-site strategy, especially if you're dealing with mission-critical data that's irreplaceable. Others, however, prefer to keep their data within arm's reach on high-capacity hard drives.


----------



## ekim68

US Intelligence seeks a universal translator for text search in any language



> The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the US Intelligence Community's own science and technology research arm, has announced it is seeking contenders for a program to develop what amounts to the ultimate Google Translator. IARPA's Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) program intends to provide researchers and analysts with a tool to search for documents in their field of concern in any of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. solar industry passes oil, coal and gas for job creation



> Solar employment now accounts for the largest share of workers in the U.S. power generation field, surpassing coal, gas and oil, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
> 
> In 2016, the solar workforce increased by 25% over the previous year to 374,000 employees, compared to 187,117 electrical generation jobs in the coal, gas and oil industries combined, according to the DOE's "Energy and Employment Report for 2017".


----------



## ekim68

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs -- but not for much longer



> In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.
> 
> A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way.


----------



## ekim68

Massive wind turbine takes energy generation record



> A behemoth V164 offshore wind turbine from Danish company MHI Vestas Offshore Wind has produced almost 216,000 kWh over a 24-hour period during tests at its site near Østerild, Denmark in December. In doing so, the 9 MW prototype - a reworked version of the V164-8.0 MW, which was initially developed in 2012 and launched two years later - takes the energy generation record for a commercially available offshore wind turbine.
> 
> Since its launch in 2014, the Usain Bolt of wind turbines is essentially in competition with itself, largely due to its superior size over the competition.


----------



## ekim68

How the Decline in Investigative Journalism Is Making Congress Dumb



> President Trump's lockdown on information provisions by federal agencies includes a blockade of communication with Congress, which already struggles to understand complex policy issues because staffing levels on its committees and Congressional Research Service have been dwindling for 30 years. A less noticed, but important contribution to Congressional ignorance is the virtual disappearance of a particular type of witness at hearings: investigative journalists.
> 
> The scrappy reporter heroically spilling big secrets at a high-profile Congressional hearing - typically with a corrupt official or sleazy plutocrat looking on while sputtering with impotent rage - is a staple of novels, TV shows and movies about Washington politics. These fictional portrayals resonated with the public because they used to be common in real life. To cite one of many examples, investigative reporter Lea Thompson's testimony describing how infants had suffered permanent brain damage from inadequate baby formula help spur Congress to eliminate such products by passing the Infant Formula Act of 1980.


----------



## ekim68

The West's biggest coal plant may be about to shut down



> The largest coal-fired power plant in the West - one of the biggest climate polluters in the nation - could close later this year, a major symbolic blow to the future of coal as the backbone of America's electric power grid.
> 
> The owners of Arizona's Navajo Generating Station northeast of the Grand Canyon announced in early January that low natural gas prices and the rising costs of generating electricity using coal make it too expensive to operate the plant. A decision on the plant's fate is expected this spring.


----------



## ekim68

Vinyl record production gets a much-needed tech upgrade



> Ever wondered why you sometimes have to wait months after an album's launch to get the music on vinyl? It's not necessarily because the label hates vinyl -- in many cases, it's because the decades-old manufacturing process can't keep up with the format's resurgence. Relief may be in sight for turntable fans, though. Viryl Technologies is producing a pressing machine system, WarmTone, that should drag vinyl production into the modern era.


----------



## ekim68

Touch Bar MacBook Pros are being banned from bar exams over predictive text



> When it launched late last year, the new MacBook Pro's Touch Bar was largely reliant on first-party applications to show off what it could do. Since then, a number of other companies have jumped on board, helping the secondary screen grow into something more than novelty.
> 
> Of course, as with any new technology, there's going to be some unanticipated downside. Test taking software company Examsoft, for one, believes the input device could help facilitate cheating among students taking the bar exam.


----------



## ekim68

Ransomware is about to get a lot worse, by holding your operating system hostage




> Ransomware has boomed in the last year





> . The Malwarebytes report details how 12 months ago, ransomware was a threat to both individuals and organisations, accounting for almost one in five payloads delivered using exploits and spam emails.
> 
> Almost a year later, in November 2016, ransomware accounted for two thirds of all malicious payloads, making it by far the dominant form of malware, with the number of instances increasing by 267 percent. Ad fraud malware was a distant second place, accounting for one in ten malicious payloads.


----------



## ekim68

New York sues Charter, alleges Time Warner fraud on internet speeds



> New York filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Charter Communications Inc of short-changing customers who were promised faster internet speeds than it could deliver.
> 
> The lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan accused Charter's Spectrum unit, until recently known as Time Warner Cable, of systematically defrauding customers since 2012 by promising and charging for services it knew it could not offer.
> 
> At least 640,000 subscribers signed up for high-speed plans but got slower speeds, and many subscribers were unable to access promised online content such as Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and various gaming platforms, the complaint said.
> 
> The lawsuit seeks "full restitution" for customers, as well as hefty civil fines.


----------



## ekim68

First ever blueprint unveiled to construct a large scale quantum computer



> An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.





> Previously, scientists had proposed using fibre optic connections to connect individual computer modules. The new invention introduces connections created by electric fields that allow charged atoms (ions) to be transported from one module to another. This new approach allows 100,000 times faster connection speeds between individual quantum computing modules compared to current state-of-the-art fibre link technology.


----------



## ekim68

Tokyo 2020 Olympic Medals To Be Made From Recycled Mobile Phones



> Eight tonnes of metal is needed to produce the 5,000 medals required for the Games
> 
> The medals for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be made from recycled mobile phones in an effort to engage the Japanese nation and meet sustainability criteria.


----------



## poochee

...


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## ekim68

The surgeon giving his patients VR instead of sedatives



> In Mexico's most violent state, a surgeon is using virtual reality to relieve the pain and stress of operations when sedatives are not possible.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook's AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what's in them



> Initially used to improve the experience for visually impaired members of the Facebook community, the company's Lumos computer vision platform is now powering image content search for all users. This means you can now search for images on Facebook with key words that describe the contents of a photo, rather than being limited by tags and captions.
> 
> To accomplish the task, Facebook trained an ever-fashionable deep neural network on tens of millions of photos. Facebook's fortunate in this respect because its platform is already host to billions of captioned images. The model essentially matches search descriptors to features pulled from photos with some degree of probability.


----------



## ekim68

Bay of Bengal: depleted fish stocks and huge dead zone signal tipping point



> Long treated as a bottomless resource pit, over-exploitation of the ocean, pollution and rising sea levels are having a catastrophic impact on life in the bay


----------



## ekim68

Sweden pledges to cut all greenhouse gas emissions by 2045



> Sweden has committed to completely phase out greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and called for all countries - including the US - to "step up and fulfil the Paris Agreement".
> 
> In one of the most ambitious emissions plans published by a developed nation, the Swedish government has reaffirmed the urgency of tackling climate change, ignoring uncertainties about global policies under Donald Trump's administration.


----------



## ekim68

Report finds chemicals in one-third of fast food packaging



> (CNN)Most of the time, when you order fast food, you know exactly what you're getting: an inexpensive meal that tastes great but is probably loaded with fat, cholesterol and sodium.
> But it turns out that the packaging your food comes in could also have a negative impact on your health, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.


----------



## ekim68

Unsocial media: jealousy of online friends leaves people feeling down, Kaspersky Lab study reveals

*



Woburn, MA - January 5, 2017

Click to expand...

*


> - Social media started life as a way of staying in touch with friends and sharing happy memories. However, the results of the latest study from Kaspersky Lab indicate that social media now leaves many people feeling negative instead. The hunt for likes plays a central role in this, with the majority of people feeling down or upset when they don't get as many likes as they expect for a post, and with 42 percent saying they feel jealous when their friends get more likes than them. In addition, the research shows that people feel envious when they see the seemingly happier lives of their friends on social media.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Unsocial media: jealousy of online friends leaves people feeling down, Kaspersky Lab study reveals


...


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## ekim68

IoT devices will outnumber the world's population this year for the first time



> There will be 8.4 billion connected things in 2017, setting the stage for 20.4 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be deployed by 2020, according to analyst firm Gartner.
> 
> The installed base of hard-to-secure smart things, such as TVs, fridges, and security cameras, is expected to grow 31 percent this year to reach 8.4 billion devices, or around a billion more than the world's total population. That figure compares with last year's total installed base of 6.38 billion devices.


----------



## ekim68

EPA: East Chicago residents should use water filters



> It's possible up to 90 percent of homes in East Chicago have lead water lines, so all residents should assume they have them and use a properly certified filter, officials said.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> EPA: East Chicago residents should use water filters


...


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## ekim68

Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Cars



> In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy alternative to the dreary morning commute.


----------



## ekim68

The Tesla Model S just beat a Porsche 911 in a record-breaking speed test



> Tesla just edged out a Porsche in a first-of-its kind acceleration test.
> 
> The Tesla Model S P100D became the first production car to reach 60 mph in under 2.3 seconds in a Motor Trend speed test (2.275507139 seconds, to be exact.) Operating in Tesla's "Easter egg" ludicrous mode, the Model S reached 60 mph faster than the Porsche 911 Turbo S.


----------



## ekim68

Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as 'unreliable' source



> Online encyclopaedia editors rule out publisher as a reference citing 'reputation for poor fact checking and sensationalism'


----------



## ekim68

How UPS Trucks Saved Million of Dollars by Eliminating Left Turns



> UPS, the world's largest shipping and package delivery service, has trucks deployed all over the world, delivering as million as 15 million packages each day. And these UPS trucks apparently never take a left turn. In the US, and other countries where you drive on the right side of the road, right turns are free, but for a left turn you need to wait for a green light. The idea is simple - removing the turns means less idling at signals, and less fuel consumption, which makes it sound like an idea worth following.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> How UPS Trucks Saved Million of Dollars by Eliminating Left Turns


...


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## ekim68




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## ekim68

Subaru secures permit to test self-driving car in California



> There are now 22 companies testing their autonomous vehicle tech in the state.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Subaru secures permit to test self-driving car in California


...


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## ekim68

Ford bets $1B on self-driving car startup



> SAN FRANCISCO - Ford Motor is betting $1 billion on the world's self-driving car future.
> 
> The Detroit automaker announced Friday that it would allocate that sum over five years to a new autonomous car startup called Argo AI, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., and will have offices in Michigan and California.


----------



## ekim68

A Newly Discovered Mineral Can Convert Movement, Sunlight and Heat Into Electricity at the Same Time



> A research team from the University of Oulu in Finland have discovered a specific mineral having a perovskite crystal structure that has the properties required to extract energy from numerous sources simultaneously.
> 
> Perovskites are a family of minerals. Many of these show potential for collecting one or two types of energy at a time, but not simultaneously. While one family member might be good for harnessing energy from changes in pressure and temperature, another might have the right properties for converting solar energy into electricity efficiently. The latter would typically be used in solar cells. A perovskite that can convert changes in pressure arising from motion is known as piezoelectric material, while those that are able to convert temperature produced by movement are called pyroelectric.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter tries new measures in crackdown on harassment



> The social media company announced a new set of features Tuesday to combat hateful and abusive content.
> 
> The changes include preventing serial abusers from creating new accounts, a new "safe search" function and blocking potentially abusive and "low-quality" tweets from appearing in conversations, Twitter's engineering chief Ed Ho said in a blog post.


----------



## poochee

...


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## ekim68

Nanorods Emit and Detect Light, Could Lead to Displays That Communicate via Li-Fi



> Ever since 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, quantum dots have been in a market struggle to displace light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a backlight source for liquid crystal displays (LCDs).
> 
> Now an advance by a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea and Dow Chemical may turn the display market on its head by eliminating the need for backlights in LCD devices. They have produced a LED pixel out of nanorods capable of both emitting and detecting light.


----------



## ekim68

Security Firm Trend Micro's Blog Falls Victim To Content Spoofing Attack



> In an era of unprecedented cyberthreats, many organisations turn to security firms for guidance on how to prevent and respond to incidents, and to their researchers for information about the latest threats.
> 
> But just to illustrate that you can never be too careful, cybersecurity specialist Trend Micro has confirmed that one of the blogs it uses to communicate with customers was itself the victim of a content spoofing attack.


----------



## ekim68

Ransomware Gangs Have Become the High-Seas Pirates of the Internet

*



SAN FRANCISCO

Click to expand...

*


> -As bad as the ransomware problem is right now-and it's plenty bad-we're likely only at the beginning of what could become a crisis, experts say.
> 
> "Lots of people are being infected and lots of people are paying. The bottom line its it's getting worse and it's going to continue to do so," Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at SentinelOne, said during a talk on the ransomware epidemic at the RSA Conference here Monday.


----------



## ekim68

New Office Sensors Know When You Leave Your Desk



> Hiding devices in lights and ID badges, your boss can legally track you everywhere but the bathroom.


----------



## ekim68

Around 2.2 million deaths in India and China from air pollution: Study



> Air pollution is the leading environmental cause of death on the planet and 92 percent of the global population is living in areas where the air is unhealthy, according to a new report.
> 
> The _State of Global Air 2017_ report states that extensive, long term exposure to fine particulate matter contributed to more than four million premature deaths in 2015.
> 
> The report is a joint effort between the Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evalution's Global Burden of Disease Project.


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## poochee

...


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## ekim68




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## ekim68

After Passing Worst Surveillance Law In A Democracy, UK Now Proposes Worst Anti-Whistleblowing Law



> Last November, the UK government finally passed the Snooper's Charter, officially known as the Investigatory Powers Act. That was largely because everyone in the UK was too busy arguing over the Brexit mess to notice that Theresa May had finally achieved her goal, and pushed through what the Open Rights Group called "the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy." Now that May has provided the police with the ability to rummage through a year's worth of every Brit's browsing history without a warrant, and given permission for the intelligence agencies to break into any computer and demand backdoors to be installed for any software or online service used in the UK, it seems she has a new target: whistleblowers.


----------



## ekim68

How algorithms (secretly) run the world



> When you browse online for a new pair of shoes, pick a movie to stream on Netflix or apply for a car loan, an algorithm likely has its word to say on the outcome.
> 
> The complex mathematical formulas are playing a growing role in all walks of life: from detecting skin cancers to suggesting new Facebook friends, deciding who gets a job, how police resources are deployed, who gets insurance at what cost, or who is on a "no fly" list.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists hatch crazy $500 billion plan to refreeze the Arctic



> As governments make slow progress towards alleviating climate change and denial marks the Trump Administration's approach to the global crisis, scientists have hatched a crazy $500 billion scheme to refreeze the Arctic. Led by physicist Steven Desch of Arizona State University, a team of 14 scientists concocted a plan to replenish Arctic sea ice using ten million wind-powered pumps.
> 
> The strategy involves deploying millions of renewably-powered pumps to send water onto the surface of Arctic ice during the winter. In theory, that water would then freeze, thickening the ice before summer.


----------



## ekim68

Rude, disrespectful surgeons may also be more error-prone: Study



> WEDNESDAY, Feb. 15, 2017 -- Surgeons with a history of patient complaints regarding their personalities or attitude are also more likely to make mistakes in the operating room, a new study finds.
> 
> Researchers compared surgical outcomes with patient reports of unprofessional behavior by their doctors at several health systems in the United States.
> 
> The investigators found that people treated by surgeons who had the most complaints had nearly 14 percent more complications in the month after surgery than patients treated by surgeons viewed as more respectful.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. panel gives yellow light to human embryo editing



> Editing the DNA of a human embryo to prevent a disease in a baby could be ethically allowable one day-but only in rare circumstances and with safeguards in place, says a widely anticipated report released today.
> 
> The report from an international committee convened by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, D.C., concludes that such a clinical trial "might be permitted, but only following much more research" on risks and benefits, and "only for compelling reasons and under strict oversight." Those situations could be limited to couples who both have a serious genetic disease and for whom embryo editing is "really the last reasonable option" if they want to have a healthy biological child, says committee co-chair Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.


----------



## ekim68

How eating less can slow the aging process



> Recent research published in _Molecular & Cellular Proteomics_ offers one glimpse into how cutting calories impacts aging inside a cell. The researchers found that when ribosomes -- the cell's protein makers -- slow down, the aging process slows too. The decreased speed lowers production but gives ribosomes extra time to repair themselves.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists use stem cells to grow animal-free pork in a lab



> A new study published in the journal _Scientific Reports_ has taken us one step closer to the dream of animal-free meat. (And, no, in case your mind immediately goes to the 1973 sci-fi movie _Soylent Green_, it ain't people, either!)


----------



## ekim68

Hurdle cleared on road to printable, low-cost perovskite solar cells



> Much more printable power could be on the way soon, thanks to a manufacturing breakthrough that allows for lower cost and higher efficiency perovskite solar cells to move forward. Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a new chemical reaction that solves one of the key challenges holding back development of the relatively new class of cells.
> 
> "Perovskite solar cells can enable us to use techniques already established in the printing industry to produce solar cells at very low cost," explains professor Professor Ted Sargent. "Potentially, perovskites and silicon cells can be married to improve efficiency further, but only with advances in low-temperature processes."


----------



## ekim68

Researchers discover security problems under the hood of automobile apps



> In a presentation at this week's RSA security conference in San Francisco, researchers from Kaspersky Labs revealed more bad news for the Internet of drivable things-connected cars. Malware researchers Victor Chebyshev and Mikhail Kuzin examined seven Android apps for connected vehicles and found that the apps were ripe for malicious exploitation. Six of the applications had unencrypted user credentials, and all of them had little in the way of protection against reverse-engineering or the insertion of malware into apps.


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## ekim68

Autism Starts Months before Symptoms Appear, Study Shows



> Flagging children early offers the possibility of more effective treatment


----------



## ekim68

Study reveals secret to left- or right-handedness



> Feb. 17 (UPI) -- Researchers at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany have found the roots of hand preference may come from the spinal cord in utero and not from the brain.
> 
> Previous studies had concluded that left- or right-handedness is tied to hemispheric asymmetries in the brain. The hand preference develops in utero at about eight weeks gestation and is visible in the fetus on ultrasound at around the 13th week of pregnancy.


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## ekim68

First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual Utopia




> Real-life Fran was a hiker and a dancer. But when Parkinson's stole her mobility, she discovered a new home inside Second Life.


----------



## ekim68

America's Television Graveyards



> Years after most Americans switched to flat-screens, we're just now beginning to deal with the long-term ramifications of sustainably disposing of old cathode-ray televisions and computer monitors. This dangerous, labor-intensive, and costly undertaking will have to be done for each of the estimated 705 million CRT TVs sold in the United States since 1980. CRT processing, as it's called, happens at only a handful of the best e-waste recycling centers in the United States. In many cases, your old TV isn't recycled at all and is instead abandoned in a warehouse somewhere, left for society to deal with sometime in the future.


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## poochee

ekim68 said:


> First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual Utopia


...


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## ekim68

:up:


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## ekim68

I'll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you.



> A few months ago I wrote about how you can encrypt your entire life in less than an hour. Well, all the security in the world can't save you if someone has physical possession of your phone or laptop, and can intimidate you into giving up your password.
> 
> And a few weeks ago, that's precisely what happened to a US citizen returning home from abroad.


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## poochee

...


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## ekim68

And the Beat goes on...............


Thousands of spills at US oil and gas fracking sites



> They found that there had been 6,600 releases from these fracked wells over a ten-year period in four states.
> 
> The biggest problems were reported in oil-rich North Dakota where 67% of the spills were recorded.
> 
> The largest spill recorded involved 100,000 litres of fluid with most related to storing and moving liquids.


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## poochee

...


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## ekim68

Global arms trade hits highest level since end of Cold War



> The spike was fueled by conflicts in the Middle East, tensions in the South China Sea and the perceived threat from Russia to its neighbors, according to a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
> 
> The U.S. is by far the world's biggest arms exporter, accounting for 33% of all weapons exports in the five years through 2016, the SIPRI report said. Russia was the second biggest supplier, with China third.


----------



## ekim68

Disney Research turns a whole room into a wireless charger



> While there's been no shortage of attempts to incorporate wireless power transmission technology into our furniture, garages and living rooms, reality has not quite caught up with the futuristic ideals of untethered wireless freedom. That said, we might be inching closer to it with Disney Research's recent demonstration of a new method for wireless power transmission that could charge your devices automatically the moment you walk into a room, making electrical cords and charging cradles a thing of the past.


----------



## ekim68

GE, Intel, and AT&T Are Putting Cameras and Sensors All Over San Diego



> General Electric will put cameras, microphones, and sensors on 3,200 street lights in San Diego this year, marking the first large-scale use of "smart city" tools GE says can help monitor traffic and pinpoint crime, but raising potential privacy concerns.
> 
> Based on technology from GE's Current division, Intel (intc, +0.25%) and AT&T (t, +0.72%), the system will use sensing nodes on light poles to locate gunshots, estimate crowd sizes, check vehicle speeds and other tasks, GE and the city said on Wednesday. The city will provide the data to entrepreneurs and students to develop applications.


----------



## ekim68

Average life expectancy on the rise - but the US lags behind



> Drawing on long-term data on mortality and longevity, researchers from the Imperial College London and the World Health Organization (WHO) have predicted the average life expectancies for people in 35 countries born in 2030. Residents of every country in the study can expect to live longer, with South Korean women topping the list at 90 years - but it's not such great news for the US.


----------



## ekim68

Self-driving cars should be liable for accidents, not the passengers-UK gov't



> Electric charging points at all major motorway services and petrol stations, and the occupants of a self-driving car aren't liable in the case of an accident-those are two of the measures proposed by a new law that the UK government hopes will let us reap the rewards of improved transport technology over the next few years.


----------



## ekim68

NASA snaps pics of the world's largest solar farm from space



> With renewable energy on the rise, it makes perfect sense for the title "world's largest solar plant" to change hands pretty quickly. In 2014 for example, the 550 MW Topaz Solar Farm held the title, to be toppled in November by a 648 MW plant in Kamuthi India. At this point in time, China's Dam Solar Park has risen above them all with 850 MW of capacity. Sound like a lot? Here's some NASA satellite imagery to help put things into perspective.


----------



## ekim68

SeaCharger solar-powered unmanned craft completes California to Hawaii ocean adventure



> Back in May, engineer Damon McMillan announced that his two-year garage project would start making its 2,000-mile solo voyage on Memorial Day. As planned, the solar-powered SeaCharger entered Californian water on May 30, but didn't get very far. A software bug forced the attempt to be abandoned. A couple of weeks later, though, and the 8-foot long craft was on its way again. And just over 41 days after relaunch, it arrived safely at Mahukona, Hawaii.
> 
> The aim of the project was to create an unmanned surface vehicle that could cross an ocean using sunlight as its sole energy source. The SeaCharger has a fiberglass-covered foam hull topped by two photovoltaic panels charging a LiFePo4 battery bank housed within a thruster pod suspended beneath the craft. A watertight pod between the solar panels is home to an Arduino-based autopilot, GPS and satellite modem circuitry.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's spaceship campus will open in April as 'Apple Park'



> Forget 'Campus Two," "Spaceship" or "Doughnutsville," because Apple's new headquarters has been officially named Apple Park. The company has announced that the multi-billion dollar building will begin operations in April, with 12,000 employees moving in across six months. Apple has also revealed that the building's 1,000-seat auditorium will be christened the Steve Jobs Theater in memory of the late co-founder.


----------



## ekim68

The Alternative Facts of Cable Companies



> C*able companies have bad reputations* for customer service, and sometimes they rename themselves to divert attention and get a fresh start. Comcast's "Xfinity" rebranding in 2010 has now been followed by Charter's renaming of itself-after a megamerger with Time Warner Cable last year-as "Spectrum." But changing your name doesn't mean that you aren't liable for misbehavior under your previous moniker. This is what Charter…er, Spectrum… found recently when, following a lengthy investigation, New York's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, filed an extraordinary lawsuit against the company.
> 
> Based on the company's own documents and statements, it appears that just about everything it has been saying since 2012 to New York State residents about their internet access and data services is untrue.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is so sure its cars are safe that it now offers insurance for life



> In the self-driving future envisioned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, car owners might be saying "goodbye" to a whole lot more than steering wheels.
> 
> Musk is so sure of the safety features bundled into Tesla vehicles that his company has begun offering some customers a lifetime insurance and maintenance package at the time of purchase.
> 
> No more monthly insurance bills. No more unexpected repair costs.


----------



## ekim68

Japan accelerates wind power development as govt support pays off: study



> With a month to go this fiscal year, Japan's installation of new wind power capacity in 2016-17 is set to come in almost double that of the previous 12 months, propelled by higher tariffs guaranteed by Tokyo and a rising number of offshore wind farms.
> 
> Japan is set to add 300 megawatts of wind capacity - enough to power more than 100,000 average homes - in the 12 months through March, Japan's Wind Power Association said in a study released late last month. Some 157 megawatts of wind power were installed in the previous year.


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## poochee

Interesting and informative articles here.


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## ekim68

Renault-Nissan developing a fleet of self-driving EVs



> French people love to drive, but with private radar companies set to give out way more speeding tickets, they may be willing to let machines take the wheel. Luckily, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has teamed with a company called Transdev to develop a fleet of self-driving vehicles "for future public and on-demand transportation," it said in a press release. The project will kick off with autonomous field testing of Europe's most popular EV, the 250-mile-range Renault Zoe.


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## ekim68

Who Americans Consider Their Allies, Friends & Enemies



> The map above shows which countries Americans consider their allies and friends and those they consider unfriendly or even their enemy.
> 
> The data is based off a YouGov poll conducted between January 28 - February 1, 2017, which asked 7,150 adults living in the United States the question:


----------



## ekim68

Why Hollywood as We Know It Is Already Over



> With theater attendance at a two-decade low and profits dwindling, the kind of disruption that hit music, publishing, and other industries is already reshaping the entertainment business. From A.I. Aaron Sorkin to C.G.I. actors to algorithmic editing, Nick Bilton investigates what lies ahead.


----------



## ekim68

The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe



> Calls to make America great again hark back to a time when income inequality receded even as the economy boomed and the middle class expanded. Yet it is all too easy to forget just how deeply this newfound equality was rooted in the cataclysm of the world wars.
> 
> The pressures of total war became a uniquely powerful catalyst of equalizing reform, spurring unionization, extensions of voting rights, and the creation of the welfare state. During and after wartime, aggressive government intervention in the private sector and disruptions to capital holdings wiped out upper-class wealth and funneled resources to workers; even in countries that escaped physical devastation and crippling inflation, marginal tax rates surged upward. Concentrated for the most part between 1914 and 1945, this "Great Compression" (as economists call it) of inequality took several more decades to fully run its course across the developed world until the 1970s and 1980s, when it stalled and began to go into reverse.


----------



## ekim68

New drivers caught using phones to lose licence



> Drivers caught using a phone within two years of passing their test will have their licence revoked under new rules in England, Scotland and Wales.
> 
> Penalties for using a phone at the wheel double from 1 March to six points and a £200 fine.
> 
> New drivers who get six points or more must retake their practical and theory. More experienced drivers can be banned if they get 12 points in three years.


----------



## ekim68

Soon, you can buy gadgets that can self-destruct when stolen



> Researchers have developed new technology that can prevent stolen phones and laptops from getting into the wrong hands -- by destroying them.
> 
> This new self-destruct mechanism built by researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia would provide an extra layer of defense against thieves who resell the devices or access the device's sensitive data.
> 
> The technology works quickly, and can be installed on most modern devices, say the researchers.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Soon, you can buy gadgets that can self-destruct when stolen


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## ekim68

One bitcoin is now worth more than one ounce of gold



> For the first time ever, the price of one bitcoin has surpassed the price of one ounce of gold.
> 
> While today's swap can be attributed to a good day for bitcoin (up ~3%) and a bad day for gold (down ~1.3%), the big picture is that bitcoin has more than doubled in the last year (up ~185% from a year ago) while gold is essentially trading exactly at the price it was a year ago.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Have Found a Way to Rapidly Thaw Cryopreserved Tissue Without Damage



> Researchers have developed a technique that allows them to rapidly thaw cryopreserved human and pig samples without damaging the tissue - a development that could help get rid of organ transplant waiting lists.
> 
> Cryopreservation is the ability to preserve tissues at liquid nitrogen temperatures for long periods of time and bring them back without damage, and it's something scientists have been dreaming about achieving with large tissue samples and organs for decades.
> 
> Not only for the life-extending applications we've read about in sci-fi novels, but, more feasibly, because the technology could allow hospitals to safely store organs for long periods of time.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon pledges to cover 15 massive warehouse rooftops with solar panels



> On Tuesday, Amazon said that it would install solar panels on 15 of its fulfillment and sorting centers around the US in 2017. That may not seem like a lot, but the massive warehouses in California, New Jersey, Maryland, Nevada, and Delaware account for millions in rooftop square footage and will ultimately reflect 41MW of installed capacity.


----------



## ekim68

Moscow Billboard Targets Ads Based on the Car You're Driving



> The rise of digital billboards spawns the idea of targeted highway ads, with tests in the U.S. planned for this summer.


----------



## ekim68

New technique turns random objects into FM radio stations



> A new technology is enabling everyday objects, such as posters and clothing, to be transformed into FM radio stations, according to research from the University of Washington.
> 
> The team has introduced a technique called 'backscattering' which uses ambient low-power radio signals to broadcast messages from random objects to smartphones in the local vicinity. The researchers hope that the development could help support various smart city applications, and picture a future where anything from a poster at a bus stop to a road sign can transmit audio updates and information to passers-by.


----------



## ekim68

How American TV consumption is changing, in one chart



> Streaming service subscribers (free or paid) increased again (68% in 2016 vs. 63% in 2014) and has caught up with the percentage of Paid TV service providers (67%) for the first time ever, according to the Consumer Technology Association's new study, _The Changing Landscape for Video and Content._


----------



## ekim68

Smart garbage can turns trash into a game




> Waste





> is a big concern for cities -- after all, no one likes looking at trash on the street. But it ends up there anyway for various reasons: bins overflow, sometimes they're hard to find and worst of all, some people just don't care what they do with their trash. Sencity seeks to fight this apathy by turning litter disposal into a game with its new TetraBIN, a connected trash bin that rewards you for tossing out your garbage.


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## poochee

...


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## ekim68

Pollution responsible for a quarter of deaths of young children, says WHO




> Pollution





> is responsible for one in four deaths among all children under five, according to new World Health Organisation reports, with toxic air, unsafe water and and lack of sanitation the leading causes.
> 
> The reports found polluted environments cause the deaths of 1.7 million children every year, but that many of the deaths could be prevented by interventions already known to work, such as providing cleaner cooking fuels to prevent indoor air pollution.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Waze and other traffic dodging apps prompt cities to game the algorithms



> Call it planners versus algorithms.
> 
> Smartphone apps like Waze, a godsend for some road warriors because they shave minutes and even hours off their commutes with their creative detours off main highways, are causing headaches for city planners.
> 
> Using crosswalks, wider sidewalks and traffic lights, these transportation engineers aim to make neighborhood traffic slow, safe, and friendly for pedestrians - not send frustrated commuters barreling down side roads.


----------



## ekim68

China's ZTE pleads guilty, settles with U.S. over Iran, North Korea sales



> Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp (000063.SZ) has agreed to pay $892 million and plead guilty to criminal charges for violating U.S. laws that restrict the sale of American-made technology to Iran and North Korea.
> 
> While a guilty plea deals a blow to ZTE's reputation, the resolution could lift some uncertainty for a company that relies on U.S. suppliers for 25 percent to 30 percent of its components.
> 
> A five-year investigation found ZTE conspired to evade U.S. embargoes by buying U.S. components, incorporating them into ZTE equipment and illegally shipping them to Iran.


----------



## ekim68

How Republicans' Obamacare-Repeal Plan Would Affect the Health Sector



> There's plenty for the health-care industry to like in the latest Republican proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would lower taxes and eliminate rules. There's also plenty not to like because the plan would funnel less money into helping people pay for insurance and hospital visits.
> 
> The GOP bill, which still has a long way before it may become law, would replace Obamacare with a more limited program of insurance subsidies. That would probably result in less comprehensive insurance, increasing the risk that people will be unable to pay hospitals and doctors when they show up for care. At the same time, the proposal would eliminate billions of dollars of taxes on the industry.
> 
> The Republican proposal is "mostly positive" for insurers covering people in Medicare and the working population, and "modestly worse" for hospitals and insurers that specialize in Medicaid, Ana Gupte, an health analyst with Leerink Partners, said in a note to clients Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Poachers are trying to hack animal tracking systems



> Animal tracking through electronic tagging has helped researchers gain insight into the lives of many wild animal species, but can also be misused by wildlife poachers, hunters, animal-persecution groups and people interested in seeing and interacting with the animals - all to the detriment of our animal brethren.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's new solar energy station will power Hawaii at night



> Renewable energy supplies are great because they produce power without filling the air with pollution. Yet, once the sun goes down solar panels become pretty useless. But Tesla and Hawaii have a solution that'll use the sun's rays both day and night using Powerpacks built at the Gigafactory.
> 
> The Kapaia project is a combination 13MW SolarCity solar farm and 53MWh Tesla Powerpack station on the island of Kauai. In partnership with the KIUC (Kauai Island Utility Cooperative) the project will store the sun's energy during the day and release it at night. The station (along with Kauai's other renewable resource solutions including wind and biomass) won't completely keep the island from using fossil fuels but it will temper the need.


----------



## ekim68

Storing data in a single atom proved possible by IBM researchers



> The fundamental components of computers are becoming small enough that they are pressing against the boundaries of the familiar world of Newtonian physics. And nowhere is the scale and precision of operation on better display than in hard disk drives, where a trillion bits may fit in a square inch. But IBM has outdone them all by reading and writing data to _a single atom_.


----------



## ekim68

Fiix will send a mechanic to your driveway to repair your car on demand



> Getting your car repaired is not only costly, it's frustrating. This is especially true when you have to leave your car in the shop for days at a time.
> 
> Fiix want to fix this. Part of Y Combinator's Winter 2017 class, the startup has built a platform to send a mechanic to your home to fix your car within hours of being requested.
> 
> Customers request service by calling or chatting with the company on the website. Interestingly, Fiix prefers to deal with customers over the phone so they can accurately diagnose the issue. This lets them send the right parts and mechanic without actually seeing your car, and make sure the issue can actually be fixed in a driveway and doesn't need a full garage.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla pledges to fix Australian state's power woes



> Lyndon Rive, co-founder of Solar City and head of Tesla's energy division, believes that his company could fix an Australian state's energy woes in just 100 days. Rive was talking to Australia's _Financial Review_, claiming that Tesla could build between 100-300MWh of battery storage in that short a time. It's a bet that his cousin (and boss) Elon Musk was eager to take up, later tweeting that Tesla would do the work for free if it missed that deadline.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/drought-stricken-chinese-city-proposes-mega-pipeline-to-1793042210']Drought-Stricken Chinese City Proposes Mega Pipeline to Pump Water From Siberia[/URL]



> The northwest Chinese city of Lanzhou has a serious water shortage problem. To address the issue, its urban planners have sketched out an ambitious plan to deliver water from Siberia's Lake Baikal to the city along a 1,000-mile-long pipeline. Getting approval for the project will be a monumental challenge, but it may be a sign of things to come for other water-poor regions of the world.


----------



## ekim68

Africa gets its own web address with launch of .africa



> Africa now has the unique web address .africa, equivalent to the more familiar .com, following its official launch by the African Union.
> 
> AU commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma hailed its creation as the moment when Africa "got [its] own digital identity".


----------



## ekim68

Norway says half of new cars now electric or hybrid



> Norway, which already boasts the world's highest number of electric cars per capita, said Monday that electric or hybrid cars represented half of new registrations in the country so far this year.


----------



## ekim68

Church cops? Congregation eyes its own unusual police force



> BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - Briarwood Presbyterian Church already has more than 4,000 members, two private schools and its own radio station. And if administrators have their way, the wealthy congregation could soon add something that no other American church has: its own police force.


----------



## ekim68

Gawker founder Nick Denton believes the 'good internet will rise up again'



> "Facebook makes me despise many of my friends and Twitter makes me hate the rest of the world," Gawker founder Nick Denton said.
> 
> The publishing pioneer, who connected with fellow bloggers at South by Southwest in the early days of web publishing, returned to the festival Sunday to reflect on the demise of his company and what lies ahead for the internet in the years after Donald Trump's presidential election. The future isn't Facebook or Twitter, where fake news and trolls abound. Instead, it's rooted in Reddit-or at least something like Reddit, Denton said.


----------



## ekim68

Millions of Smart Meters May Over-Inflate Readings by up to 600%



> Lab tests carried out by Dutch scientists have shown that some of today's "smart" electrical meters may give out false readings that in some cases can be 582% higher than actual energy consumption.
> 
> The study involved several tests conducted on nine different brands of "smart" meters, also referred to in the industry as "static energy meters." Researchers also used one electromechanical meter for reference.


----------



## ekim68

SXSW 2017: Why is the Vatican at a tech conference?



> As the Vatican's Adjunct Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture, one of Bishop Tighe's many responsibilities is to run the social media accounts for the Pope, as well as considering ways in which the Catholic Church can stretch its influence into our digital lives.


----------



## ekim68

Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission



> A small yellow robot submarine, called Boaty McBoatface after a competition to name a new polar research ship backfired, is being sent on its first Antarctic mission.
> 
> Boaty, which has arguably one of the most famous names in recent maritime history, is a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which will be able to travel under ice, reach depths of 6,000 metres, and transmit the data it collects to researchers via a radio link.


----------



## ekim68

This giant warehouse farm says it can grow 100 times more greens per square foot than traditional farms



> For centuries, American farmers have grown produce with soil, sunlight, and water.
> 
> A new farm, called Bowery, says it has found a much more efficient place to grow: inside a giant warehouse in Kearny, New Jersey.
> 
> Located about 15 miles outside New York City, Bowery estimates it has the capacity to grow 100 times more greens per square foot than the average industrial farm.


----------



## ekim68

We didn't lose control - it was stolen



> To mark the World Wide Web's 28th birthday, its inventor Tim Berners-Lee has written an open letter identifying three major "trends" that he's become increasingly worried about in the last twelve months:
> 
> 
> We've lost control of our personal data
> It's too easy for misinformation to spread on the Web
> Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> This giant warehouse farm says it can grow 100 times more greens per square foot than traditional farms


...


----------



## ekim68

:up:


----------



## ekim68

World's biggest fund manager issues 'Darth Vader-style' threat to oust bosses who ignore climate change



> The world's biggest fund manager has threatened to vote out directors of companies that fail to address the risks posed to their businesses by climate change.
> 
> In a post on its website, BlackRock, which controls assets worth $5.1 trillion (about £4.2 trillion), said climate risk was a "systemic issue".
> 
> It said it planned to engage with the companies that are "most exposed to climate risk" over this year to help them tell investors - like BlackRock -- about the financial impacts of global warming and the shift to a low-carbon economy.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://lifehacker.com/we-ve-brought-these-stupid-internet-of-things-hacks-u-1793313692']We've Brought These Stupid 'Internet of Things' Hacks Upon Ourselves[/URL]



> Whether it's poorly reported stories of hacked Samsung TVs, sadly hilarious tales of hacked teddy bears, or even more bizarre claims about wiretapped microwaves, real, fake, and overblown accounts of all the things that can happen with the devices we choose to connect to the internet dominate the news. We've brought this stupid future on ourselves.
> 
> Over the last few years, we've been connecting anything and everything we can to the internet under the guise of simplicity. You can connect light bulbs, refrigerators, sex toys, pet feeders, and tons more. These devices are usually referred to as Internet of Things (IoT). How poorly thought out they are is already a running joke, but that's not stopping them from coming out at an increased pace.


----------



## ekim68

DirecTV admits screwing up regional sports fees, starts issuing credits



> AT&T this week acknowledged that DirecTV has been charging the wrong regional sports fees to some customers and is now issuing bill credits to those who paid more because of the mistake.


----------



## ekim68

Petition to remove Congress members' health care subsidies gets nearly 500,000 signatures



> An Oregon man has circulated a petition demanding that if Congress is willing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, its members should also be willing to forego their own health care subsidies.
> 
> On Thursday afternoon, the Change.org petition had received more than 432,000 signatures, with a goal of 500,000 before it will be sent off to congressional leadership.


----------



## ekim68

Adobe semaphore code cracked by Tennessee high school teacher



> The illuminated disks atop Adobe Systems' downtown San Jose headquarters have transmitted a secret message since 2012. On Monday, Adobe revealed that Jimmy Waters, a high school math teacher in Knoxville, Tenn., had cracked that code. The semaphore had been transmitting the audio broadcast of Neil Armstrong's historic moon landing in 1969. That's right, not the text but the actual _audio_.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: Movie Theaters Haven't Innovated Beyond Popcorn



> Asked about his company's relationship with major theater chains, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings didn't pull any punches on Thursday. "How did distribution innovate in the movie business in the last 30 years? Well, the popcorn tastes better, but that's about it," he quipped.
> 
> Hastings made these remarks during a Q&A session with reporters at the company's headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif., where he suggested that new distribution models could do for movies what cable networks and online services have done for TV shows.


----------



## ekim68

BMW says self-driving car to be level 5 capable by 2021



> German carmaker BMW (BMWG.DE) is on track to deliver a self-driving car by 2021, the company's senior vice president for Autonomous Driving, Elmar Frickenstein, said on Thursday.
> 
> "We are on the way to deliver a car in 2021 with level 3, 4 and 5," Frickenstein told a panel discussion in Berlin, explaining the vehicle will have different levels of autonomy, depending on how and where it is used.
> 
> A level 5 vehicle is capable of navigating roads without any driver input, while a level 3 car still needs a steering wheel and a driver who can take over if the car encounters a problem.


----------



## ekim68

The public will be able to dine with Googlers at a planned new campus




> Google received necessary approvals from the Mountain View City Council earlier this week.


----------



## ekim68

China's police are now shooting down drones with radio-jamming rifles



> A Chinese city's police department is arming itself with more than 20 drone-jamming rifles to crack down on illegal drone flights.
> 
> Police in Wuhan, central China , are going to be equipped with 20 of these rifles, which work by emitting radio signals that force the drones to land purportedly without damaging them.


----------



## ekim68

Lockheed Martin in Bothell develops record-setting laser weapon for U.S. Army




> Lockheed Martin's





> Bothell office has unveiled a world record-setting laser weapon for the U.S. Army.
> 
> Lockheed successfully developed and tested the 58 kW laser beam earlier this year, setting a world record for this type of laser.


----------



## ekim68

Denmark rids itself of foreign debt for first time in 183 years



> A debt milestone for Denmark.
> 
> The country will pay off its last foreign currency loan worth $1.5 billion (€1.4 billion) on Monday - ridding itself of any FX debt obligations for the first time in at least 183 years.


----------



## ekim68

Interview: The bold plan to build the world's first ship tunnel



> Norway's most hazardous shipping route passes around the country's Stad peninsula and harsh local weather means delays and dangerous conditions for ship crews are a regular occurrence. An ambitious plan aims to solve this by building the world's first ship tunnel of any significant size directly _through_ the peninsula, enabling ships to travel in safety.


----------



## ekim68

Nokia, Facebook break subsea fiber optic network records in field trials



> Facebook is investing heavily in different ways to carry troves of data across the globe, including subsea fiber optic cables. So when the tech giant saw that Nokia Bell Labs was working on ways to make those cables more efficient, it offered to let Nokia test out its innovative techniques on one of its transatlantic cables.
> 
> In February, Nokia Bell Labs successfully completed multiple submarine field trials over Facebook's 5,500 kilometer submarine cable between New York and Ireland, which has yet to come online. The result was impressive: Using Bell Labs' new probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) technology, the trials improved the optical transmission capacity of the cable by nearly 2.5 times.


----------



## ekim68

Spider venom messes with our brains-and may help protect them from harm



> It may not be radioactive, but venom from a dangerous spider in Australia may help give researchers the super power of protecting brains from strokes.
> 
> Venom from the Australian funnel-web spider (_Hadronyche infensa_) contains a chemical that shuts down an ion channel known to malfunction in brain cells after strokes, researchers report Monday in _PNAS_. In cell experiments, the harmless chemical protected brain cells from a toxic flood of ions unleashed after a stroke strikes. In rats, the venom component markedly protected the rats' brains from extensive damage-even when it was given hours after a stroke occurred.


----------



## ekim68

Japanese company develops a solar cell with record-breaking 26%+ efficiency



> Solar panels are cheaper than ever these days, but installation costs can still be considerable for homeowners. More efficient solar panels can recapture the cost of their installation more quickly, so making panels that are better at converting sunlight into electricity is a key focus of solar research and development.
> 
> The silicon-based cells that make up a solar panel have a theoretical efficiency limit of 29 percent, but so far that number has proven elusive. Practical efficiency rates in the low-20-percent range have been considered very good for commercial solar panels. But researchers with Japanese chemical manufacturer Kaneka Corporation have built a solar cell with a photo conversion rate of 26.3 percent, breaking the previous record of 25.6 percent. Although it's just a 2.7 percent increase in efficiency, improvements in commercially viable solar cell technology are increasingly hard-won.


----------



## ekim68

Museums use CT scans to take the mystery out of mummies



> Most of us have a rather cinematic view of mummies: a bandaged body rising out of a sarcophagus, stumbling toward whoever just disturbed their slumber. Of course, this could never happen and not just for supernatural reasons. Mummies are wrapped up pretty tight and are just too old and fragile to do anything. In fact, they're often too delicate for scientists to even study them, meaning many human remains have sat in storage for more than a century. However, an exhibit making its way to New York's American History of Natural History today not only takes them out of the warehouse, but also tells us more about the people wrapped inside, thanks to some help from modern technology.


----------



## ekim68

Senate votes to kill FCC's broadband privacy rules



> The U.S. Senate has voted to kill broadband provider privacy regulations prohibiting them from selling customers' web-browsing histories and other data without their permission.
> 
> The Senate's 50-48 vote Thursday on a resolution of disapproval would roll back Federal Communications Commission rules requiring broadband providers to receive opt-in customer permission to share sensitive personal information, including web-browsing history, geolocation, and financial details with third parties. The FCC approved the regulations just five months ago.


----------



## ekim68

World's largest artificial Sun rises in Germany



> Germany isn't exactly famous for its sunshine, so to help with the country's commitment to investigating renewable energy, the German Space Center (DLR) has constructed the world's largest artificial Sun. Making its public debut today in Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, the three-storey "Synlight" electrically-powered sun lamp will be used for various research projects, including developing processes for producing hydrogen fuel using sunlight.


----------



## ekim68

How Noisy Is Your Neighborhood? Now There's A Map For That



> There's no denying it: Los Angeles isn't exactly gentle on the ears.
> 
> That's one lesson, at least, from a comprehensive noise map created by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. On the interactive U.S. map the agency released this week, which depicts data on noise produced primarily by airports and interstate highways, few spots glare with such deep and angry color as the City of Angels.


----------



## ekim68

Madison, Wisconsin commits to 100% renewable energy



> Madison just became the first city in Wisconsin and the largest city in the Midwest to commit to 100 percent clean energy in just the latest example of how President Donald Trump can't stop the renewables revolution. The state capital and college town is the 25th US city to commit to the transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean, renewable energy following Tuesday's city council vote. The vote allocated $250,000 to develop a plan by January 18, 2018 for city operations to achieve goals of 100 percent renewable energy and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, including electricity, heating and transportation.


----------



## ekim68

Countries Keep Joining the Paris Climate Agreement



> Countries from all corners of the world continue to formally join the Paris Agreement in another sign that international climate action will continue in the Trump-era. Since Trump was elected president, 34 countries have formally joined the Paris Agreement, with 16 countries taking that step since the beginning of 2017. This brings the total number of parties to the Paris Agreement to 137, accounting for over 82 percent of the world's emissions.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Countries Keep Joining the Paris Climate Agreement


...


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://theintercept.com/2017/03/24/a-louisiana-town-plagued-by-pollution-shows-why-cuts-to-the-epa-will-be-measured-in-illnesses-and-deaths/']A Louisiana Town Plagued by Pollution Shows Why Cuts to the EPA Will Be Measured in Illnesses[/URL]



> When the Environmental Protection Agency informed people in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, last July that the local neoprene plant was emitting a chemical that gave them the highest risk of cancer from air pollution in the country, the information was received not just with horror and sadness but also with a certain sense of validation.
> 
> For years, many of the people living on this little square of land between the train tracks and the Mississippi River levee have felt they suffered more than their share of illnesses.


----------



## ekim68

'Extreme and unusual' climate trends continue after record 2016



> In the atmosphere, the seas and around the poles, climate change is reaching disturbing new levels across the Earth.
> 
> That's according to a detailed global analysis from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
> 
> It says that 2016 was not only the warmest year on record, but it saw atmospheric CO2 rise to a new high, while Arctic sea ice recorded a new winter low.
> 
> The "extreme and unusual" conditions have continued in 2017, it says.


----------



## ekim68

North Dakota oil spill 3 times larger than first estimated
 


> A December oil pipeline spill in western North Dakota might have been three times larger than first estimated and among the biggest in state history, a state environmental expert said Friday.
> 
> About 530,000 gallons of oil is now believed to have spilled from the Belle Fourche Pipeline that was likely ruptured by a slumping hillside about 16 miles northwest of Belfield in Billings County, Health Department environmental scientist Bill Seuss said. The earlier estimate was about 176,000 gallons.


----------



## ekim68

As 120 countries push for a ban, nuclear survivors take the floor



> Over the past two days, about 120 governments have participated in nuclear ban talks at the United Nations, determined to move ahead even though nuclear-armed states like the United States are refusing to participate and pressuring allies to do the same. The high-level segment of the meeting, which invited government ministers and UN permanent representatives to speak, was scheduled to end on Monday but ran until lunchtime on Tuesday due to overwhelming interest. States continued to cite the "historic nature" of the negotiations, with the delegate from Liechtenstein observing that "the broad and high-level representation today shows strong political support for this process."


 
[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

Home Remedy




> A San Diego "pre-hospice" program helps chronically ill patients live longer, live better, and stay out of the hospital-all while saving the health care system money.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> As 120 countries push for a ban, nuclear survivors take the floor
> 
> 
> [/URL][/URL]



...


----------



## ekim68

More than ever, employees want a say in how their companies are run



> Employees have been unhappy with their employers since the invention of wages 5,000 years ago. While workers have traditionally looked to unions to address their grievances, a new generation is trusting in the power of petitions to force changes.


----------



## ekim68

Streaming Services Generated More Than 50% of All U.S. Music Industry Revenue in 2016



> Streaming music services were for the first time ever responsible for more than 50% of all U.S. music industry revenue in 2016, according to new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday.
> 
> Paid and ad-supported streaming together generated 51% of music revenue last year, to be precise, bringing in a total of $3.9 billion. In 2015, streaming music was responsible for 34% of the music industry's annual revenue.


----------



## ekim68

IBM technology creates smart wingman for self-driving cars



> IBM said that it has patented a machine learning technology that defines how to shift control of an autonomous vehicle between a human driver and a vehicle control processor in the event of a potential emergency.
> 
> Basically the patented IBM system employs onboard sensors and artificial intelligence to determine potential safety concerns and control whether self-driving vehicles are operated autonomously or by surrendering control to a human driver.


----------



## ekim68

Study: Most manufacturers overstate how long laptop batteries will last



> A new study has found that the battery life estimates made by manufacturers of laptops rarely have much bearing on reality. Although Apple's battery life claims were the closest to reality, in the case of some other manufacturers, their laptops lasted hours less than the stated time.


----------



## ekim68

Golden Age of TV is not so golden for writers: Why the Writers Guild of America is moving closer to a strike



> A decade ago, Hollywood writers brought the entertainment industry to a standstill when they walked off the job for three months in a dispute over pay for movies and TV shows distributed online. The strike halted dozens of TV and movie productions and sent shock waves through the Los Angeles economy*.*
> 
> Now, the Hollywood community is feeling a sense of déjà vu as the possibility of another strike looms large. After the collapse of talks with the major studios, the Writers Guild of America is seeking a strike authorization vote from members. While the union has until May 1 to reach an agreement, tensions are as high as they've been in years, say people close to the negotiations not authorized to comment.
> 
> The charged atmosphere is the result of a perfect storm of economic and digital changes bearing down on the business. Since the last writers strike, the industry has seen far-reaching shifts. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have transformed Hollywood and contributed to an unprecedented number of quality series being produced - a phenomenon often described as the new Golden Age of TV.


----------



## ekim68

Super SEALs: Elite Units Pursue Brain-Stimulating Technologies



> At a conference near Washington, D.C., in February, the commander of all Navy special operations units made an unusual request to industry: Develop and demonstrate technologies that offer "cognitive enhancement" capabilities to boost his elite forces' mental and physical performance.
> 
> "We plan on using that in mission enhancement," Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski said. "The performance piece is really critical to the life of our operators."


----------



## ekim68

Yahoo and AOL are part of Verizon's new 'Oath' brand



> Somewhere along the way, Verizon's planned purchase of Yahoo got real complicated. Thanks to security breachs of gargantuan proportions, Yahoo has lost a ton of value -- and the company was struggling even when Verizon announced its intentions to buy the former internet juggernaut. Part of the value lost is in the Yahoo brand, which Verizon apparently considers toxic at this point. To that end, Verizon is changing the name of the combined Yahoo and AOL company. _Business Insider_ first reoprted that "Oath" will be the new name of the company (which would be the parent company of Engadget). Minutes after we published this story, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong confirmed the change in a tweet.


----------



## ekim68

Carbon Footprint of Canada's Oil Sands Is Larger Than Thought



> The Donald Trump administration approved the Keystone XL pipeline knowing the tar sands crude oil it would deliver from Canada is even more polluting than the Obama administration thought when it turned the project down in 2015.
> 
> Recent government studies of a different tar sands pipeline found that the project's greenhouse gas emissions "may be five to 20 percent higher than previously indicated," the State Department noted on March 23 in its decision approving the Keystone XL permit.


----------



## ekim68

These Hackathon Hustlers Make Their Living From Corporate Coding Contests



> Some coders go from one marathon hacking session to another, subsisting on prize money and schwag.


----------



## ekim68

This tiny electric jet startup thinks it can reinvent regional air travel



> Flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles can be a huge pain in the ass. You can expect to spend over $200 on your plane ticket, plus another five hours of traveling door-to-door thanks to traffic, security, and other headaches. This is the type of hassle-rich trip - short but overly expensive and overly complicated - that a new startup called Zunum Aero is aiming to reinvent.
> 
> The Kirkland, Washington-based company, which came out of stealth mode today, plans to build a fleet of hybrid electric jets to sell to major carriers for service on densely traveled regional routes like San Francisco to Los Angeles or Boston to Washington, DC. The company has received backing from Boeing and JetBlue Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of JetBlue Airways.
> 
> Lower operating costs (i.e., no fueling) will allow carriers to reduce fares by 40 to 80 percent, they predict.


----------



## ekim68

Ride-hailing apps may help to curb drunk driving



> Alcohol-related car accidents declined in New York after the introduction of Uber


----------



## ekim68

Iceland may become first to require proof of equal pay for women



> Lawmakers in Iceland are considering a proposal that would make it the first country in the world to legally require employers to prove they are paying men and women in similar positions equally.


----------



## ekim68

Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person



> Employee burnout is a common phenomenon, but it is one that companies tend to treat as a talent management or personal issue rather than a broader organizational challenge. That's a mistake.
> 
> The psychological and physical problems of burned-out employees, which cost an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending in the U.S., are just the most obvious impacts. The true cost to business can be far greater, thanks to low productivity across organizations, high turnover, and the loss of the most capable talent. Executives need to own up to their role in creating the workplace stress that leads to burnout-heavy workloads, job insecurity, and frustrating work routines that include too many meetings and far too little time for creative work. Once executives confront the problem at an organizational level, they can use organizational measures to address it.


----------



## ekim68

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee slams UK and US net plans



> Sir Tim Berners-Lee was speaking to the BBC following the news that he has been given the Turing Award.
> 
> It is sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of computing.
> 
> Sir Tim said moves to undermine encryption would be a "bad idea" and represent a massive security breach.
> 
> Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said there should be no safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online. But Sir Tim said giving the authorities a key to unlock coded messages would have serious consequences.
> 
> "Now I know that if you're trying to catch terrorists it's really tempting to demand to be able to break all that encryption but if you break that encryption then guess what - so could other people and guess what - they may end up getting better at it than you are," he said.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists expose protein responsible for allergic diseases



> (04-04-2017) Scientists at VIB-UGent have managed to unravel the functioning of what is thought to be the 'master protein' that drives a range of widespread allergic diseases, such as asthma and eczema.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One Unveils its Vision for America, Details 11 Routes as Part of Global Challenge



> WASHINGTON, DC. Apr. 6, 2017 - Executives from Hyperloop One joined leading policymakers and transportation experts here today to reveal details of select Hyperloop routes in the United States and to initiate a nationwide conversation about the future of American transportation.
> 
> Of more than 2,600 participants in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge, 11 teams presented routes, linking 35 cities and covering more than 2,800 miles. They join 24 other teams from around the globe, each vying to be among 12 finalists. Three eventual winners will work closely with Hyperloop One engineering and business development teams to explore project development and financing.


----------



## ekim68

A 1986 bulletin board system has brought the old Web back to life in 2017




> It's 2017, but you can still experience the Internet of 1986 thanks to BBS enthusiasts.


----------



## ekim68

Are some wolves being 'redomesticated' into dogs?



> It happened thousands of years ago, and it may be happening again: Wolves in various parts of the world may have started on the path to becoming dogs. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that the animals are increasingly dining on livestock and human garbage instead of their wild prey, inching closer and closer to the human world in some places. But given today's industrialized societies, this closeness might also bring humans and wolves into more conflict, with disastrous consequences for both.
> 
> "It's a thought-provoking study, and does a good job of laying out how diet has the potential to change a large predator," says Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, who wasn't involved in the research.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla passes General Motors to become the most valuable US automaker



> Tesla's market capitalization is now bigger than General Motors', making it the largest U.S. based automaker by that metric.


----------



## ekim68

Hybrid ink 'drawable' electonic circuits create radical possibilities for flexible gadgets



> Who said pen and paper was dead? German scientists have developed a new type of ink that allows fully-functioning electronic circuits to be 'written' directly onto a surface from a pen. The technology could provide an inexpensive means of manufacturing printed circuits suitable for flexible smartphones, tablets and other radical gadget designs.
> 
> The circuits are ready to be used as soon as the ink dries and requires no additional processing, claim researchers from the Leibniz Institute for New Materials (INM).


----------



## ekim68

Sir Tim Berners-Lee lays out nightmare scenario where AI runs the financial world



> The architect of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee today talked about some of his concerns for the internet over the coming years, including a nightmarish scenario where artificial intelligence (AI) could become the new 'masters of the universe' by creating and running their own companies.
> 
> Masters of the universe is a reference to Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, regarding the men (and they were men) who started racking up multi-million dollar salaries and a great deal of influence from their finance roles on Wall Street and in London during the computerised trading boom pre-Black Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Are your sensors spying on you?



> Hackers are able to decipher PINs and passwords just from the way we tilt our phone when we are typing in the information.
> 
> Cyber experts at Newcastle University, UK, have revealed the ease with which malicious websites, as well as installed apps, can spy on us using just the information from the motion sensors in our mobile phones.


----------



## ekim68

Can the Michelin Model Fix Fake News?



> Americans today have an addiction-and they're addicted to social media delivered news, much of which is biased, misrepresents facts, or is completely fabricated. Today, the spread of fake news poses a health risk to Western democracies.
> 
> Junk news consumption, much like junk food, feels good. It plays to the biases and preferences of the reader, confirming their viewpoints and reinforcing comfortable political positions.


----------



## ekim68

Well that didn't take long....


Google shuts down Burger King's cunning TV ad



> Just under three hours after Burger King unveiled a new advertisement designed to hijack your Google Home to read a long-winded description of its Whopper burger, Google has disabled the functionality. It was fun / horrifying while it lasted!


----------



## ekim68

I was wondering when this would come...


Saudi banks, bin Laden companies face $4.2 billion U.S. lawsuit by 9/11 insurers



> More than two dozen U.S. insurers affiliated with Travelers Cos (TRV.N) have sued two Saudi banks, companies affiliated with Osama bin Laden's family, and several charities for at least $4.2 billion over the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
> 
> The lawsuit filed late on Wednesday night in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan is the latest effort to hold entities in Saudi Arabia liable for the attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model S sells faster as used car - and for more money - than peers do, study finds



> Used Tesla Inc. Model S sedans sell faster than luxury-car competitors do, and faster than other top-selling used vehicles from Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.


----------



## ekim68

No more IP addresses for countries that shut down internet access



> Governments that cut off internet access to their citizens could find themselves refused new IP addresses under a proposal put through one of the five global IP allocation organizations.
> 
> The suggested clampdown will be considered at the next meeting of internet registry Afrinic in Kenya in June: Afrinic is in charge of managing and allocating IP address blocks across Africa.


----------



## ekim68

G.SKILL hits 4500MHz with all-new Trident Z DDR4-4333MHz 16GB memory kit

Wow, 4500.....!


----------



## ekim68

AI programs exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals



> Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use, scientists say


----------



## ekim68

Facebook targets 30,000 fake France accounts before election




> Facebook





> says it has targeted 30,000 fake accounts linked to France ahead of the country's presidential election, as part of a worldwide effort against misinformation.
> 
> The company said Thursday it's trying to "reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts."


----------



## ekim68

Inside the Tech Support Scam Ecosystem



> A team of three doctoral students, looking for insights into the inner workings of tech support scams, spent eight months collecting data on and studying the tactics and infrastructure of the scammers, using a purpose-built tool. What they uncovered is a complex, technically sophisticated ecosystem supported by malvertising and victimizing people around the world.


----------



## ekim68

Natural Gas Leak in Cook Inlet Stopped, Effects on Marine Life Not Yet Known



> Nearly four months after an underwater pipeline began leaking almost pure methane into Alaska's Cook Inlet, Hilcorp Alaska announced on Friday that a temporary repair has stopped the leak.
> 
> "The clamp assures a gas tight, liquid tight seal that will reinforce the pipeline," Hilcorp said in a press release. The next step will be to send divers back down to make a permanent repair.
> 
> The company had gradually decreased the amount of gas flowing through the leaking pipeline, but for much of those four months, it was releasing more than 200,000 cubic feet of natural gas into the inlet each day.


----------



## ekim68

Mayo Clinic researchers demonstrate value of second opinions



> ROCHESTER, Minn. - Many patients come to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion or diagnosis confirmation before treatment for a complex condition. In a new study, Mayo Clinic reports that as many as 88 percent of those patients go home with a new or refined diagnosis - changing their care plan and potentially their lives. Conversely, only 12 percent receive confirmation that the original diagnosis was complete and correct.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Mayo Clinic researchers demonstrate value of second opinions


...


----------



## ekim68

Computers create recipe for two new magnetic materials



> Material scientists have predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom, using high-throughput computational models. The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials at unprecedented speed.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-reveal-the-hotel-lobbys-aggressive-pla-1794381546']Leaked Documents Reveal the Hotel Lobby's Aggressive Plan to Undermine Airbnb[/URL]




> Airbnb can be an awesome service for frugal travelers, and it feels especially great to use when the only other option is staying at an overpriced boutique hotel in the same city. But the incumbent hotel lobby is hoping to highlight some of the weaknesses of the "short-term rental" service, including how it negatively impacts communities and allows unregulated businesses to thrive.
> 
> A document recently obtained by _The_ _New York Times_ reveals the hotel lobby's plan to thwart Airbnb's business by pushing for bills to regulate the company at every level of government. Although we've known for years that hotel lobbyists have been fighting to impose regulations on Airbnb, the new document shows just how well-organized the upstart's opponents are.


----------



## ekim68

Panasonic can read your heart rate by looking at your face



> Being a sports professional means keeping calm in high-pressure situations, or at least pretending you are when actually freaking out. Spectators are typically none the wiser, but Panasonic will be giving viewers some additional insight into the mind of golfers competing at the Panasonic Open Golf Championship 2017, which tees off in Japan later this month. Coverage of the tournament, which is being broadcast on Japanese TV and online, will show the heart rate of golfers on-screen, so you can watch the nerves kick in as someone steps up to attempt a clutch, chip-in birdie. It's intended to add a bit more drama to the otherwise slow proceedings, but just as interesting is how Panasonic plans on making this happen, using what the company calls "contactless vital sensing" by way of a special camera.


----------



## ekim68

No Correlation Between Minimum Wage Increases and Employment Levels



> This pattern of increased job growth following minimum-wage increases holds true both for general labor-market indicators as well as those for industries heavily affected by minimum- wage increases:


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Belatedly 'Introduces' Faster Broadband To City It Sued To Keep From Doing The Same Thing Years Ago. It Didn't Go Well



> Hoping to get Chattanooga residents excited about the new option when it finally arrived a few weeks ago, Comcast posted an announcement to Facebook "introducing" the city to gigabit broadband service. It didn't go well. The company began taking an absolutely ferocious beating from area locals tired of Comcast's high prices and legendarily-bad customer service:


----------



## ekim68

Mission control: Salty diet makes you hungry, not thirsty



> We've all heard it: eating salty foods makes you thirstier. But what sounds like good nutritional advice turns out to be not true in the long run. In a study carried out during a simulated mission to Mars, an international group of scientists has found exactly the opposite to be true. 'Cosmonauts' who ate more salt retained more water, weren't as thirsty, and needed more energy.


----------



## ekim68

TED wants to remind us that ideas-not politicians-shape the future



> In less than a week, some of the world's best minds will gather in Vancouver, Canada, for the TED conference. With the theme "The Future You" on its 33rd year, business and cultural celebrities will take turns expounding on their "idea worth sharing" in TED's storied stage. Among this year's speakers are Tesla founder Elon Musk, surgeon-writer Atul Gawande, tennis legend Serena Williams, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, self-help guru Tim Ferris, and rock band OK Go.


----------



## ekim68

Your internet provider can't pick which apps and services count against your data cap, says CRTC



> Internet service providers in Canada should not be able to exempt certain types of content, such as streaming music or video, from counting toward a person's data cap, according to a new ruling by the country's telecommunications regulator.
> 
> The move is a win for proponents of a principle known as net neutrality, under which carriers treat all content equally and do not privilege content that benefits them.


----------



## ekim68

Britain set for first coal-free day since Industrial Revolution



> The UK is set to have its first ever working day without coal power generation since the Industrial Revolution, according to the National Grid.
> 
> The control room tweeted the predicted milestone on Friday, adding that it is also set to be the first 24-hour coal-free period in Britain.


----------



## ekim68

Guatemala declares state of emergency as rainforest goes up in flames





> The fires have been concentrated in Maya Biosphere Reserve, a collection of protected areas - including national parks - in the country's north.
> [*]Officials believe many of the fires were started to clear land for illegal cattle ranching and drug trafficking.
> [*]Declaring a state of emergency will allow agencies to more quickly deploy firefighters to affected areas.
> [*]Community-managed areas in the biosphere reserve have seen less fire activity, reportedly due to higher fire prevention capacity.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2017/04/19/uk-trade-billions-export-finance-fossil/']Revealed: UK provides billions in credit to fossil fuel industry despite clean energy pledge[/URL]



> The UK government has provided fossil fuel companies with £6.9 billion in financial support since 2000, according to a joint investigation by _Energydesk _and _Private Eye. _
> 
> The support came from UK Export Finance, the government agency that underwrites loans and insurance for risky export deals as part of efforts to boost international trade.
> 
> The vast majority of this support - £4.8bn - has been pledged since 2010, despite a government commitment to back clean technologies "instead of supporting investment in dirty fossil-fuel energy production".


----------



## ekim68

Corporate Sovereignty Used To Bully Ukraine, Colombia And Italy For Protecting Public Health And The Environment




> Corporate sovereignty





> provisions in investment treaties have become much better known than they were when Techdirt first wrote about them in 2012. Despite that growing awareness, and widespread outrage at the idea that corporations can request secret supra-national tribunals to make awards of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars paid from public funds, companies continue to use the system to bully governments into changing their policies.


----------



## ekim68

Cartilage-like hydrogel promises 3D-printable knee implants



> Far more than a simple hinge, the human knee is a complex, intricate mechanism, and a knee injury is a painful and debilitating of condition that's difficult and expensive to repair. Duke University is developing a cartilage-like material based on hydrogel that may make the task of repairing knees easier. The 3D-printable hydrogel allows bioengineers to create bespoke artificial replacement parts for injured knees that are tailored to match the old part both in shape and mechanical properties.


----------



## ekim68

The Growing Case for Geoengineering




> As climate change accelerates, a handful of scientists are eager to move ahead with experiments testing ways to counteract warming artificially. Their reasoning: we just might get desperate enough to use this technology one day.


----------



## ekim68

Mercedes energy storage units headed for UK homes



> Car manufacturers are racing to get their electric cars onto the market, but that's not the only battery-powered battle being played out: they're also keen to get their batteries into family homes. Tesla has made its Powerwall plans clear, and Mercedes-Benz Energy has been talking a big game with its energy storage systems, which will soon be finding their way into homes in the UK.





> Each battery pack can store 2.5 kWh, and the modular nature of the system means up to eight can be combined for a total capacity of 20 kWh. Each individual unit is a compact block, and the batteries can be integrated and wall-mounted in one neat unit for a clean look. That's a different approach to the Tesla Powerwall, which comes in 7.5 kWh and 10 kWh capacities, and can be scaled to 58 kWh using multiple units.


----------



## ekim68

Governor Declares State of Emergency to Save Louisiana Coast



> Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency Wednesday for coastal Louisiana to highlight the state's need for more federal funding to address extreme weather events.
> 
> "We are in a race against time to save our coast, and it is time we make bold decisions," Edwards said. "The Louisiana coast is in a state of crisis that demands immediate and urgent action to avert further damage to one of our most vital resources."
> 
> More than half of Louisiana's 4.65 million residents live on the coast. "Parts of our state remain unprotected from or vulnerable to future hurricane and flood events," Edwards emphasized, and estimated that 2,250 square miles of coastal Louisiana will be lost in the next 50 years unless immediate action is taken.


----------



## ekim68

Google's controversial groundwater withdrawal sparks question of who owns South Carolina water



> Who gets the water decides the region's future, its development and livability.
> 
> That's why "water wars" are erupting in South Carolina, and that's why the withdrawals by high-tech companies like Google are so controversial.
> 
> Forty million gallons of surface water per day now are pumped to customers by the Berkeley Water and Sanitation utility. Google, the marquee computer network company, apparently uses one-tenth of it - about 4 million gallons - to cool the servers at its only South Carolina data center, in Goose Creek.
> 
> Now Google wants to draw 1.5 million gallons per day from an aquifer under the coastal region to help cool the servers after a planned expansion - a volume that would make it the third largest aquifer user in the three counties around Charleston, according to South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control records.


----------



## ekim68

Ontario basic income pilot project to launch in Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay



> Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Monday a plan to study basic income in Ontario, in a three-year pilot project based in Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay.
> 
> The province will explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income - no matter what - to people who are currently living on low incomes, "whether they are working or not," Wynne said.
> 
> Wynne said the pilot will provide the basic income to 4,000 households chosen from applicants invited "randomly" by the province in the coming weeks.


----------



## ekim68

Plastic-eating caterpillar could munch waste, scientists say



> A caterpillar that munches on plastic bags could hold the key to tackling plastic pollution, scientists say.
> 
> Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that the larvae of the moth, which eats wax in bee hives, can also degrade plastic.
> 
> Experiments show the insect can break down the chemical bonds of plastic in a similar way to digesting beeswax.
> 
> Each year, about 80 million tonnes of the plastic polyethylene are produced around the world.


----------



## poochee

Many interesting articles in this thread.


----------



## ekim68

IBM Watson now being used to catch rogue traders



> The power of IBM Watson's analytical tools is now going to be harnessed within the financial sector to catch rogue traders in action.


----------



## ekim68

The Electric-Car Boom Is So Real Even Oil Companies Say It's Coming



> Electric cars are coming fast -- and that's not just the opinion of carmakers anymore. Total SA, one of the world's biggest oil producers, is now saying EVs may constitute almost a third of new-car sales by the end of the next decade.
> 
> The surge in battery powered vehicles will cause demand for oil-based fuels to peak in the 2030s, Total Chief Energy Economist Joel Couse said at Bloomberg New Energy Finance's conference in New York on Tuesday. EVs will make up 15 percent to 30 percent of new vehicles by 2030, after which fuel "demand will flatten out," Couse said. "Maybe even decline."


----------



## ekim68

Man arrested after knocking over a 300-pound security robot



> Drunkenly attacking a connected bot with cameras wasn't smart.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Will the high-tech cities of the future be utterly lonely?



> Humans are inherently social animals, and our health suffers if we're cut off from social ties. So it's no wonder the so-called loneliness "epidemic" is being called a public health crisis. But as we sit on the cusp of massive technological advances, the near future could exacerbate this growing problem.
> 
> Loneliness can happen to anyone. It is indiscriminate of age, country, and social status. In Britain, more than one in eight people say they don't consider anyone a close friend, and the number of Americans who say they have no close friends has roughly tripled in recent decades. A large proportion of the lonely are young; almost two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-old Brits said they feel lonely at least some of the time, while almost a third are lonely often or _all the time_.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

DNA-based test can spot cancer recurrence a year before conventional scans



> A revolutionary blood test has been shown to diagnose the recurrence of cancer up to a year in advance of conventional scans in a major lung cancer trial.
> 
> The test, known as a liquid biopsy, could buy crucial time for doctors by indicating that cancer is growing in the body when tumours are not yet detectable on CT scans and long before the patient becomes aware of physical symptoms.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> DNA-based test can spot cancer recurrence a year before conventional scans


...


----------



## ekim68

:up:


----------



## ekim68

We're Getting Closer to Mass Production of Bones, Organs, and Implants



> Medical researchers have been able to create certain kinds of living cells with 3D printers for more than a decade. Now a few companies are getting closer to mass production of higher-order tissues (bone, cartilage, organs) and other individually tailored items, including implants. This kind of precision medicine, treating patients based on their genes, environment, and lifestyle, could herald the end of long organ donor lists and solve other problems, too.


----------



## ekim68

Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services' Internet traffic



> On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.
> 
> Anomalies in the border gateway protocol-which routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks-are common and usually the result of human error. While it's possible Wednesday's five- to seven-minute hijack of 36 large network blocks may also have been inadvertent, the high concentration of technology and financial services companies affected made the incident "curious" to engineers at network monitoring service BGPmon. What's more, the way some of the affected networks were redirected indicated their underlying prefixes had been manually inserted into BGP tables, most likely by someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks.


----------



## poochee

_April 30, 2017, 10:20 AM
*The "Greatest Show on Earth" folds its tent for good*

*VIDEO*

Faced with declining ticket sales, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus -- after juggling the numbers as best it could -- is staging its final performance two weeks from today … which means that for anyone wanting to take one last look, there's no time to lose. Lee Cowan reports:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ringlin...us-the-greatest-show-on-earth-folds-its-tent/

"Ladies and Gentleman, children of all ages … Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth!"
_


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear words, and change its pitch



> Amazon is trying to make its Alexa voice assistant sound more humanlike. Up until now, the female-sounding voice maintained an even, monotone cadence whenever speaking, but with Amazon's new Speech Synthesis Markup Language that the company introduced this week, Alexa can whisper, vary its speaking speed, and bleep out words. Developers can also add pauses, change the pronunciation of a word, spell a word out, add audio snippets, and insert special words and phrases into their skill.


----------



## ekim68

Corporate profits are way up, corporate taxes are way down



> Since 1952, corporate profits as a share of the economy have risen dramatically (from 5.5 percent to 8.5 percent), while corporate tax revenues as a share of the economy have plummeted (from 5.9 percent to just 1.9 percent).
> 
> This trend has worsened since the end of the Great Recession. Between 2010 and 2015, corporate profits averaged 9.2 percent of gross domestic product, while corporate income tax revenue averaged just 1.6 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Millions hit the streets in worldwide May Day rallies



> Workers and activists marked International Workers' Day, or May Day, around the world with defiant rallies and marches for better pay and working conditions.


----------



## ekim68

India to make every single car electric by 2030 in bid to tackle pollution that kills millions



> Every car sold in India will be powered by electricity by the year 2030, according to plans unveiled by the country's energy minister.
> 
> The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles.
> 
> "We are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way," coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi.


----------



## ekim68

China is recruiting 20,000 people to write its own Wikipedia



> The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture."
> 
> Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," the country's national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long.


----------



## ekim68

Oklahoma's Largest Earthquake Linked to Oil and Gas Industry Actions 3 Years Earlier, Study Says



> The strongest earthquake in Oklahoma's history likely was caused by oil and gas operators injecting vastly increased amounts of toxic wastewater underground three years before it struck, a new study suggests.
> 
> Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed injection data from the most active disposal wells in the area where the 5.8-magnitude earthquake hit last September. They found that there had been a sudden and dramatic increase in the amount of wastewater injected in the first half of 2013 at some of the wells.


----------



## ekim68

Cities Seek Deliverance From the E-Commerce Boom



> It's the flip-side to the "retail apocalypse:" A siege of delivery trucks is threatening to choke cities with traffic. But not everyone agrees on what to do about it.


----------



## ekim68

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/tesla-investment-supply-chain-recycling-redwood-materials.html

Homeland Security Is Set to Hire an Ombudsman Who Was a Former Director of an Anti-Immigration Group



> Julie Kirchner has previously advocated harsh restrictions on immigrants. Now her job is to provide them assistance.


----------



## ekim68

Fiber-reinforced hydrogel is 5 times stronger than steel




> Hydrogels





> have shown significant potential in everything from wound dressings to soft robots, but their applications have been limited from their lack of toughness - until now. A team of scientists at Hokkaido University have developed a new set of hydrogel composites or "fiber-reinforced soft composites" that combine hydrogels with woven fiber fabric to create a material that is five times stronger than carbon steel.


----------



## ekim68

Ranchers and Tribes Unite Once Again to Fight the Keystone XL



> A unique alliance among tribes, ranchers, and other landowners in Nebraska regroups to resist fossil fuel development like the Keystone XL.


----------



## ekim68

China hits milestone in developing quantum computer 'to eclipse all others'



> A team of scientists from eastern China has built the first form of quantum computer that they say is faster than one of the early generation of conventional computers developed in the 1940s.
> 
> The researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China at Hefei in Anhui province built the machine as part of efforts to develop and highlight the future use of quantum computers.
> 
> The devices make use of the way particles interact at a subatomic level to make calculations rather than conventional computers which use electronic gates, switches and binary code.


----------



## ekim68

World's largest X-ray laser lights up for the first time



> In bright news for the scientific world, the world's biggest X-ray laser has generated its first light in Hamburg, Germany. The 3.4 km (2.1 mi) long European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) produced a pulsing laser light with a wavelength of 0.8 nm at one pulse per second as part of the last major development milestone ahead of its September official opening. When up and running properly, it will generate up to 27,000 pulses per second - a considerable improvement over the previous maximum of 120 per second.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix Has Almost 4x as Many Streaming Subscribers as Comcast has Cable Subscribers



> Netflix has been growing at a rapid pace over the past few years, with international expansion, a focused strategy on original content that gets people talking, and an affordable price point that appeals to younger subscribers.


----------



## ekim68

Report finds global app usage still rising, and users in the U.S. spend 135 minutes a day in them



> There's a reason that everyone you look at it is looking at a smartphone. According to the folks whose job it is to track such things, people can't get enough of apps, and global usage of them continues to increase.
> 
> In its latest usage report, App Annie takes a look at the average user's app usage for the first quarter of 2017 and reaches the conclusion that mobile apps have become vital to our day-to-day lives. Last year's report found that time spent in apps reached 1 trillion hours.


----------



## ekim68

The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data



> A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans-Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft-look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.


----------



## ekim68

Biodegradable semiconductor addresses our growing e-waste problem



> How many of your personal gadgets or home appliances have you replaced or thrown away in the last few years? While it might not get as much coverage as plastic bags, electronic waste is just as thorny an environmental problem. Our love affair with technology is leading to pollution, depletion of resources and a growing stockpile of discarded devices. But what if there was a way for our unwanted electronics to break down so we wouldn't even need to think about the environmental impact of disposing of them?
> 
> That's what Stanford's Zhenan Bao is trying to do. Her lab has come up with a prototype for an ultrathin, skin-like semiconductor that can fully degrade when it comes into contact with a weak acid such as vinegar.


----------



## ekim68

Many Commercial Drones 'Insecure by Design'



> Drones, many readily available on ecommerce shops such as Amazon, are plagued by vulnerabilities that could give attackers full root access to the device, read or delete files, or crash the device.
> 
> The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) published a warning about one model, the DBPOWER U818A WiFi quadcopter, last month, but according to the researcher who reported the vulnerabilities, multiple drone models- manufactured by the same company but sold under different names - are also vulnerable.


----------



## ekim68

More than half of people believe using spyware to snoop on family members is legal



> A new study shows that almost 5o percent of people believe it's legal to install a program on a family member's phone to snoop on their activity.
> 
> The survey of more than 2,000 people in the US and UK by software comparison service Comparitech.com also finds 57 percent would consider spying on their children's phone conversations and messages.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook takes out full-page newspaper ads to help U.K. citizens detect fake news online



> Facebook's role in the spread of "fake news" has come under greater scrutiny in recent times, with many believing that the social network played a decisive role in both the U.S. presidential election and the U.K.'s EU referendum. And this is why Facebook, among other technology companies, has been investing in initiatives to show that it is actively trying to thwart spurious news sources on its platform.


----------



## ekim68

Europe's largest offshore wind farm boots up in the Netherlands



> The electricity generated by Gemini's turbines is collected into two nearby substations before being piped 110 km (68 miles) to the Eemshaven seaport. There, a land station will manage and maintain the entire facility, and the power is then fed into the country's grid. Over the course of a few decades, the Gemini wind farm will apparently supply up to 1.5 million residents with power, and reduce the amount of CO2 emissions by about 1.25 million tonnes (1.38 million tons) every year.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Becomes First U.S. Company to Top $800 Billion Value




> Apple Inc.





> became the first U.S. company with a market value of more $800 billion as investors bet the next iPhone will spur a resurgence in sales.


----------



## ekim68

Here's how you size up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from above



> If you plan on scooping up a pile of ocean trash twice the size of Texas, it certainly helps if you can lay eyes on it first. The Ocean Cleanup project did just that when it ventured into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with 30 research vessels in tow one year ago, and now the team is taking its prying eyes to the skies to gain an aerial perspective on the task at hand.
> 
> The Ocean Cleanup project is the brainchild of Dutch aerospace engineering student turned entrepreneur Boyan Slat. His idea is to use the ocean's natural currents to usher plastic debris into huge trash-catching barriers, and then onwards to a central collection point. Slat believes that his system could make it possible to cut the time needed to clean up the world's oceans from millennia to mere years.


----------



## ekim68

The entire Senate just embraced web encryption



> Anyone now visiting their senator's website will see something new: a little green lock in their browser's address bar.
> 
> Last week the US Senate quietly began serving its entire domain -- including each of the 100 elected senators' websites -- over an encrypted HTTPS channel by default.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/this-laser-printer-creates-high-res-color-images-withou-1795092075']This Laser Printer Creates High-Res Color Images Without a Single Drop of Ink[/URL]



> Anyone with a color printer knows that selling replacement ink cartridges is the quickest way to become a millionaire. But what if your printer never needed a single drop of ink to produce color images at impossibly high resolutions? A new laser printer can already do that by etching microscopic patterns onto sheets of plastic.
> 
> Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have taken inspiration from creatures like butterflies and peacocks, whose wings and feathers create bright, iridescent colors not through light-absorbing pigments, but by bending and scattering light at the molecular level, creating what's known as structural color.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's highly-anticipated solar roofs go up for pre-order today



> Only two of the four possible tile styles are being made publicly available. According to a response Musk made to a question on Twitter, the tiles that can be pre-ordered are the black glass smooth and textured versions. The Tuscan and French slate versions will be available to order "in about six months," he added.
> 
> Tesla enthusiasts around the world can get excited, for the product can be ordered "for almost any country," according to the company's CEO. Deployment (i.e. delivery and installation) has also been confirmed for this year in the U.S. and in 2018 for overseas orders.


----------



## ekim68

A very good read....


Hackers Came, but the French Were Prepared



> PARIS - Everyone saw the hackers coming.
> 
> The National Security Agency in Washington picked up the signs. So did Emmanuel Macron's bare-bones technology team. And mindful of what happened in the American presidential campaign, the team created dozens of false email accounts, complete with phony documents, to confuse the attackers.
> 
> The Russians, for their part, were rushed and a bit sloppy, leaving a trail of evidence that was not enough to prove for certain they were working for the government of President Vladimir V. Putin but which strongly suggested they were part of his broader "information warfare" campaign.


----------



## ekim68

Why Do Gas Station Prices Constantly Change? Blame the Algorithm




> Retailers are using artificial-intelligence software to set optimal prices, testing textbook theories of competition; antitrust officials worry such systems raise prices for consumers


----------



## ekim68

Gorilla Glass maker Corning gets $200 million from Apple's US manufacturing investment fund



> Apple made news and scored some positive PR earlier this month when the company announced a $1 billion fund aimed at investing in US-based manufacturing. Now it's ready to announce the first big investment from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund. New York-based Corning Incorporated will be receiving $200 million from the tech giant's coffers, money that will go toward its Harrodsburg, Kentucky R&D facility.


----------



## ekim68

Sprint sues FCC for 'capricious' deregulation of business data services




> Sprint Corp.





> and another wireless company filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission for the agency's recent decision on business data services.
> 
> Overland Park-based Sprint (NYSE: S) and Arkansas-based Windstream Services LLC filed the petition for review Monday, seeking relief "on the grounds that the Report and Order is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion," according to a filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.


(Think about this: A Corporation suing for 'Capricious' Deregulation' when I thought that all Corporations hated Regulations..)


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk just posted a bunch of pictures of his tunnel and 'Boring' equipment




> Elon Musk





> has begun digging under Los Angeles.
> 
> The entrepreneur posted Friday several pictures of equipment meant for digging tunnels beneath Los Angeles.
> 
> The project is one of Musk's latest ventures, which was inspired by a desire to alleviate "out of control" traffic in Los Angeles.
> 
> He aims to first dig a tunnel from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to the nearby Los Angeles airport. Musk frequently flies from Los Angeles to the San Francisco area, where he runs Tesla. Eventually, he envisions a deep, multilayered network of underground tunnels spanning the city.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Elon Musk just posted a bunch of pictures of his tunnel and 'Boring' equipment


...


----------



## ekim68

Toyota wants flying cars in time for the 2020 Olympics



> Toyota has joined the flying car craze by backing a group working on a drone-like vehicle that would soar 10 meters (33 feet) above the ground at speeds up to 100 km/h (62 mph). The "Skydrive" is being developed by Cartivator, a startup with around 30 young volunteers working with drone expert Masafumi Miwa from Tokushima University. The aim is to get the car flying by next year and have it commercialized in time to light the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games torch.


----------



## ekim68

Migratory birds bumped off schedule as climate change shifts spring



> GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- New research shows climate change is altering the delicate seasonal clock that North American migratory songbirds rely on to successfully mate and raise healthy offspring, setting in motion a domino effect that could threaten the survival of many familiar backyard bird species.
> 
> A growing shift in the onset of spring has left nine of 48 species of songbirds studied unable to reach their northern breeding grounds at the calendar marks critical for producing the next generation of fledglings, according to a paper published today in _Scientific Reports_.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Migratory birds bumped off schedule as climate change shifts spring


...


----------



## ekim68

Lowe's prototype exoskeletons give warehouse workers a boost



> Hardware chain Lowe's is outfitting employees with a simple exoskeleton to help them on the job. The company has partnered with Virginia Tech to develop the technology, which makes lifting and moving heavy objects easier. The non-motorized exoskeletons are worn like a harness, with carbon fiber rods acting as artificial tendons - bending when the wearer squats, and springing back when they stand up.


----------



## ekim68

All fossil-fuel vehicles will vanish in 8 years in twin 'death spiral' for big oil and big autos, says study that's shocking the industries



> No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.
> 
> This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.


----------



## ekim68

The tech sector is leaving the rest of the US economy in its dust



> When Donald Trump was elected president last November, share prices for America's big banks and construction firms rose sharply. The bet was that the Trump administration would deregulate the financial sector and approve a massive infrastructure bill. Prices in commodities like steel and copper ticked up in anticipation. Six months later, little of this Trump Trade has come to fruition. The Republican majority is still working to pass a health care bill, and no deregulation, tax reform, or infrastructure spending are in sight.
> 
> But that hasn't slowed the stock market. The S&P 500 closed at a record high yesterday afternoon, and is up over $1.5 trillion since the start of 2017. And the companies doing the most to drive that rally are all tech firms. Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft make up a whopping 37 percent of the total gains.


----------



## ekim68

HP Enterprise unveils The Machine, a single-memory computer capable of addressing 160 terabytes




> Hewlett Packard Enterprise





> announced what it is calling a big breakthrough - creating a prototype of a computer with a single bank of memory that can process enormous amounts of information. The computer, known as The Machine, is a custom-built device made for the era of big data.
> 
> HPE said it has created the world's largest single-memory computer. The R&D program is the largest in the history of HPE, the former enterprise division of HP that split apart from the consumer-focused division.
> 
> If the project works, it could be transformative for society. But it is no small effort, as it could require a whole new kind of software.


----------



## ekim68

Swiss-designed, all-electric, four-door supercar to tackle Tesla



> Imagine a fully-electric sedan that combines a carbon fiber body with Italian styling and a powertrain capable of 0-62 mph times of only 2.3 seconds and a total electric driving range of nearly 400 miles per charge. The Elextra due to be unveiled this year is designed to be just such a car, and we now get a better look at the car's bodywork.


----------



## ekim68

Google owner Alphabet balloons connect flood-hit Peru



> "Tens of thousands" of Peruvians have been getting online using Project Loon, the ambitious connectivity project from Google's parent company, Alphabet.
> 
> Project Loon uses tennis court-sized balloons carrying a small box of equipment to beam internet access to a wide area below.
> 
> The team told the BBC they had been testing the system in Peru when serious floods hit in January, and so the technology was opened up to people living in three badly-hit cities.


----------



## ekim68

Diesel vehicles are releasing 50 percent more toxic gas than we realized



> The undisclosed emissions spewing from Volkswagen vehicles may be closer to the rule than the exception, with a comprehensive new study published this week finding that real-world emissions from diesel vehicles have been underestimated by as much as 50 percent. The pollutant in question, nitrogen oxide, is linked to thousands of premature deaths, with the scientists calling for stricter regulations to limit further damage.


----------



## ekim68

Shocking: Families will spend more than a third of summer staring at screens like zombies



> Summertime is almost here, meaning families will begin spending more time outdoors enjoying nature, right? Not necessarily. In modern times, devices seem to rule our attention. Things like computer monitors, televisions, smartphones, and tablets keep our eyes focused on screens like zombies.
> 
> To highlight just how bad things have gotten, a new survey reveals that families will spend more than a third of the 2017 summer season with their eyes glued to some sort of screen.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Shocking: Families will spend more than a third of summer staring at screens like zombies


...


----------



## ekim68

What does the impact of the Syrian war look like from space?



> Six years of war in Syria have had a devastating effect on millions of its people.
> 
> One of the most catastrophic impacts has been on the country's electricity network.
> 
> Images from Nasa, obtained by BBC Arabic, show clearly how the lights have gone out during the course of the conflict, leaving people to survive with little to no power.


----------



## ekim68

Mozilla enters net neutrality lobbying fight



> Internet nonprofit Mozilla is jumping in on the Washington, D.C., influence fight over the fate of net neutrality.
> 
> In a lobbying disclosure form released on Monday, the company said that it would be hiring Kountoupes Denham LLC, a D.C. consultancy to lobby on its behalf regarding cybersecurity and the open internet.
> 
> The firm has previously lobbied on net neutrality issues on behalf of technology interests like Intel and the Google-backed Internet Association, a internet company trade group that represents the likes of Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
> 
> The disclosure and hire is Mozilla's first for 2017. The move comes amid an escalating fight over Obama-era net neutrality rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2015. The rules, officially known as the Open Internet Order, aim to create a level playing field on the internet by forcing broadband providers to treat all web content equally.
> On Thursday, the battle hit a new flashpoint when the FCC voted in favor of considering Chairman Pai's proposal to roll back net neutrality measures.


----------



## ekim68

London City first in UK to get remote air traffic control



> London City is to become the first UK airport to replace its air traffic control tower with a remotely operated digital system.
> 
> Instead of sitting in a tower overlooking the runway, controllers will be 120 miles away, watching live footage from high-definition cameras.
> 
> The new system, due to be completed in 2018, will be tested for a year before becoming fully operational in 2019.


----------



## ekim68

Have the Rich Become "Super Citizens"?



> Modern philanthropy was born in the early 20th century, with the birth of the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1907, the foundation was founded with a $10 million gift from Margaret Sage, the widow of Russell, a railroad tycoon. While its mission was broad ("the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States"), the foundation adopted an innovative formula of grant making and sustained involvement in its initiatives that ushered in a new model of institutional charity. But philanthropy faced criticism from the beginning. After Sage, John D. Rockefeller, the oil magnate, tried to get a foundation charter, only to face pushback from then-president Theodore Roosevelt. "No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them," he said. The idea was that if there were not such tremendous inequality, there would be no need for charity at all.


----------



## ekim68

Cybercrooks fight over DDoS attack resources



> As more groups get into the denial-of-service attack business they're starting to get in each other's way, according to a report released this morning.
> 
> That translates into a smaller average attack size, said Martin McKeay, senior security advocate at Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies Inc.
> 
> There are only so many devices around that have the kind of vulnerabilities that make them potential targets for a botnet.


----------



## ekim68

Radioactivity found on worker's clothing week after tunnel collapse in Washington



> May 20 (UPI) -- Authorities are investigating radioactive material found on a worker's clothing one week after a tunnel collapse at the waste nuclear waste site in the state of Washington.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/evidence-of-a-decline-in-electricity-use-by-u-s-households/']Evidence of a Decline in Electricity Use by U.S. Households[/URL]



> Americans tend to use more and more of everything. As incomes have risen, we buy more food, live in larger homes, travel more, spend more on health care, and, yes, use more energy. Between 1950 and 2010, U.S. residential electricity consumption per capita increased 10-fold, an annual increase of 4% per year.
> 
> But that electricity trend has changed recently. American households use less electricity than they did five years ago. The figure below plots U.S. residential electricity consumption per capita 1990-2015. Consumption dipped significantly in 2012 and has remained flat, even as the economy has improved considerably.


----------



## ekim68

Human antibodies in Ebola survivor's blood effective against all strains



> The fight against Ebola continues with news of a new outbreak in the Republic of Congo. That said, a discovery by scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine offers reason to be optimistic: they have found the first human antibodies that can shut down all strains of _ebolavirus_.


----------



## ekim68

Wireless Data Revenues Dip For First Time in _Seventeen Years_ -- Thanks To A Crazy Little Thing Called Competition



> We've noted for some time how T-Mobile's crazy idea to _be nice to consumers_ (well, if you exclude their attacks on the EFF and net neutrality) has been a great thing for American consumers. Thanks to more consumer-friendly policies, T-Mobile has been adding more subscribers per quarter than any other major carrier for several years running. This pressure recently resulted in both AT&T and Verizon being forced to bring back the unlimited data plans the companies had been telling consumers they _didn't actually want_ for years.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://vitals.lifehacker.com/get-ready-for-1-000-iuds-and-1-600-colonoscopies-unde-1795334745']Get Ready for $1,000 IUDs and $1,600 Colonoscopies Under Trumpcare[/URL]



> We've been living high on the hog these last few years: getting mammograms and colonoscopies whenever we need them, vaccinating ourselves against cancer-causing viruses for free, preventing unwanted babies from showing up in our wombs without having to spend our rent money to do so. But those days might be over soon, and we have some price tags we're going to need to get used to.


----------



## ekim68

Remote Pacific island is the most plastic-contaminated spot yet surveyed



> Plastic is durable-very, very durable-which is why we like it. Since it started being mass-produced in the 1950s, annual production has increased 300-fold. Because plastic is so durable, when our kids grow up and we purge our toy chests, or even just when we finish a bottle of laundry detergent or shampoo, it doesn't actually go away. While we're recycling increasing amounts of plastic, a lot of it still ends up in the oceans.
> 
> Floating garbage patches have brought some attention to the issue of our contamination of the seas. But it's not just the waters themselves that have ended up cluttered with plastic. A recent survey shows that a staggering amount of our stuff is coming ashore on the extremely remote Henderson Island.


----------



## ekim68

52 genes associated with intelligence discovered



> A giant meta-study comprised of over 78,000 people has confidently identified 52 genes that scientists consider to be significantly associated with intelligence. While only constituting a fraction of the thousands of genes potentially associated with influencing intelligence, this discovery sets scientists on a fascinating path to understanding the genetic roots of intelligence.


----------



## ekim68

About that Net Neutrality thing.....


Republicans want to leave you more voicemail - without ever ringing your cellphone



> For years, consumers have warred with telemarketers for ringing their landline phones at all hours of the day.
> 
> Pretty soon, though, they might find their mobile voicemail under the same sort of assault - that is, if the U.S. Republican Party and others have their way.
> 
> The GOP's leading campaign and fundraising arm, the Republican National Committee, has quietly thrown its support behind a proposal at the Federal Communications Commission that would pave the way for marketers to auto-dial consumers' cellphones and leave them prerecorded voicemail messages - all without ever causing their devices to ring.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's Free Banana Stands Disrupting Local Fruit Economy



> Although there is no money in Amazon's community banana stands - where the company has been offering free fruit to both workers and locals in Seattle since 2015 - the tech giant's largesse is changing the banana landscape for some nearby businesses.
> 
> The brainchild of CEO Jeff Bezos, there are now two stands on its corporate campus staffed with "banistas" led by "bananagers" who give out bananas to anyone and everyone nearby, whether that's one banana for breakfast or a dozen.
> 
> Thus far, the company says it's handed out more than 1.7 million free banana, reports The Wall Street Journal. But while many folks are fans of of the free bananas, others say it's changing banana consumption in the community: Some workers say it's harder to find bananas at local grocery stores, while nearby eateries have also stopped selling as many banana as they used to.


----------



## ekim68

Cable Companies Refuse To Put Their Breathless Love Of Net Neutrality Down In Writing



> Apparently, giant broadband providers don't much want to put their sudden, mysterious love of net neutrality into writing. Last week, the FCC voted to begin killing net neutrality, opening the door to a 90-day comment period ahead of a broader rule-killing vote later this year. In the wake of the move, the same large ISPs that have spent a decade trying to kill meaningful regulatory oversight comically went out of their way to (falsely) claim that the killing of the rules doesn't mean all that much -- because these duopolies _love net neutrality so much_ any hard rules simply aren't necessary.


----------



## ekim68

Baking soda shortage has hospitals frantic, delaying treatments and surgeries



> Amid a national shortage of a critical medicine, US hospitals are hoarding vials, delaying surgeries, and turning away patients, _The_ _New York Times_ reports. The medicine in short supply: solutions of sodium bicarbonate-aka, baking soda.
> 
> The simple drug is used in all sorts of treatments, from chemotherapies to those for organ failure. It can help correct the pH of blood and ease the pain of stitches. It is used in open-heart surgery, can help reverse poisonings, and is kept on emergency crash carts. But, however basic and life-saving, the drug has been in short supply since around February.


----------



## ekim68

1970s highway starts new life as greenery-filled walkway



> It's always interesting to see how well fanciful renders translate into an actual project and the MVRDV-designed Seoullo 7017 Skygarden is no exception. Following the concept's unveiling a couple of years ago, the highway-turned-walkway/park has now opened to the public.


----------



## poochee

Nice..........


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's drive-up grocery stores are now open to the public in Seattle



> Amazon has opened two drive-up grocery stores to the public after testing the locations first with its own employees. Both are in the Seattle area, and allow Amazon Prime subscribers to place an online order and choose a two-hour pickup window for when they'd like to drive over and retrieve it.
> 
> Despite the stores being called "AmazonFresh Pickup," a membership to the company's home delivery grocery service isn't required. But if you _do_ pay for AmazonFresh (an extra $14.99 per month on top of Prime's usual cost), your groceries will be ready within 15 minutes. Regular Prime customers have to wait at least two hours before the earliest pickup window becomes available.


----------



## ekim68

It's time for academics to take back control of research journals[/quote]



> "Publish or perish" has long been the mantra of academics seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government's research excellence framework.
> 
> The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia.


----------



## ekim68

Major U.S. tech firms press Congress for internet surveillance reforms



> Facebook, Amazon and more than two dozen other U.S. technology companies pressed Congress on Friday to make changes to a broad internet surveillance law, saying they were necessary to improve privacy protections and increase government transparency.
> 
> The request marks the first significant public effort by Silicon Valley to wade into what is expected to be a contentious debate later the year over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, parts of which will expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress reauthorizes them.


----------



## ekim68

A Chinese company is offering free training for US coal miners to become wind farmers



> If you want to truly understand what's happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that's a real place).
> 
> The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state's mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It's the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets.


----------



## ekim68

UCF Research Could Bring 'Drastically' Higher Resolution To Your Phone and TV



> Researchers at the University of Central Florida have developed a new color changing surface tunable through electrical voltage - a breakthrough that could lead to three times the resolution for televisions, smartphones and other devices.


----------



## ekim68

Net neutrality: 'Dead people' signing FCC consultation



> A campaign group has complained to the US Federal Communications Commission over its refusal to erase fake comments from a consultation on net neutrality.
> 
> Fight for the Future's complaint is signed by 14 people who say their details were used without permission to file anti-net neutrality views.
> 
> The campaign group says that some of the comments were posted using the names and details of dead people.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/']Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to "Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies"[/URL]




> A shadowy international





> mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.


----------



## ekim68

Intel unveils monster 18-core Core i9: 'First teraflop-speed' consumer PC chip



> Compared with Intel's four-core, seventh-generation Core i5 and Core i7 processors for mainstream users, the Core X-series is aimed at gamers who want to live-stream, and users running applications such as VR video editing, 3D modeling, and special-effects creation.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Renewable Energy Jobs Employ 800,000+ People and Rising: in Charts



> Twice as many Americans now work in the wind industry as in coal mining, and solar employs many more, but the U.S. still trails the EU and is far behind China.


----------



## ekim68

Here's an idea for retired coal mines: Turn them into giant batteries.



> Energy companies are looking to retrofit old mines to store power from solar and wind, reports the Wall Street Journal.
> 
> The mine-turned-battery concept relies on something called "pumped hydro." Basically, when you have extra power you want to store, you just use it to pump water uphill. When you want to use that power again, you release the water to flow back downhill, spinning a turbine to generate electricity.
> 
> It turns out the structure of coal mines is perfect for building these systems: Water can be cycled between reservoirs deep in the mine and holding ponds at the surface.


----------



## ekim68

Hotels now see online travel sites as rivals



> Major hotel chains are engaging in an online turf war with the very travel sites that have helped drive their businesses.
> 
> Marriott International Inc., Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. and InterContinental Hotels Group are using extensive marketing campaigns to claw back business from Expedia Inc., Priceline Group Inc. and other travel-booking sites, which steer customers to hotel properties but also take commissions of up to 30% for each reservation. The chains are starting to treat these sites less as valuable business partners and more as gatekeepers standing between them and their customers.


----------



## ekim68

EU agrees to fund free WiFi for European towns with no internet coverage



> May 29 European Union institutions agreed on Monday to set aside 120 million euros to provide free wireless internet connections by 2020 to up to 8,000 municipalities in the EU in areas with no internet coverage.


----------



## ekim68

Conch Shells Inspire New Helmets, Body Armor



> The military may be turning to one of the sea's most indestructible materials to make the next generation of helmets and body armor.
> 
> A research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have explored using the superior strength of conch shells and reproducing that in engineered materials that could be used to provide customized protective headgear and body armor.
> 
> Conch shells have a unique configuration based on three different levels of hierarchy in the material's internal structure that make it hard for tiny cracks to spread and enlarge. According to MIT graduate student Grace Gu, the structure of conch shells makes it 10 times tougher than nacre, commonly known as mother of pearl.


----------



## ekim68

Parents have no right to dead child's Facebook account, German court says



> A German court rejected a mother's demand on Wednesday that Facebook grant her access to her deceased daughter's account.
> 
> In the ruling, which overturned a lower court's decision, the Berlin appeals court said the right to private telecommunications extended to electronic communication that was meant only for the eyes of certain people.
> 
> Privacy remains a sensitive issue in Germany due to extensive surveillance by Communist East Germany's Stasi secret police and by the Nazi era Gestapo. Memories of espionage were stirred anew by Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations of prying by the United States.


----------



## ekim68

America's Shale Gas Bounty Is Heading Overseas at a Record Clip



> America's natural gas is flowing out of the country at a record pace, helping to ease a supply glut at home while tumbling prices for the fuel entice overseas buyers.
> 
> When the liquefied natural gas tanker Ribera Del Duero Knutsen left Cheniere Energy Inc.'s Sabine Pass export terminal in Louisiana late Tuesday, it became the 18th ship to depart the terminal in May. That's the highest monthly total since the first vessel sailed from the facility last year.


----------



## ekim68

Ethiopia turns off internet nationwide as students sit exams




> Ethiopia





> has shut off internet access to its citizens, according to reports from inside the country, apparently due leaked exam papers for the nation's grade 10 examinations.
> 
> Outbound traffic from Ethiopia was shutdown around 4pm UK time on Tuesday, according to Google's transparency report, which registered Ethiopian visits to the company's sites plummeting over the evening. By Wednesday afternoon, access still had not been restored.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous driving will spawn $7 trillion 'passenger economy': Intel



> Fully autonomous vehicles will bring forth a new "passenger economy" worth $7 trillion by 2050, according to new research from Intel and Strategy Analytics.
> 
> The passenger economy does not include the autonomous vehicle industry itself; rather, it's a "peripheral" economy or a "side-effect" of autonomous vehicles becoming mainstream, Doug Davis, VP of Intel and GM of Intel's Automated Driving Solutions Group, told journalists on Thursday.
> 
> While the predicted value can be disputed, Intel's overarching point is that fully autonomous vehicles will generate new types of products, services, and business models as today's drivers become tomorrow's idle passengers.


----------



## ekim68

Your face or fingerprint could soon replace your plane ticket



> Headed on a trip? You may soon be able to ditch your boarding pass in favor of your fingers or face.
> 
> Delta announced, on Wednesday, a new biometric identification pilot program that will eventually let you use your fingerprints instead of a plane ticket. That followed a JetBlue announcement hours earlier that it is testing a program in Boston that will match pictures of customers' faces with the passport database maintained by U.S. Custom and Border Protections.


----------



## ekim68

The Ag Tech Market Map: 100+ Startups Powering The Future Of Farming And Agribusiness



> As population growth increases the need to ramp up food production, tech startups are creating a range of agricultural software, services, farming techniques, and more aimed at bringing more data and efficiency to the sector.


----------



## ekim68

Europe says Twitter is failing to remove hate speech



> That's the judgment of Europe's top regulator, which released data on Thursday showing that Twitter has failed to meet its standard of taking down 50% of hate speech posts after being warned that they include objectionable content.
> 
> European regulators are aggressively pushing social media firms to remove racist and violent posts from their platforms in a timely manner, sparking a debate about the limits of free speech on the internet.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.neowin.net/news/googles-street-view-celebrates-its-10th-anniversary']Google's Street View celebrates its 10th anniversary[/URL]



> It's funny to think that over ten years ago when using mapping software, you never really got to preview the location or its surroundings. You were always presented with a digital iteration of a map and made due. In 2007, things changed with the introduction of Google' Street View. Street View allowed users to see and preview a location before you even arrived. While it seems like a no-brainer idea, it was an extremely powerful tool.


----------



## ekim68

Traditional sports have an esports problem



> Professional sports leagues like the NFL and the NBA are about to face a major challenge called "the march of time."
> 
> Young Americans, or "millennials," (the generation that was born from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s) are split in terms of their loyalty to traditional sports and competitive video gaming, according to an LEK Consulting survey. While 18 percent are undecided, 40 percent of millennials prefer esports compared to 42 percent who still favor old-fashioned athletics. A variety of factors can explain this parity (such as the rise of smartphones, the free-to-play business model, or Twitch), but whatever the reasons, LEK points out that established sports leagues officially have a millennial problem.


----------



## ekim68

A Plant 1,000 Times More Efficient at CO2 Removal Than Photosynthesis Is Now Active



> Yesterday, the world's first commercial carbon capture plant began sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air around it. Perched atop a Zurich waste incineration facility, the Climeworks carbon capture plant comprises three stacked shipping containers that hold six CO2 collectors each. Spongey filters absorb CO2 as fans pull air through the collectors until they are fully saturated, a process that takes about two or three hours.
> 
> The container then closes, and the process reverses. The collector is heated to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), and the pure CO2 is released in a form that can be buried underground, made into other products, or sold.


----------



## ekim68

This Is Where Intolerance Is Highest on Religion, Culture, Race



> At a time when media headlines point to a spike in global intolerance, here's some good news: most people around the world don't say they believe any single race, religion or culture is better than another.


----------



## ekim68

Videotapes Are Becoming Unwatchable As Archivists Work To Save Them



> Kidd and the others are archivists and preservationists, and they're part of a group called XFR Collective (pronounced Transfer Collective). Most work professionally, but they volunteer their free time to do this. And while the mood is light, there is a sense of a deadline.
> 
> "In the heads of all Transfer Collective members, we do have kind of this 'tick-tock,'" Kidd says.
> 
> That's because research suggests that tapes like this aren't going to live beyond 15 to 20 years. Some call this the "magnetic media crisis," and archivists, preservationists, and librarians like the ones in the XFR Collective are trying to reverse it.


----------



## ekim68

Dutch households will use servers to heat their showers for free



> You know just from using a laptop that computers give off a lot of excess heat. For data centers containing tens of thousands of servers, this is a big problem, wasting energy and money. To try and mitigate this, companies have experimented with moving facilities to near the Arctic Circle and even submerging servers underwater. But Dutch startup Nerdalize has a different approach. Rather than trying to dissipate excess energy from servers, it wants to harness it, using it to heat people's homes instead.


----------



## ekim68

Net neutrality: Amazon among top internet firms planning day of action



> Some of the world's largest internet companies are planning a day of action in defense of open internet rules now under attack by the Trump administration.
> 
> Amazon, Etsy, Kickstarter, Mozilla and Vimeo all intend to hold a day of protest on 12 July in opposition to plans by Donald Trump's newly appointed telecoms regulator to neuter tough 2015 rules meant to protect "net neutrality" - the concept that all traffic should be equal online.


----------



## ekim68

At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard



> The cost of imprisoning each of California's 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year


----------



## ekim68

Cable TV "failing" as a business, cable industry lobbyist says



> The cable TV business is in trouble-in fact, it is "failing" as a business due to rising programming costs and consumers switching from traditional TV subscriptions to online video streaming, according to a cable lobbyist group.
> 
> "As a business, it is failing," said Matthew Polka, CEO of the American Cable Association (ACA). "It is very, very difficult for a cable operator in many cases to even break even on the cable side of the business, which is why broadband is so important, giving consumers more of a choice that we can't give them on cable [TV]."


----------



## ekim68

Why printers add secret tracking dots



> They're almost invisible but contain a hidden code - and now their presence on a leaked document has sparked speculation about their usefulness to FBI investigators.





> At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page. They were barely visible to the naked eye, but formed a coded design. After some quick analysis, they seemed to reveal the exact date and time that the pages in question were printed: 06:20 on 9 May, 2017 - at least, this is likely to be the time on the printer's internal clock at that moment. The dots also encode a serial number for the printer.


----------



## ekim68

Electric vehicles have another record year, reaching 2 million cars in 2016



> The number of electric cars on the roads around the world rose to 2 million in 2016, following a year of strong growth in 2015, according to the latest edition of the International Energy Agency's _Global EV Outlook_.
> 
> China remained the largest market in 2016, accounting for more than 40% of the electric cars sold in the world. With more than 200 million electric two-wheelers and more than 300,000 electric buses, China is by far the global leader in the electrification of transport. China, the US and Europe made up the three main markets, totalling over 90% of all EVs sold around the world.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One: These nine new routes could bring 680mph maglev travel to millions



> Hyperloop One has narrowed European submissions for its Hyperloop One Global Challenge down to nine candidate routes.
> 
> The potential connections include Germany, Estonia-Finland, Spain-Morocco, Corsica-Sardinia, The Netherlands, Poland, UK Scotland-Wales, UK Northern Arc and UK North-South Connector. News of the routes, spanning 5,000km/3,100 miles and connecting 75 million people in 44 cities, follow its announcement of an 11-route potential network connecting cities in the US.
> 
> Hyperloop One announced the 'winners' of the challenge in Amsterdam on Tuesday, talking up the tantalizing prospect of European city-to-city journeys lasting tens of minutes thanks to the Hyperloop's maglev system propelling travelers at 1,100kph/683mph through near-vacuum sealed tubes.


----------



## ekim68

Why access to health care is a national security issue



> Early last month, US House Republicans rammed through the American Health Care Act, a remarkably regressive piece of legislation that, among other flaws, would be disastrous for pandemic planning and preparedness. The bill eliminates funding for the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which was created under the 2010 Affordable Care Act to invest in vaccination programs, electronic laboratory reporting of infectious diseases, and infection-prevention programs. Vaccines are an important preventive strategy against deadly pandemics, while electronic lab reporting facilitates a rapid response to disease. In other words, these are precisely the funds that will be needed to prevent the next Ebola or Zika virus from turning into a national catastrophe.


----------



## ekim68

It's Been So Windy in Europe That Electricity Prices Have Turned Negative



> It's been _ very_ windy across Europe this week. So much so, in fact, that the high wind load on onshore and offshore wind turbines across much of the continent has helped set new wind power records.
> 
> For starters, renewables generated more than half of Britain's energy demand on Wednesday-for the first time ever.
> 
> In fact, with offshore wind supplying 10 percent of the total demand, energy prices were knocked into the negative for the longest period on record. The UK is home to the world's biggest wind farm, and the largest wind turbines, so it's no surprise that this was an important factor in the country's energy mix.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> It's Been So Windy in Europe That Electricity Prices Have Turned Negative


...


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Just Passed BMW in Market Cap




> BMW AG





> makes ultimate driving machines, but Tesla Inc.'s stock is the one that's motoring.
> 
> A rally in Tesla shares spurred by Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk's confidence in selling electric vehicles at scale briefly vaulted the company's market capitalization past the German luxury carmaker in early Friday trading. The amount of ground Tesla covered was vast: BMW was valued at a $30 billion premium as of early December.


----------



## ekim68

3-on-3 basketball added to 2020 Tokyo Olympic program



> LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- The IOC added 3-on-3 basketball to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic program on Friday in an effort to give the games a more youthful and urban appeal.
> 
> In another move toward street sports, BMX Freestyle cycling will join the Olympics for the first time among a net increase of 15 gold medals for a 321-event program.


----------



## ekim68

As more of us flock to urban living, city designers are re-thinking buildings' influence on our moods in an era of "neuro-architecture".



> "We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us," mused Winston Churchill in 1943 while considering the repair of the bomb-ravaged House of Commons.
> 
> More than 70 years on, he would doubtless be pleased to learn that neuroscientists and psychologists have found plenty of evidence to back him up.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/06/09/tesla-superchargers-solar-battery-grid-elon-musk/']Tesla plans to disconnect 'almost all' Superchargers from the grid and go solar+battery, says Elon Musk[/URL]



> Tesla has been talking about adding solar arrays and batteries to its Supercharger stations ever since announcing the fast-charging network in 2012.
> 
> But only half a dozen stations or so out of the over 800 stations ended up getting a solar array.
> 
> CEO Elon Musk said that they plan to deploy more battery and solar systems with the upcoming 'Version 3' of the Supercharger, but now he went a step further and claimed that "almost all Superchargers will disconnect from the electricity grid."


----------



## ekim68

Drone crash knocks out power to 1,600 in Mountain View



> MOUNTAIN VIEW - A drone crashed into a high-voltage wire Thursday night, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage and knocking out power to roughly 1,600 people for about two hours, police said.





> "The FAA has rules and regulations in place to prevent this exact type of incident from happening," said Mountain View police spokeswoman Katie Nelson. "We simply ask that people comply with the rules and that they operate drones safely and sensibly."


----------



## ekim68

In America, coal pollution is nearly as deadly as car crashes



> When President Donald Trump announced on June 1 that he had decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, he asserted that staying in the pact would prevent our nation from further developing its fossil fuel reserves. Critics understandably have called this a setback for global efforts to curb greenhouse gas pollution.
> 
> But there is another, equally important argument for transitioning to clean fuels. Tens of thousands of Americans die every year from old-fashioned air pollution, generated by electric power plants that burn fossil fuels. Estimates vary, but between 7,500 and 52,000 people in the United States meet early deaths because of small particles resulting from power plant emissions. That's huge. It is roughly comparable to the 40,000 people that died in car crashes in 2016.


----------



## ekim68

Logitech finally finds a good use for wireless charging: A mouse pad

*



With a Powerplay mouse pad, never again will your wireless mouse run out of power.

Click to expand...

*


----------



## ekim68

TV Cord Cutting Poised To Smash Records During Second Quarter



> So we've already noted that with the rise of streaming video competition, more people cut the TV cord last year than any other time in history. MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett has noted that 2016's 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record. SNL Kagan agrees, noting that traditional pay TV providers lost around 1.9 million traditional cable subscribers. That was notably worse than the 1.1 million net subscriber loss seen last year. And once you factor in the fact that people are buying and moving to new homes without signing up for cable, the full numbers are actually worse.


----------



## poochee

Interesting, the many changes taking place as time marches on.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model X the First SUV Ever to Achieve 5-Star Crash Rating in Every Category



> We engineered Model X to be the safest SUV ever, and today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that after conducting independent testing, it has awarded Model X a 5-star safety rating in every category and sub-category, making it the first SUV ever to earn the 5-star rating across the board. More than just resulting in a 5-star rating, the data from NHTSA's testing shows that Model X has the lowest probability of injury of any SUV it has ever tested. In fact, of all the cars NHTSA has ever tested, Model X's overall probability of injury was second only to Model S.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon Closes The Yahoo Deal; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Resigns



> The first sentence of Yahoo's Wikipedia page now reads, "Yahoo! Inc. was an American multinational technology company."
> 
> Yahoo's Internet properties officially became Verizon's properties Tuesday, as the telecom giant finalized its $4.5 billion acquisition.


----------



## ekim68

Did Net Neutrality Kill Broadband Investment Like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon Said It Would?



> Last year, when the FCC was preparing to vote on the new Open Internet Order (aka "net neutrality") and its reclassification of broadband Internet as a vital utility, virtually the entire telecom and cable industry claimed this change would ruin investment and slow innovation. But a look at the year-end financial figures for the biggest naysayers casts a lot of doubt on these dire predictions.


----------



## ekim68

Countering anti-Muslim hate around the U.S.



> THE HATE group "ACT for America" held "anti-Sharia law" protests in over 20 cities on June 10. But the Islamophobes were met with counterprotests that vastly outnumbered them in many places--and in a couple locations, they were forced to pack up and leave early.


----------



## ekim68

Genetic link to insomnia proves it's not all in your head



> We've all experienced sleepless nights when we have something on our minds, but new research has shown that insomnia isn't necessarily just about what's going on in your head. In the search for a biological mechanism behind the sleep disorder, researchers in Europe have identified seven genes that increase the likelihood of developing insomnia, proving that it isn't solely a psychological condition.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook built an AI system that learned to lie to get what it wants



> Humans are natural negotiators. We arrange dozens of tiny little details throughout our day to produce a desired outcome: What time a meeting should start, when you can take time off work, or how many cookies you can take from the cookie jar.
> 
> Machines typically don't share that affinity, but new research from Facebook's AI research lab might offer a starting point to change that. The new system learned to negotiate from looking at each side of 5,808 human conversations, setting the groundwork for bots that could schedule meetings or get you the best deal online.


----------



## ekim68

Wind, solar produce 10 percent of US electricity for first time



> Wind and solar produced 10 percent of the electricity generated in the United States for the first time in March, federal energy officials said Wednesday.
> 
> The Energy Information Administration's (EIA) monthly power report for March found that wind produced 8 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. that month, with solar producing 2 percent.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Wind, solar produce 10 percent of US electricity for first time


...


----------



## ekim68

Apple issues $1 billion green bond after Trump's Paris climate exit



> Apple Inc (AAPL.O) offered a $1 billion bond dedicated to financing clean energy and environmental projects on Tuesday, the first corporate green bond offered since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
> 
> The offering comes over a year after Apple issued its first green bond of $1.5 billion - the largest issued by a U.S. corporation - as a response to the 2015 Paris agreement.
> 
> Apple said its second green bond is meant to show that businesses are still committed to the goals of the 194-nation accord.


----------



## Johnny b

ekim68 said:


> Wind, solar produce 10 percent of US electricity for first time


While not of the renewable type of energy source, solid oxide fuel cells are very clean. No combustion.
Solid oxide fuel generators are becoming a 'big thing, especially in South Korea and Asia in general.
In the US, not so much as natural gas, coal and nuclear reactors (old tech ) still get much of the attention.

A general Wikipedia link as to what they are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_fuel_cell

Of interest concerning South Korea and Japan:
http://www.hydrogenlondon.org/news/decentralised-energy-and-fuel-cells-in-asia/

A Google search for images of existing sofc power stations:
https://www.google.com/search?q=&tb...AhXo24MKHbKBBf4Q9C8IHA&biw=1355&bih=746&dpr=1

images of portable sofc units:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en....0j1.1.0....0...1.2.64.img..0.0.0.otv2NTHfMNU

The future looks bright for solid oxide fuel cells.


----------



## ekim68

I agree the future looks bright for all kinds of power. I read an article about 25 years ago that said that the Earth gets hit with 5,000 times the energy that man uses. (Of course we can't figure it out just yet, but we're headed in the right direction.) Old Money is trying its best to slow everything down, and if I see another Commercial about Clean Burning Coal I'm gonna turn off my TV....


----------



## ekim68

More older Americans getting news on mobile



> More than 80% of U.S. adults get news on their phones -- up from roughly half of Americans just four years ago, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. Most of that growth comes from adults older than 65 whose news consumption via mobile spiked almost 25% in the last year, and has tripled over the past four years. The next oldest group of adults shows a similar pattern.


----------



## Johnny b

http://www.sciencealert.com/solar-p...ur-entire-house-into-a-clean-source-of-energy

* This New 'Solar Paint' Could Transform Your Entire House Into a Clean Source of Energy *



> A team of researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has developed a paint that can be used to generate clean energy.


----------



## ekim68

Face-recognition system at Dubai airport soon



> Dubai: For visitors or residents coming in to Dubai, a new face-recognition software in the offing at the Dubai International Airport will enable them to walk straight to the baggage claim area after deplaning without having to stop at passport control.
> 
> British start-up ObjectTech announced that they will work with the Dubai government to install biometric tunnels that scan people's faces as they walk to baggage reclaim.
> 
> The "biometric border" walkway takes a 3D scan of people's faces as they enter the airport and checks it against a digital passport using face-recognition software.


----------



## ekim68

Houston fears climate change will cause catastrophic flooding: 'It's not if, it's when'



> Human activity is worsening the problem in an already rainy area, and there could be damage worthy of a disaster movie if a storm hits the industrial section


----------



## valis

Yup. Matter of time now, imo. We're well past the tipping point. We are just along for the ride now.


----------



## Johnny b

The Antarctic seems to be getting a lot more attention lately.
So much warming that moss growth has become more than just a little obvious.

http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...g-climate-change-global-warming-a7743246.html


----------



## ekim68

Amazon won't replace Whole Foods cashiers with computers... yet




> Amazon





> said it has no current plans to automate the jobs of cashiers in Whole Foods stores after it finishes acquiring the grocery chain. It also isn't planning any layoffs, according to a spokesperson.
> 
> There is some speculation, however, that Amazon may change its plans and use new technology inside of Whole Foods locations.


----------



## Johnny b

ekim68 said:


> Amazon won't replace Whole Foods cashiers with computers... yet
> 
> http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/AMZN


It will be interesting to see how this plays out in my area.
Krogers, Walmart Superstores and Meijer are the big players here right now. Cubs folded several years ago.
Krogers had a delivery service, but it didn't seem to get much traction, both Krogers and Walmart have self serve check outs ( haven't been in a Meijer's for a very long time so I don't know if they do or don't ) but most shoppers ( including me ) seem to still favor the conventional checkouts.

Price, labels, quality and variety seem the main draws.
Be interesting to see how Amazon competes.

John


----------



## ekim68

For First Time in History, Solar Jobs Outnumber Coal Jobs in Virginia



> Virginia has long been coal country, but the solar power industry has been increasing its foothold in the Commonwealth over the last few years. And now, Michael Pope reports that a significant shift is taking place.
> 
> Virginia now has more jobs in the solar industry than the coal industry.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Swapping Linux for Windows in Munich too risky after WannaCry attacks, warn Greens



> Open-source pioneer Munich has been warned the city could face increased risk from hackers if it goes ahead with a planned return to Windows.
> 
> Munich spent nine years and millions of euros shifting some 15,000 staff to a Linux-based OS and other open-source software, but is now expected to swap Linux for Windows 10 by 2021.
> 
> However, Munich's Green Party says the recent WannaCry ransomware attacks on Windows machines worldwide highlight how much more of a target Microsoft's OS is for hackers than Linux-based operating systems.


----------



## ekim68

AirQuadOne could be your flying quadbike



> At the upcoming Paris Air Show, European consortium Neva Aerospace will be presenting a new concept for a personal VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft. Known as AirQuadOne, plans call for the fully-electric vehicle to be able to reach a maximum altitude of 3,000 ft (914 m) and travel at top air speed of 80 km/h (50 mph), with one charge of its battery pack being good for 20 to 30 minutes of flight time.


----------



## Johnny b

* Scientists Saw a Nearly Unheard of Antarctic Meltdown *

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/unprecedented-west-antarctic-meltdown-21553



> Antarctica is unfreezing. In the past few months alone, researchers have chronicled a seasonal waterfall, widespread networks of rivers and melt ponds and an iceberg the size of Delaware on the brink of breaking away from the thawing landscape.


----------



## ekim68

80% Of Cord Cutters Leave Because Of High Cable TV Prices, But The Industry Still Refuses To Compete On Price



> A new study from Tivo (pdf) notes that nearly half of current pay TV subscribers are considering cutting the cord this year. That's not particularly surprising given the fact that the first quarter set cord cutting records, and the second quarter is expected to be significantly worse. Similarly unsurprising is the fact that of these defecting customers, roughly 80% of those departing say they're doing so because traditional cable TV service is simply too expensive:


----------



## ekim68

Supercomputing Top500: US knocked out of 'top three most powerful' list



> For the first time in over two decades the US has lost its ranking among the world's top three supercomputers.


----------



## ekim68

Working 1976 Apple I computer sells "cheaply" for $355,000



> The general malaise in the collectibles industry continued last week when one of only six known working Apple I computers sold for just US$355,000. Whilst this may seem a lot for a 40-year-old computer, it is the cheapest working Apple I computer to have sold in recent times, with working models having previously fetched $626,967 (€492,000), $664,261 (€513,660) and $905,000, which is the current world record.


----------



## Johnny b

* Ethiopia's coffee is the latest victim of climate change *

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/19/15829674/climate-change-coffee-ethiopia



> In the future, climate change will make your allergies more miserable, likely flood the basement of your beach house, and possibly screw up your morning supply of irreplaceable caffeine - at least if you get your coffee from Ethiopia.


----------



## Johnny b

* Bay Area: Join us 6/21 to discuss the US government's scientific data purge
Professor Lindsey Dillon will talk about rescuing scientific research in the age of Trump. *

https://arstechnica.com/video/2017/...uss-the-us-governments-scientific-data-purge/



> After taking office in January, the Trump administration began systematically removing scientific and environmental data from government websites. Sociology professor Lindsey Dillon is helping to run a data-rescue project called the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), whose aim is to preserve this data and make it accessible to the public. At Ars Technica Live #14, we'll be hosting a public discussion with Dillon about her work.


----------



## ekim68

Cable lobby tries to stop state investigations into slow broadband speeds



> Broadband industry lobby groups want to stop individual states from investigating the speed claims made by Internet service providers, and they are citing the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules in their effort to hinder the state-level actions.
> 
> The industry attempt to undercut state investigations comes a few months after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary that claims the ISP defrauded and misled New Yorkers by promising Internet speeds the company knew it could not deliver.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk has "promising" talks with LA mayor about his traffic-solving tunnels



> When Elon Musk started talking about digging tunnels as a way of avoiding traffic, a lot of people were hesitant to take the SpaceX CEO seriously. Not only is he now starting to convince the average joe that such a thing might be possible, but the people in power, too.
> 
> Only six months have passed since Elon Musk first publicly raised the idea of building a tunneling machine to burrow beneath Los Angeles, but the project has gathered some serious steam in that time. The Boring Company has since been discussed by Musk onstage at a TED conference, given legitimacy by a detailed company website and has even started digging a test tunnel at its headquarters in LA.


----------



## ekim68

Phoenix flights cancelled because it's too hot for planes



> As temperatures climb in Phoenix, Arizona, more than 40 flights have been cancelled - because it is too hot for the planes to fly.
> 
> The weather forecast for the US city suggests temperatures could reach 120F (49C) on Tuesday.
> 
> That is higher than the operating temperature of some planes.
> 
> American Airlines announced it was cancelling dozens of flights scheduled to take off from Sky Harbor airport during the hottest part of the day.


----------



## ekim68

Oil firms could waste trillions if climate targets reached: report



> Oil giants including Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell risk spending more than a third of their budgets by 2025 on oil and gas projects that will not be feasible if international climate targets are to be met, a thinktank says.
> 
> More than $2 trillion of planned investments in oil and gas projects by 2025 risk becoming redundant if governments stick to targets to lower carbon emissions to limit global warming to 2 degrees celsius, according to a report by the Carbon Tracker thinktank and a group of institutional investors.
> 
> The report analyzed the costs of oil and gas projects planned for approval by 69 companies into 2025. It then compared their carbon intensity to targets needed to meet the 2 degree limit set by the 2015 Paris agreement, which would lead to a decline in fossil fuel consumption.


----------



## ekim68

China could surpass the US and become the world's leading investor in scientific and medical research by 2022



> A new study has claimed that the US' status as the world's leading nation in scientific and medical research is under threat.
> 
> University of Michigan researchers reviewed every issue of six top-tier international journals and four mid-tier journals from 2000 to 2015.
> 
> While the researchers concluded that the US is still the world leader in research and development spending, and ranks first in the world for scientific discoveries, China's increased investment in science over the past two decades means that it can now provide the US with serious competition and ranks fourth in the world for total number of new discoveries.


----------



## ekim68

Equipment already in space can be adapted for extremely secure data encryption



> In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Erlangen, demonstrate ground-based measurements of quantum states sent by a laser aboard a satellite 38,000 kilometers above Earth. This is the first time that quantum states have been measured so carefully from so far away.


----------



## ekim68

Walmart Gears Up Anti-Amazon Stance in Wake of Whole Foods Deal



> Days after arch-rival Amazon announced plans to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, Walmart is apparently ramping up its defense.
> 
> That acquisition takes square aim at Walmart's bread-and-butter grocery business by giving the online retailer 465 new retail locations-thus a much bigger brick-and-mortar presence.
> 
> Now, Walmart is telling some partners and suppliers that their software services should not run on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, according to _the Wall Street Journal._


https://www.wsj.com/articles/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-amazons-cloud-1498037402


----------



## ekim68

How Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria



> The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire's steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe's largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG's new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What's less certain are the jobs.
> 
> The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year-vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s.


----------



## ekim68

Report: The 10 biggest tech vendors in the world, by revenue



> Research firm Gartner recently released its list of top tech vendors, based on revenue. The list of 100 includes Amazon, Samsung, Google, and others. Here are the top 10 IT vendors.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea signs on to build full-scale Hyperloop



> Considering that just four years ago it was an idea cooked up by a busy billionaire in his spare time, today the Hyperloop is gaining serious traction in all corners of the globe. One of the startups vying to make it a reality, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), has announced a partnership with the South Korean government and local universities to build the world's first full-scale Hyperloop system.


----------



## ekim68

Coal's Decline Not Hurting Power Grid Reliability, Study Says



> A new study is challenging Energy Secretary Rick Perry's concerns about increasing levels of renewable energy in the U.S. electric grid, arguing that the decline of coal in the nation's power mix is driven largely by market forces and is not hurting the reliability of the grid.
> 
> Perry in April ordered a 60-day grid review looking in particular at whether government support for renewable energy is speeding the retirement of coal and nuclear plants and resulting in a more fragile electricity supply. He suggested in his memo that renewable energy and regulatory burdens on coal were to blame for an "erosion of critical baseload resources."
> 
> The new study says that that fear is baseless, and it argues the opposite.


----------



## ekim68

University of Michigan's self-driving buses will shuttle students across campus



> The University of Michigan has played home to some interesting developments in the self-driving space. Now its dedicated research facility, Mcity, is putting some of its expertise into practice by launching the campus' first driverless shuttles.
> 
> The service will carry passengers along a nonstop two-mile route (3.2 km) connecting the university's Lurie Engineering Center and its North Campus Research Complex. Two shuttles will cover the route every 10 minutes and will operate during business hours to start, though this could be expanded down the track if things go well.


----------



## ekim68

The High Price of Desertification: 23 Hectares of Land a Minute



> Desertification is on the march. Many people are going hungry because degraded lands affects agriculture, a key source of livelihood and food in much of Africa. More than 2.6 billion people live off agriculture in the world. More than half of agricultural land is affected by soil degradation, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
> 
> It gets worse. The UN body says 12 million hectares of arable land, enough to grow 20 tonnes of grain, are lost to drought and desertification annually, while 1.5 billion people are affected in over 100 countries. Halting land degradation has become an urgent global imperative.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast accused of cutting competitor's wires to put it out of business



> A tiny Internet service provider has sued Comcast, alleging that the cable giant and its hired contractors cut the smaller company's wires in order to take over its customer base.
> 
> Telecom Cable LLC had "229 satisfied customers" in Weston Lakes and Corrigan, Texas when Comcast and its contractors sabotaged its network, the lawsuit filed last week in Harris County District Court said.
> 
> Comcast had tried to buy Telecom Cable's Weston Lakes operations in 2013 "but refused to pay what they were worth," the complaint says. Starting in June 2015, Comcast and two contractors it hired "systematically destroyed Telecom's business by cutting its lines and running off its customers," the lawsuit says. Comcast destroyed or damaged the lines serving all Telecom Cable customers in Weston Lakes and never repaired them, the lawsuit claims.


----------



## ekim68

After 50 years of occupation in Palestine, friendship across a separation wall



> After crossing multiple checkpoints and Israel's more than 25-foot high separation wall, we gathered up on Aisha's rooftop, where she'd planned a barbecue for our families to share. Our boys made fast friends, quickly overcoming the language barrier between them as they bonded over playing with Legos. We loaded up plates, enjoyed the open air, and talked about our lives and our work. All around us, we heard the noises of Palestinian families in the West Bank going about their days.
> 
> This is a scene that occupation tells us should be impossible: Yifat, an Israeli woman, and Aisha, a Palestinian woman, cooking and laughing together while we watch our children play. Through 50 years of occupation, wars have been fought, walls built and separation policies enacted that make our friendship an unlikely one.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube claims 1.5 billion monthly users as it races to boost video-ad business




> Google





> 's YouTube unit says it now reaches 1.5 billion viewers every month -- and its users watch more than an hour of mobile videos per day -- as it expands its video programming to sell more digital ads.
> 
> YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki shared the news in a blog post the same day she gave a keynote address at VidCon, a conference for online video creators in Anaheim, California.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is shifting gears in China by manufacturing its own cars there



> Tesla is inching ever closer to its China dream.
> 
> Yesterday (June 22) the company confirmed that it is "in talks" with the municipal government of Shanghai to manufacture its vehicles in the country.


----------



## ekim68

Mozilla: This $2M is yours if you can 'decentralize' the web



> It's not a "Silicon Valley" plot line. The Firefox maker and the National Science Foundation are aiming for a free and accessible internet for everyone.


----------



## ekim68

FCC grants OneWeb approval to launch over 700 satellites for 'space internet'



> FCC chairman Ajit Pai has released a statement announcing that the commission has granted OneWeb approval for US market access to launch a network of internet-beaming satellites into orbit. OneWeb, which is backed in part by Richard Branson, has been working on providing broadband internet via satellite since 2000, when it acquired the satellite spectrum formerly owned by SkyBridge.
> 
> OneWeb plans to launch a constellation of 720 low-Earth orbit satellites using non-geostationary satellite orbit (NGSO) technology in order to provide global, high-speed broadband.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> University of Michigan's self-driving buses will shuttle students across campus


And there's this....


Self-driving cars are safer when they talk to each other


----------



## ekim68

Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia



> Conventional wisdom says one reason so many hackers seem to hail from Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union is that these countries have traditionally placed a much greater emphasis than educational institutions in the West on teaching information technology in middle and high schools, and yet they lack a Silicon Valley-like pipeline to help talented IT experts channel their skills into high-paying jobs. This post explores the first part of that assumption by examining a breadth of open-source data.
> 
> The supply side of that conventional wisdom seems to be supported by an analysis of educational data from both the U.S. and Russia, which indicates there are several stark and important differences between how American students are taught and tested on IT subjects versus their counterparts in Eastern Europe.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese province runs on 100% renewables for 7 days



> The Qinghai Province, located in Northwest China, has successfully run on 100 per cent renewable energy for seven continuous days, as part of a trial conducted by the State Grid Corporation of China.
> 
> The trial - which ran from 17 June to 23 June - saw the entire province generate all of its power needs with clean energy sources, including solar, wind and hydro power.


----------



## ekim68

The United States Space Corps wants you ...



> US lawmakers have drafted legislation proposing the formation of a new branch of the military called the Space Corps. This new space-orientated military service would join the five other branches of the United States Armed Forces and is intended to manage national security in space.


----------



## ekim68

As LA heat wave bakes Valley, residents say 'cool pavement' project is working



> It was late last month that Los Angeles, led by Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Blumenfield of the ultra hot southwest San Fernando Valley, launched an experiment in what could become L.A. cool.
> 
> A light gray seal was splotched across a blistering half-block stretch of Jordan Avenue.
> 
> Since then, the battleship-gray reflective street surfaces have been added to short blocks in Arleta, Northridge and Hyde Park. Two more are slated to be laid down today in west Los Angeles, among 15 pilot projects across the city.
> 
> Their goal, city officials say, is to cut road temperatures, cool the insides of nearby buildings, lessen air pollution and reduce the threat of deaths linked to increasingly hotter heat waves.


----------



## ekim68

Infarm wants to put a farm in every grocery store



> Imagine a future where you go into a grocery store to buy some fresh basil, and, as you traverse the aisle, instead of polythene bags containing mass-produced snippets of the herb that have been flown in from thousands of miles away, in front of you are a stack of illuminated containers, each housing a mini basil farm.


----------



## ekim68

The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power, Study Shows



> AUSTIN, Texas - Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach - even if it's off. That's the takeaway finding from a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
> 
> McCombs Assistant Professor Adrian Ward and co-authors conducted experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users in an attempt to measure, for the first time, how well people can complete tasks when they have their smartphones nearby even when they're not using them.


----------



## ekim68

China's Forest City to fight pollution with the power of a million plants



> The vision of Italian architect Stefano Boeri is starting to take shape around the world, with his so-called vertical forest towers going up in Switzerland and Milan. Now the Chinese region of Liuzhou will also play home to some of his handiwork, with construction underway on a so-called Forest City that is hoped to soak up some of the country's infamous air pollution.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook crosses 2 billion monthly users



> Facebook has announced that it now has over 2 billion monthly active users. That's up from the 1.94 billion total that the company cited as part of its most recent earnings report in May. Mark Zuckerberg shared the news directly, and _Fast Company_ has a story on Facebook's constant efforts to keep pushing growth upward.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen's cars will be 'talking' to each other by 2019



> Vehicles will be communicating with other as soon as 2019, if Volkswagen's plans come to fruition. Just one day after announcing its autonomous vehicle AI partnership with NVIDIA, the German car manufacturer says pWLAN (public wireless LAN) technology will be fitted to its cars as standard in just two years.
> 
> The technology makes it possible for cars and transport infrastructure within a radius of 500 meters to share information about warnings, traffic and road conditions within milliseconds, giving drivers a head start on risky situations such as black ice, or a car making an emergency stop.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists look to breed heat-resistant cows for a hotter planet



> The bovine world's answer to Brangelina, the Brangus cow, is a desirable species bred through the 20th century that has proven resistant to heat and humidity. These traits have led scientists to study the Brangus, a mix of the Angus and Brahman cattle, as they look to engineer a new type of cow capable of withstanding a warming planet.


----------



## ekim68

Hampton Creek is now growing its own meat in labs-and it says it will get to stores first



> The maker of vegan mayonnaise has been working on getting lab-made meat onto dinner tables everywhere. It's just that nobody knew about it.
> 
> Hampton Creek-a company that built its name on plant-based condiments and vegan-friendly cookie doughs-today revealed that, for the last year, it has been secretly developing the technology necessary for producing lab-made meat and seafood, or as the industry likes to call it, "clean meat." Perhaps even more surprising is that Hampton Creek expects to beat its closest competitor to market by more than two years.


----------



## ekim68

World's first floating windfarm to take shape off coast of Scotland



> The world's first floating windfarm has taken to the seas in a sign that a technology once confined to research and development drawing boards is finally ready to unlock expanses of ocean for generating renewable power.
> 
> After two turbines were floated this week, five now bob gently in the deep waters of a fjord on the western coast of Norway ready to be tugged across the North Sea to their final destination off north-east Scotland.


----------



## ekim68

Top officials unaware pipeline security operated illegally



> BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - North Dakota's governor, top law officer and military leader all said Wednesday they were unaware that a private security firm hired by the developer of the disputed Dakota Access oil pipeline has been operating illegally in the state without a license.
> 
> North Dakota's Private Investigative and Security Board first notified TigerSwan in September it was unlicensed, and in December rejected its application, citing the alleged criminal history of the company's president.


----------



## ekim68

That EPA push to ban a pesticide that harms babies' brains? Dropped after Trump EPA chief Pruitt met with Dow CEO



> Scott Pruitt, the Trump administration's top environmental official, privately met with the CEO of Dow Chemical just before reversing the EPA's efforts to ban a widely used Dow pesticide. Multiple scientific studies showed chlorpyrifos can damage the brains of children.
> 
> Today's Associated Press story is a clear case for why the Environmental Protection Agency and its appointed leader matter to American lives.


----------



## ekim68

People with higher IQs are more likely to live to their 80s



> People with higher IQs are less likely to die before the age of 79. That's according to a study of over 65,000 people born in Scotland in 1936.
> 
> Each of the people in the study took an intelligence test at the age of 11, and their health was then followed for 68 years, until the end of 2015. When Ian Deary, of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his team analysed data from the study, they found that a higher test score in childhood was linked to a 28 per cent lower risk of death from respiratory disease, a 25 per cent reduced risk of coronary heart disease, and a 24 per cent lower risk of death from stroke.


----------



## ekim68

More than 40 ISPs Across the Country Tell Chairman Pai to Not Repeal Network Neutrality and Maintain Title II Enforcement



> One excuse FCC Chairman Ajit Pai regularly offers to explain his effort to gut net neutrality protections is the claim that open Internet rules have harmed ISPs, especially small ones. During a speech earlier this year, he stressed that 22 small ISPs told him that the 2015 Open Internet Order hurt their ability to invest and deploy.
> 
> In reality, though, many more ISPs feel very differently. Today, more than 40 ISPs told the FCC that they have had _no problem with the Open Internet Order_ and that it hasn't hurt their ability to develop and expand their networks. What is more, that they want the FCC to do its job and address the problem Congress created when it repealed the broadband privacy rules in March.


----------



## ekim68

Alaska Adopts New Law Declaring Indigenous Peoples Day



> Alaska Gov. Bill Walker on Saturday, June 24, 2017 signed a bill into law officially designating the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day.
> 
> He signed the bill in the village of Utgiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, one of 28 communities represented by bill sponsor Rep. Dean Westlake, a Inupiaq Democrat from Kiana.
> 
> "Alaska's Native Peoples are an integral part of the spiritual, cultural, political, and historic fabric of what is now the Last Frontier," Governor Walker said. "This official recognition is just one way we as a state can acknowledge and celebrate the contributions made by First Peoples throughout the history of this land. I'm incredibly honored to sign this legislation."


----------



## ekim68

Twitter detects riots faster than police, study says



> Social media could help police maintain peace and order.
> 
> Twitter can identify riots and other violent activities minutes or even over an hour before the police are notified, according to a study released Tuesday by Cardiff University.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Is a Small Step Closer to Its Goal of Beaming the Internet to the World's Remotest Places



> (SAN FRANCISCO) - Facebook said on Thursday it had completed a second test of an unmanned aircraft designed to some day beam internet access to remote parts of the planet, and unlike in the first test , the drone did not crash.Facebook plans to develop a fleet of drone s powered by sunlight that will fly for months at a time, communicating with each other through lasers and extending internet connectivity to the ground below.


----------



## ekim68

Sony Will Start Pressing Vinyl Records After 28-Year Hiatus



> The year was 1989. The president was a newly elected George H.W. Bush. The hair was, well, teased.
> 
> The music? "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," "Like a Prayer," "Right Here Waiting," "We Didn't Start the Fire."
> 
> And, notably, it was the last time that Sony pressed a vinyl record, giving way to both the popularity of cassette tapes as well as the then-new digital format known as the compact disc, which Sony had a key role in developing.
> 
> After a 28-year hiatus, Sony announced this week that it plans to open a new facility in Japan dedicated to pressing vinyl records.


----------



## ekim68

$7.5 billion Kemper power plant suspends coal gasification



> Southern Company and Mississippi Power announced Wednesday afternoon that they would suspend all coal gasification operations at a Kemper County plant and simply use natural gas instead. The decision comes after the Mississippi Public Service Commission (MPSC) recommended that the plant burn only natural gas, which is cheaper at the moment.


----------



## ekim68

Afghanistan's all-girl teen robotics team denied entry to US



> Next month, the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition will bring together high school teams from around the world. Taking place in Washington, DC, over 150 teams are set to participate. However, while the team from Afghanistan's robot will be there, the team itself won't because the US has denied their visa applications.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/06/30/2228240/nike-thought-it-didnt-need-amazon----then-the-ground-shifted']Nike Thought It Didn't Need Amazon -- Then the Ground Shifted[/URL]

_



For years, Nike was one of the biggest holdouts against Amazon.com, refusing to provide its sneakers and athletic clothing for sale on the hulking e-commerce site. Its products were so cool, the company reasoned, it didn't need or want the help. Recently, Nike reversed course.

Click to expand...

_


----------



## ekim68

California is the poster child for solar energy



> California is the poster child for solar energy: in 2016, 13% of the state's power came from solar sources. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, California is in the lead for the cumulative amount of solar electric capacity installed in 2016.
> 
> In fact, the California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the _Los Angeles Times_, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution.


----------



## ekim68

Rare butterfly thrives on, and because of, US military bases



> BOSTON
> In the shadow of giant war machines, a tiny rare butterfly is flourishing. Oddly, experts say, the U.S. military gets the credit.
> 
> The frosted elfin, which flutters along on a 1-inch (2.5 centimeters) wingspan, has found a home at several defense installations because of the way the military manages open spaces, said Robyn Niver, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
> 
> "Military training requires vast open areas, so these bases are some of our last great wild places," Niver said.


----------



## ekim68

Wanna tap 3 MEELLION phone calls? All it takes is one measly warrant



> The US government's annual wiretap report, published this week, has revealed the reach and scope of its agents' surveillance abilities.
> 
> In 2016, the number of federal and state wiretaps fell 24 percent from the previous year, with 1,551 authorized by federal judges and 1,617 cleared by the states. That's an increase of 11 per cent in federal taps, and the number of state-approved taps fell by 41 per cent. This spying covers American citizens and non-citizens.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Tests 3-D Face Scanning to Unlock Next iPhone




> Apple Inc.





> is working on a feature that will let you unlock your iPhone using your face instead of a fingerprint.
> 
> For its redesigned iPhone, set to go on sale later this year, Apple is testing an improved security system that allows users to log in, authenticate payments, and launch secure apps by scanning their face, according to people familiar with the product. This is powered by a new 3-D sensor, added the people, who asked not to be identified discussing technology that's still in development. The company is also testing eye scanning to augment the system, one of the people said.


----------



## ekim68

Norway to ban the use of oil for heating buildings by 2020



> Norway is set to become the first country in the entire world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings.
> 
> The Scandinavian country, which is the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas outside the Middle East, will wholly stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards.
> 
> The country, which hopes to ban the sale of all fossil fuel-based cars by 2025, has made a concerted effort to introduce policies which shrink domestic emission of greenhouse gases.


----------



## ekim68

This bolt-on retrofit kit turns certain cars into self-driving vehicles



> There are lots of self-driving concepts in development, but this startup has a market-based solution that could hit the road very soon.


----------



## ekim68

Volvo goes electric across the board



> The Chinese-owned firm, best known for its emphasis on driver safety, has become the first traditional carmaker to signal the end of the internal combustion engine.
> 
> It plans to launch five fully electric models between 2019 and 2021 and a range of hybrid models.
> 
> But it will still be manufacturing earlier models that have pure combustion engines.
> 
> Geely, Volvo's Chinese owner, has been quietly pushing ahead with electric car development for more than a decade.
> 
> It now aims to sell one million electric cars by 2025.


----------



## ekim68

EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

_



(STRASBOURG)

Click to expand...

_


> - Europe's Parliament called on the Commission, Member States and producers Tuesday to take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded.
> 
> At their plenary session in Strasbourg, MEPs said tangible goods and software should be easier to repair and update, and made a plea to tackle built-in obsolescence and make spare parts affordable.


----------



## ekim68

Atomic Bellyflop: The US's First "21st Century Nuclear Reactor" Fails, Shuts Down After Five Months



> On March 23, 2017, after less than six months of operation, the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Watts Bar 2 nuclear power unit (Watts Bar 2) was shut down. Failing components in the condenser caused America's first 21st Century nuclear reactor to cease functioning, and as of July 3, it remains shut down.


----------



## ekim68

France plans to ban fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2040




> France's





> ecology minister has laid out an ambitious plan that would see the nation effectively ban the sale of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles by 2040. Nicolas Hulot, as quoted by the _Financial Times_, claims that France is announcing the "end of the sale of gasoline and diesel cars" by the deadline. As _Le Figaro_ adds, it's not clear how the country will enforce the transition, but Hulot says that the "conditions are there."


----------



## ekim68

Mark Zuckerberg Calls for Universal Basic Income in His Harvard Commencement Speech



> Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has become the latest major tech figure to call for universal basic income as a solution for inequality, joining a growing chorus from Silicon Valley.
> 
> "Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it's time for our generation to define a new social contract," Zuckerberg said during his commencement speech Thursday at Harvard University. "We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful."


----------



## ekim68

State Dept. Enlists Hollywood And Its Friends To Start A Fake Twitter Fight Over Intellectual Property



> For all the talk of "fake news" going around these days, you'd think that the federal government would avoid creating more of its own on purpose. And you'd think that the MPAA and RIAA would know better than to join in on such a project. However, the following email was sent to some folks at Stanford Law School asking the law school to join in this fake news project promoting intellectual property via a fake Twitter feud:


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is building the world's biggest battery in Australia



> Tesla's Powerwalls are starting to find their way into homes, and one of their main selling points is the way they can keep a home up and running during a blackout. Now the company has ambitious plans to extend that functionality to an entire Australian state by building the world's biggest battery storage system to keep homes powered come hell(ish summers) or high water.


----------



## ekim68

Satellite temperature record update closes gap with surface records




> Improvements to algorithms raise calculated warming trend a bit.


----------



## ekim68

These U.S. States Still Haven't Fully Recovered From Recession



> As the U.S. economy enters its ninth year of expansion this month, many Americans feel the recovery has been incomplete -- and the numbers back them up.
> 
> Five states -- Arizona, Connecticut, Mississippi, Nevada and Wyoming -- still haven't regained their levels of gross domestic product from before the financial crisis, more than five years after the country as a whole hit that milestone. Eight states are below prerecession levels of employment. And 15 have home prices that have yet to rebound fully.


----------



## ekim68

Oregon just raised the smoking age. Here's why that makes good financial sense



> Some 95% of lifetime smokers pick up the habit before their 21st birthday, so Oregon lawmakers yesterday passed a law making it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to purchase cigarettes in the hopes of nipping the bad habit in the bud.


----------



## ekim68

Almost 90% of Americans don't know there's scientific consensus on global warming



> A new report shows that the vast majority of Americans have no clue what the scientific consensus on climate change is.
> 
> According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which conduct an annual survey on what Americans think about climate change, only 13 percent of Americans correctly identified that more than 90 percent of all climate scientists have concluded that human-caused global warming is happening. (It's actually at least 97 percent of climate scientists that agree human-caused global warming is happening.)


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

NPA panel pitches limiting elderly drivers to cars with automatic braking tech



> A National Police Agency panel on Friday proposed several new rules to regulate elderly drivers, including limiting them to vehicles with automatic braking systems to increase public safety.
> 
> The panel was tasked with finding ways to mitigate the risks associated with dementia, poor vision and deteriorating physical strength associated with seniors.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/congress-close-to-approving-a-new-space-army-1796743127']Congress Close to Approving a New Space Army [/URL]



> While fighting climate change and providing health care are both just too economically burdensome for America, members of the House believe there's still enough cash to fund a space army that would fight off... the space enemies?
> 
> The idea of preparing the US for war in space has found supporters off-and-on for several decades. Talk began to heat up again back in 2007 when China demonstrated an ability to destroy a satellite with a weapon from Earth. Earlier this year, military officials started beat the drum again, insisting that US needs space fortifications. It looks like they may get their wish. This week, the House Armed Services Committee voted 60 to 1 in favor of the creation of a new military branch to be called the United States Space Corps.


----------



## ekim68

Erin Brockovich Helps Pawnee Nation Sue Fracking Companies Over Induced Earthquakes



> Environmental activist Erin Brockovich is helping Oklahoma's Pawnee Nation take on several fracking companies in a lawsuit alleging that damages to its tribal buildings and reservation property was the result of man-made, or induced, earthquakes.
> 
> National Geographic reports that the Native American tribe has retained the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg, with the aid of Brockovich, to sue Eagle Road Oil LLC, Cummings Oil Company, and 25 other oil and gas companies.


----------



## ekim68

Pew study says 41 percent of adults in the U.S. have been harassed online



> Online harassment is an all-too-common occurrence in the U.S., with 41 percent of adults saying they have experienced harassment online, and 66 percent of people saying they've seen it happen to others, according to a new Pew Research Center study. The most common form of online harassment is offensive name-calling, according to the study.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Hyperloop Aces First Test Run, Inches Closer to 700-MPH Transit



> Hyperloop One - the Los Angeles-based team that picked up and ran with Musk's idea in 2014 - just released video of its first full-scale test run. The Hyperloop is an aerodynamic pod that will use "magnetic levitation" to shoot riders through tubes at up to 700 mph underground - akin to a futuristic bullet train.


----------



## ekim68

Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says



> Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.
> 
> The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) "pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions," says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.
> 
> Traditionally, large scale greenhouse gas emissions data is collected at a national level but this report focuses on fossil fuel producers. Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change.


----------



## ekim68

The Audi A8: the World's First Production Car to Achieve Level 3 Autonomy



> The 2018 Audi A8, just unveiled in Barcelona, counts as the world's first production car to offer Level 3 autonomy.
> 
> Level 3 means the driver needn't supervise things at all, so long as the car stays within guidelines. Here that involves driving no faster than 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph), which is why Audi calls the feature AI Traffic Jam Pilot.





> There's no one feature that seems to be behind the company's decision to go up to Level 3, but there are certainly a lot of new technologies. There are computers from Nvidia and other firms, an image processor from Mobileye, and a really huge array of sensors: 12 ultrasound sensors, five cameras, five radars, one infrared camera for night vision. Most notable of all, there's lidar-the first ever offered on a production car. The unit, a forward-looking one, comes from Valeo.


----------



## ekim68

Which States Have the Highest Cost of Living? Lowest?



> Intuition tells us that a $40,000 income in Nebraska will go farther in terms of purchasing power than in California. Indeed, cost of living differences across states are important factors to consider when comparing income and budget constraints. A new dataset should help with those comparisons.


----------



## ekim68

Steve Bannon Is Back-and Trying to Privatize an Entire War



> While Don Jr. implodes, Steve Bannon and Erik Prince have hatched a plan to privatize war and pillage Afghanistan.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Steve Bannon Is Back-and Trying to Privatize an Entire War


...


----------



## ekim68

Europe has a message for employers: Think twice before you check the social media profiles of job applicants.



> European officials have issued new guidelines that warn bosses about the legal hazards of scrolling through the social media profiles of potential hires.
> 
> The rules require employers to issue a disclaimer before they check applicants' online accounts, including Facebook (FB, Tech30), Instagram, Snapchat (SNAP), Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) and LinkedIn.
> 
> If applicants don't see the warning, the company could be in breach of European Union data protection rules.


----------



## ekim68

Measles continues to spread and take lives in Europe



> Ongoing measles outbreaks in the WHO European Region have caused 35 deaths in the past 12 months. The most recent fatality was a 6-year-old boy in Italy, where over 3300 measles cases and 2 deaths have occurred since June 2016. Several other countries have also reported outbreaks; according to national public health authorities, these have caused 31 deaths in Romania, 1 death in Germany and another in Portugal.
> 
> "Every death or disability caused by this vaccine-preventable disease is an unacceptable tragedy," says Dr Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO Regional Director for Europe. "We are very concerned that although a safe, effective and affordable vaccine is available, measles remains a leading cause of death among children worldwide, and unfortunately Europe is not spared.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial floating islands could expand liveable space at sea



> The Netherlands is a fairly small country, so to support a growing population, the Dutch people have historically expanded out to sea. It's a remarkable feat of engineering how much land they've managed to reclaim by building dikes, but it might not be a sustainable solution nowadays. To update that tradition, the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) is testing the concept of an artificial floating island.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/07/13/automakers-but-tesla-china-slow-down-electric-car-mandate/']Virtually all automakers (except for Tesla) are asking China to slow down electric car mandate[/URL]



> The auto industry is once again attempting to slow down the rollout of electric vehicles.
> 
> Virtually all automakers, except for Tesla of course, have sent a letter to the Chinese government in an attempt to have them drastically weaken their zero-emission vehicle mandate.
> 
> As we previously reported, China, the world's biggest car market, has somewhat of an aggressive ZEV mandate that would force Automakers to have zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) represent 8% of new car sales as soon as 2018 and quickly ramp up to 12% by 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Congressmen Seek to Outlaw Cyber Intel Sharing With Russia



> A group of House Democrats has introduced a bill that would formalize a policy of the United States not sharing cyber intelligence with Russia.


----------



## ekim68

Honolulu city council votes to ban cellphones for pedestrians crossing streets



> July 14 (UPI) -- The Honolulu city council this week voted 7-2 to fine residents caught texting or using their mobile devices while crossing the street.
> 
> The legislation, which now heads to Mayor Kirk Caldwell for approval or veto, was conceived by a group of high school students, lawmakers said.
> 
> "These high school groups were concerned for their peers being distracted while crossing the streets and looking at their phones instead of looking both ways," Councilman Brandon Elefante told CNN.


----------



## ekim68

Well done for the Old Guy....


Somehow, Roger Federer keeps pushing the boundaries of greatness



> LONDON -- He keeps rocketing farther into the tennis firmament. Keeps pushing the boundaries past what was previously thought possible in his sport.
> 
> Roger Federer's record-setting 19th major victory unfolded under threatening skies here Sunday, but with no hint of trouble on court.


----------



## ekim68

As an old typewriter guy I just had to share....


See Tom Hanks, John Mayer in 'California Typewriter' Documentary Trailer


----------



## ekim68

India tops latest passenger trains in solar panels



> A new Diesel Electric Multiple Unit (DEMU) train was officially entered into service by India's Minister of Railways Shri Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu on July 14. The train left Safdarjung Station in south Delhi pulling six carriages topped with PV panels to meet the needs of its electrical systems with clean energy.
> 
> The project is part of an effort by Indian Railways to reduce the carbon footprint of its diesel-reliant train network, a plan that includes the building of five 1,000 MW solar plants over the next 5 years, as well as making use of bio fuels and wind energy, installing bio-toilets, and recycling water.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T have spent $572 million on lobbying the government to kill net neutrality



> Net neutrality-the rule that protects the Internet from government and corporate censorship-is incredibly popular. In poll after poll, overwhelmingly majorities of Independents, Republicans, and Democrats say they support net neutrality and oppose efforts to overturn it.
> 
> So why is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) trying to kill net neutrality? As usual, follow the money.


----------



## ekim68

Here's Elon Musk's Plan to Power the U.S. on Solar Energy



> Tesla CEO Elon Musk - whose company makes electric cars and has a new solar roof panel division - reminded more than 30 state governors at the National Governors Association meeting this weekend exactly how much real-estate is needed to make sure America can run totally on solar energy.
> 
> "If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States," Musk said during his keynote conversation on Saturday at the event in Rhode Island. "The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile."


----------



## ekim68

When Will Electric Cars Go Mainstream? It May Be Sooner Than You Think



> As the world's automakers place larger bets on electric vehicle technology, many industry analysts are debating a key question: How quickly can plug-in cars become mainstream?
> 
> The conventional view holds that electric cars will remain a niche product for many years, plagued by high sticker prices and heavily dependent on government subsidies.
> 
> But a growing number of analysts now argue that this pessimism is becoming outdated. A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research group, suggests that the price of plug-in cars is falling much faster than expected, spurred by cheaper batteries and aggressive policies promoting zero-emission vehicles in China and Europe.


----------



## ekim68

Why Coastal Tribes Are Growing Clam Gardens That Look Like Asian Rice Fields



> Tribes hope that by investing in traditional shellfish gardening and working with upstream farmers to limit contamination, they can restore coastal shellfish habitat and improve the health of their communities.
> 
> Clam gardens resemble the rice terraces of Asia. Rocks are piled into a series of walls that delineate sections along the shore; each level descends farther into the ocean. The receding tide reveals several flat, sandy beaches.


----------



## ekim68

Surgery in virtual reality: How VR could give trainee doctors the feel of real patients



> Virtual reality is often touted as a way of creating fantasy universes, but it could also turn out to be an effective way of teaching skills that are hard to practice in the real world.
> 
> Take training up the doctors of tomorrow, for example. US university Case Western has already announced it plans to do away with its anatomy labs, and the cadavers that go with them, and teach medical students with Microsoft's HoloLens 'mixed reality' system instead. Aspiring doctors will be able to wear HoloLens headsets, and view the different layers of a body -- skin, muscle, blood vessels, and so on -- in 3D.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: CNN witnesses US Navy's drone-killing laser



> (CNN)In the sometimes hostile waters of the Persian Gulf looms the US Navy's first -- in fact, the world's first -- active laser weapon.
> 
> The LaWS, an acronym for Laser Weapons System, is not science fiction. It is not experimental. It is deployed on board the USS Ponce amphibious transport ship, ready to be fired at targets today and every day by Capt. Christopher Wells and his crew.





> The strike comes silently and invisibly. "It operates in an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum so you don't see the beam, it doesn't make any sound, it's completely silent and it's incredibly effective at what it does," said Hughes.
> 
> It is remarkably precise, which the Navy says could limit collateral damage in wartime.


----------



## ekim68

Record 9 million comments flood FCC on net neutrality



> The U.S. government has received more than 9 million public comments on rolling back net neutrality regulations, a record response to this hot-button issue that both sides argue plays an essential role in who gets Internet access.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft's Wilsonville jobs are going to China, underscoring travails of domestic tech manufacturing



> Just two years ago, Microsoft cast its Wilsonville factory as the harbinger of a new era in American technology manufacturing.
> 
> The tech giant stamped, "Manufactured in Portland, OR, USA" on each Surface Hub it made there. It invited The New York Times and Fast Company magazine to tour the plant in 2015, then hired more than 100 people to make the enormous, $22,000 touch-screen computer.
> 
> But last week Microsoft summoned its Wilsonville employees to an early-morning meeting and announced it will close the factory and lay off 124 employees - nearly everyone at the site - plus dozens of contract workers.


----------



## ekim68

Tribes commit to uphold Paris climate agreement



> The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community started planning for climate change a decade ago. Located on the southeastern peninsula of Fidalgo Island on Puget Sound in Washington, the reservation is surrounded by water and at high risk for sea-level rise. A destructive 100-year storm event in 2006 led tribal leaders to research and fund climate programs, and the Swinomish became the first tribal nation to adopt a climate adaptation plan.
> 
> So when President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations' Paris climate agreement, the Swinomish reacted swiftly and, together with other tribes, publicly committed to uphold the accord.


----------



## ekim68

Compare Your Country's Tax Rate



> Wait, I thought the USA had the highest tax rate in the world? (lol)


----------



## ekim68

YouTube TV triples its footprint with launches in 10 more U.S. markets



> YouTube TV, Google's entry in the crowded market of live TV streaming services, is now available in ten more U.S. metros, the company announced this morning. In nine of the ten markets, the service will include the live local feeds from all four major broadcasters - ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC. The ability to watch live television from major broadcasters has been one of YouTube TV's differentiated features since its debut, as it chose to go forgo nationwide availability in favor of a promise to deliver broadcast channels in the markets it serves.


----------



## ekim68

Billionaires make it rain on Plenty, the indoor farming startup



> SoftBank Vision Fund, the huge tech-investment vehicle helmed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, has led a $200 million investment into indoor farming startup Plenty.
> 
> Joining Son on his trip out to back the (indoor) farm movement are notable tech billionaires Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos through their investment firms Innovation Endeavors and Bezos Expeditions. Previous investors, including the venture firm DCM, also participated in the round.
> 
> The round will be used to support the global rollout of Plenty's vertical indoor farms, which can produce crops at yields 530 times greater than that of a typical field.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk says he has approval to build NYC-to-DC Hyperloop



> Elon Musk's latest venture, The Boring Company, has certainly been a source of amusement. Now, the billionaire visionary has tweeted that he's received verbal government approval to build an New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-DC Hyperloop, which will get you from New York to Washington, DC, in 29 minutes. It currently takes approximately two and a half hours to travel between the two cities on Amtrak's Acela Express.


----------



## ekim68

Lyft launches a new self-driving division and will develop its own autonomous ride-hailing technology



> Lyft is betting the future of the road centers on sharing autonomous vehicles. It aims to be at the forefront of that technology with a new self-driving division and a self-driving system car manufacturers could plug into their self-driving cars.


----------



## ekim68

Putin's Hackers Now Under Attack-From Microsoft



> A new offensive by Microsoft has been making inroads against the Russian government hackers behind last year's election meddling, identifying over 120 new targets of the Kremlin's cyber spying, and control-alt-deleting segments of Putin's hacking apparatus. How are they doing it? It turns out Microsoft has something even more formidable than Moscow's malware: Lawyers.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Putin's Hackers Now Under Attack-From Microsoft


...


----------



## ekim68

Fake Star Wars-inspired research paper published by several "predatory journals"



> Not all scientific journals are created equal. With the advent of "predatory" journals that seem legitimate but function essentially on "pay-for-publish" economies, some commentators are claiming we are facing a looming crisis in science. One journalist set out to test the credibility of several journals by writing a fictional research paper inspired by the science of _Star Wars_. Four journals fell for the joke and published the clearly absurd paper.


----------



## ekim68

Snopes is in danger of closing its doors due to a business dispute



> The well-known fact-checking site claims it's being held hostage by an outside vendor. But under the surface, there's a fight between contending ownership groups.


----------



## ekim68

World's first floating wind farm emerges off coast of Scotland



> The world's first full-scale floating wind farm has started to take shape off the north-east coast of Scotland.
> 
> The revolutionary technology will allow wind power to be harvested in waters too deep for the current conventional bottom-standing turbines.
> 
> The Peterhead wind farm, known as Hywind, is a trial which will bring power to 20,000 homes.


----------



## ekim68

$89 Billion AT&T, Time Warner Merger Approval Looking Likely Despite Trump Pledge To Block Deal



> Needless to say, consumer advocates and smaller competitors aren't too keen on AT&T's $89 billion plan to acquire Time Warner. They argue that AT&T's long history of unethical behavior, empty promises, and anti-competitive shenanigans make it extremely likely the company will use its greater size and leverage to ill effect. They worry that AT&T will make it harder for competitors to license content necessary to compete with AT&T's DirecTV Now streaming service, and arbitrary usage caps and other tricks like zero rating to similarly put competitors at a disadvantage.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Paint to be killed off after 32 years



> Microsoft's next Windows 10 update, called the Autumn (or Fall in the US) Creators Update, will bring a variety of new features. But one long-standing stalwart of the Windows experience has been put on the chopping block: Microsoft Paint.
> 
> First released with the very first version of Windows 1.0 in 1985, Paint in its various guises would be one of the first graphics editors used by many and became a core part of Windows. Starting life as a 1-bit monochrome licensed version of ZSoft's PC Paintbrush, it wasn't until Windows 98 that Paint could save in JPEG.


----------



## ekim68

Technology Titans Won't Splurge to Save Sports



> The bosses of major sports leagues have been gobbling antacid. Television viewership has taken a hit for the National Football League and English Premier League soccer, and younger Americans tuned out for last year's Olympics broadcasts.
> 
> But the sports honchos are licking their lips at the prospects of Silicon Valley's moneybags coming into the game to help bankroll their leagues if the stream of TV money stops growing. They shouldn't bet on it.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota's new solid-state battery could make its way to cars by 2020



> Toyota is touting its progress on a new kind of battery technology, which uses a solid electrolyte instead of the conventional semi-liquid version used in today's lithium-ion batteries. The car maker said that it's near a breakthrough in production engineering that could help it put the new tech in production electric vehicles as early as 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal.
> 
> The improved battery technology would make it possible to create smaller, more lightweight lithium-ion batteries for use in EVs, that could also potentially boost the total charge capacity and result in longer-range vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Hackers plan to break into 30 voting machines to put election meddling to the test



> LAS VEGAS - Think of it as a stress test for democracy. Hackers plan to spend this weekend trying to break into more than 30 voting machines used in recent elections to see just how far they can get.
> 
> U.S. election officials have consistently said that despite Russian attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, no votes were tampered with.
> 
> Prove it, say organizers of DefCon, an annual hacker convention held in Las Vegas each July.


----------



## ekim68

A Different Kind of Car Factory Is Opening Up in Los Angeles



> While President Donald Trump is rooting for more car plants in the rust-belt states of Michigan and Ohio and more coal mines in Appalachia, California has a different idea for creating jobs: electric-vehicle factories.
> 
> California Governor Jerry Brown, scheduled to attend Proterra Inc.'s opening of an electric-bus factory in Southern California on Wednesday, described the plant as an example of how the state is still creating jobs while cleaning the air. The complex, which was backed by a $3 million state grant, will employ almost 100 workers by the end of next year and is capable of making as many as 400 zero-emission buses annually, according to Proterra.


----------



## ekim68

The Top 10 U.S. Cities For Women-Owned Businesses



> Women are conquering the business world at a rapid pace, especially in areas such as small business and entrepreneurship.
> 
> The proof? In the last decade, the number of women-owned firms nationwide has grown by over 3.5 million, now representing 38% of all businesses in the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Rigid solar EnergySail set for sea trials next year



> Eco Marine Power is preparing to put its rigid solar energy sails through their paces next year. Unlike some other proposals for reviving the use of sails in commercial shipping, the EnergySail from Eco Marine Power (EMP) can harness the power of the wind and sun at the same time, for high-efficiency transport on the high seas.


----------



## ekim68

German court rules bosses can't use keyboard-tracking software to spy on workers



> The Federal Labour Court ruled on Thursday that evidence collected by a company through keystroke-tracking software could not be used to fire an employee, explaining that such surveillance violates workers' personal rights.


----------



## ekim68

First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.



> The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon, _MIT Technology Review_ has learned.
> 
> The effort, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University, involved changing the DNA of a large number of one-cell embryos with the gene-editing technique CRISPR, according to people familiar with the scientific results.
> 
> Until now, American scientists have watched with a combination of awe, envy, and some alarm as scientists elsewhere were first to explore the controversial practice. To date, three previous reports of editing human embryos were all published by scientists in China.
> 
> Now Mitalipov is believed to have broken new ground both in the number of embryos experimented upon and by demonstrating that it is possible to safely and efficiently correct defective genes that cause inherited diseases.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 to debut: First buyers getting long-awaited electric car



> Silicon Valley automaker Tesla will deliver the first versions of its Model 3 electric car to customers Friday night as enthusiasts await basic details about the mass-market vehicle's performance and packages.


----------



## ekim68

An end to phone pranking



> A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University has developed an intelligent system that is helping the U.S. Coast Guard to distinguish and weed out prank mayday calls that cost it up to millions of dollars a year when it flies or motors out on pointless rescue missions, per Govtech.com.
> 
> The program, created by Carnegie Mellon's Rita Singh, creates a barcode of a person's voice, deciphering whether the caller really is on a boat or actually in a house somewhere. It can unmask repeat pranksters since it can pick up telltale markers and match them up.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX's new funding makes it the fourth most valuable private tech company in the US



> Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America. This skyrocket in valuation comes after another round of funding that raised $351 million for the company. According to Equidate, a marketplace for trading private tech company stocks, SpaceX's price per share is now $135, up from $96.42 prior to the new funding round.


----------



## ekim68

Hacker cracks smart gun security to shoot it without approval




> Smart guns are supposed to be safer than traditional weapons. They're designed to only fire when paired with a second piece of technology that identifies the shooter, like an electronic chip or a fingerprint.





> Supporters say they could stop accidental shootings or misfires. And they've been lauded by law enforcement to prevent criminals from using stolen or misplaced guns.
> 
> However, like any technology, they're not unhackable.


----------



## ekim68

P&G Cuts More Than $100 Million in 'Largely Ineffective' Digital Ads




> Procter & Gamble





> Co.  PG -0.52%  said that its move to cut more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the June quarter had little impact on its business, proving that those digital ads were largely ineffective.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Hacker cracks smart gun security to shoot it without approval


...


----------



## ekim68

San Francisco DA: Anti-theft law results in huge drop in stolen phones



> San Francisco's district attorney says that a California state law mandating "theft-deterring technological solutions" for smartphones has resulted in a precipitous drop in such robberies.
> 
> Those measures primarily include a remote kill switch after a phone has been stolen that would allow a phone to be disabled, withstanding even a hard reset. Such a kill switch has become standard in all iPhones ("Activation Lock") and Android phones ("Device Protection") since 2015.


----------



## ekim68

California's EV charging network gets $800 million spark from VW



> SACRAMENTO - In a decision with lasting implications for the growth of electric vehicles, state regulators on Thursday approved Volkswagen's plan to invest nearly $1 billion in California's EV network as penalty for its diesel-emission cheating scandal.
> 
> The plan approved by the state Air Resources Board would inject $800 million over 10 years into California's electric vehicle market, including new, universal charging stations, a model "Green City" in Sacramento and education about zero-emission vehicles.
> 
> The massive investment could reshape the state's budding network of electric vehicle charging stations while supporting Gov. Jerry Brown's goal to have 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on California roads by 2025.


----------



## ekim68

How smart cities like New York City will drive enterprise change



> Everybody talks about smart cities, but few are doing anything about it.
> 
> New York City is an exception. It's in the early stages of an ambitious project to blanket the city with ultrafast Wi-Fi via smart kiosks, which will replace obsolete public telephones.
> 
> These kiosks are the work of a Google-backed startup called Intersection. The company has already installed around 1,000 kiosks, and aims to install more than 6,000 more, Intersection Chief Innovation Officer Colin O'Donnell said in an interview this week.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung's latest LTE modem supports faster-than-fiber speeds



> If you're in the market for the Galaxy S9 next year, it could have a modem that's faster than your home fiber connection. Samsung has unveiled a co-called 6CA (carrier aggregation) modem that can handle download speeds as high as 1.2 Gbps, fast enough to download a full-length HD movie in 10 seconds.
> 
> That's 20 percent faster than the 1 Gbps 5CA (five carrier aggregation) modem that Samsung put in its Exynos 8895 chips for the Galaxy S8. As a reminder, this is still LTE Advanced and not the 5G that networks in the US, Europe and elsewhere are building out now. To get such speeds, mobile operators allow the chips to grab multiple LTE frequencies, like 800Mhz and 1.8GHz, and combine them.


----------



## ekim68

FCC says its specific plan to stop DDoS attacks must remain secret



> The Federal Communications Commission has told members of Congress that it won't reveal exactly how it plans to prevent future attacks on the public comment system.


----------



## ekim68

USS Gerald R Ford launches first aircraft using electromagnetic catapult



> The USS Gerald R Ford scored a double first less than a week after commissioning, as the nuclear-powered supercarrier launched and recovered a fighter plane for the first time using an electromagnetic catapult. On July 28, an F/A-18F Super Hornet piloted by Commander Jamie Struck was launched from the flight deck by the ElectroMAgnetic Launch System (EMALS) shortly after arrival, when it made the first arrested landing with the Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) system.
> 
> At first sight, the landing and takeoff of the Super Hornet on the Ford looked as conventional as any other touchdown and launch, but the superficial similarity hid technology that had never been used at sea before. For over 60 years, aircraft carriers around the world have launched fixed-wing aircraft using steam catapults, wherein a head of live steam blasted a piston down a slot in the flight deck that dragged the airplane along and hurled it into the air.


----------



## ekim68

Eating a lower calorie diet improves learning ability in worms



> Eating less can sharpen your thinking - if you're a worm, at least. We already had an inkling of the benefits of calorie restriction, such as greater longevity in flies, mice and monkeys. Now Kaveh Ashrafi at the University of California, San Francisco, has found it may also boost the brain.


----------



## ekim68

62% of cybersecurity experts believe AI will be weaponized in next year



> Some 62% of security experts believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will be weaponized and used for cyberattacks within the next 12 months, a Cylance survey released Tuesday found. This makes the growth of AI a double-edge sword, according to Cylance's blog post on the finding.
> 
> "While AI may be the best hope for slowing the tide of cyberattacks and breaches, it may also create more advanced attacker tactics in the short-term," the post said.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One's full-scale pod reaches 192 mph in new Nevada track test



> Hyperloop One has achieved a new milestone in terms of making its Hyperloop vision a physical reality: The company completed a test on July 29, 2017 at its full-scale Nevada test track that travelled at high speed, running nearly the entirety of the 500 meter (1640 foot) test route. XP-1, the company's first Hyperloop pod, reached speeds of up to 310 km/h (192 mph) during the test, which is getting closer to the planned functional speeds of future Hyperloop installations planned for Dubai and elsewhere.


----------



## ekim68

Second garbage patch the size of Texas discovered in Pacific Ocean



> Scientists on a recent six-month expedition have discovered the presence of a second garbage patch in the South Pacific, and are saying that the plastic vortex could be bigger than the state of Texas.
> 
> Charles Moore set sail with a group of volunteer researchers in November 2016 to look at plastic pollution off the coast of Chile. It was during their research that the team discovered the large amount of plastic floating in the South Pacific, measuring an estimated million square kilometers, or 1.5 times the size of Texas.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Second garbage patch the size of Texas discovered in Pacific Ocean


...


----------



## ekim68

Americans Die Younger Despite Spending the Most on Health Care



> Typically, the more a developed country spends on health care, the longer its people live. The U.S., which spends the most on health care, bucks that trend. Compared to the 35 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which promotes policies to improve social and economic well-being, the U.S. life expectancy of 78.8 years ranks 27th. It has the fourth highest infant mortality rate in the OECD, the sixth highest maternal mortality rate and the ninth highest likelihood of dying at a younger age from a host of ailments, including cardiovascular disease and cancer.


----------



## ekim68

The Supreme Court moves toward digital with online court filings



> Supreme Court case documents will soon be made available for the first time online.
> 
> The court announced Thursday that it will launch an electronic filing system on Nov. 13 that will make "virtually all new filings" accessible to the public via the court's website for free.
> 
> Court documents for the lower courts are typically available online through the Public Access to Court Electronics Records, which charges a fee per page.


----------



## ekim68

Apple owns $52.6 billion in US Treasurys - more than many major countries



> If Apple were a foreign country, CEO Tim Cook might have considerable political clout in the United States.
> 
> That's because the tech giant owns $52.6 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, which would rank it among the top 25 major foreign holders, according to estimates from the Treasury Department and Apple's SEC filings released Wednesday.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Apple owns $52.6 billion in US Treasurys - more than many major countries


WOW!!


----------



## ekim68




----------



## ekim68

Tesla fans reach a symbolic long-distance EV driving milestone



> There's been a relentless quest to set electric car driving records in 2017, and a team of Italians just managed to smash a couple of those records in style. Tesla Owners Club Italia drove their Model S P100D 1,078km (669.8 miles) on one charge, setting a new long-distance record (the previous was 'just' 901.2km) _and_ becoming the first to drive a production EV more than 1,000km before plugging in. They did have to make some major sacrifices to hit their target, but it's still a symbolic victory.


----------



## ekim68

August 3, 1977: The TRS-80 Personal Computer Goes on Sale



> It was with minimal expectations that, on August 3, 1977, Tandy Corporation teamed up with Radio Shack to release the TRS-80, one of the first personal computers available to consumer markets.


----------



## ekim68

You Can Trick Self-Driving Cars by Defacing Street Signs



> A team of eight researchers has discovered that by altering street signs, an adversary could confuse self-driving cars and cause their machine-learning systems to misclassify signs and take wrong decisions, potentially putting the lives of passengers in danger.
> 
> The idea behind this research is that an attacker could (1) print an entirely new poster and overlay it over an existing sign, or (2) attach smaller stickers on a legitimate sign in order to fool the self-driving car into thinking it's looking at another type of street sign.


----------



## ekim68

10 Members of Congress rake FCC over the coals in official net neutrality comment



> How and to what extent the FCC should regulate internet access has been a hot question for years, and the present administration holds opposite views than the previous one, resulting in a proposal to eliminate 2015's Open Internet Order. But Congress (or at least a few of its members) isn't going to take that lying down: 10 Representatives who helped craft the law governing the FCC itself have submitted an official comment on the proposal ruthlessly dismantling it.


----------



## ekim68

Ranking Websites by Demographics



> At Quantcast, we measure and quantify web audiences. Using a combination of direct measurement and inferential statistical models, we're able to determine the gender, age, income, and education makeup of a website's traffic. We're asked so frequently which websites are the best place to reach niche audiences, such as millennials or parents, that we decided to create a definitive ranking for each group. We turned to our data set to find out which websites drew the most male, female, millennial, senior, parent, wealthy and educated audiences.


----------



## ekim68

Parents Save Up!



> WASHINGTON (AP) - Expecting a baby? Congratulations! Better put plenty of money in your savings account.
> 
> The Department of Agriculture says the estimated cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610, or as much as almost $14,000 annually. That's the average for a middle-income couple with two children. It's a bit more expensive in urban parts of the country, and less so in rural areas.


----------



## ekim68

Cable's New Brilliant Idea: Charging You More Money To Skip Ads



> We've noted for years how cable executives facing market (r)evolution just can't stop making bone-headed decisions. As cord cutting accelerates and ratings take a dive, many cable and broadcast executives have decided the solution is to stuff more ads than ever into every viewing hour, in some instances actually editing down or speeding up programs so the additional ad load will fit. That's of course when they're not busy trying to prevent users from using modern technologies like DVR ad skipping, relentlessly raising cable rates and perpetuating some of the worst customer service in America.


----------



## ekim68

This Mysterious Military Spy Plane Has Been Flying Circles Over Seattle For Days




> Nobody seems to know who specifically the aircraft belongs to or what it's up to, but based on its configuration, its capabilities are pretty clear.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/08/1722255/is-this-the-end-of-typing-the-internets-next-billion-users-want-video-and-voice']Is this the End of Typing? The Internet's Next Billion Users Want Video and Voice[/URL]



> The internet's global expansion is entering a new phase, and it looks decidedly unlike the last one. Instead of typing searches and emails, a wave of newcomers -- "the next billion," the tech industry calls them -- is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy.


----------



## ekim68

Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions



> Steady improvements in American life expectancy have stalled, and more Americans are dying at younger ages. But for companies straining under the burden of their pension obligations, the distressing trend could have a grim upside: If people don't end up living as long as they were projected to just a few years ago, their employers ultimately won't have to pay them as much in pension and other lifelong retirement benefits.


----------



## ekim68

This Trump fan may actually be a Russian bot



> Early Saturday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted his gratitude to a social-media super fan, Nicole Mincey, magnifying her praise of him to his 35 million followers.
> 
> Here's the problem: There is no evidence the Twitter feed belongs to someone named Nicole Mincey. And the account, according to experts, bears a lot of signs of a Russia-backed disinformation campaign.
> 
> On Sunday, Twitter suspended the Mincey account, known as @ProTrump45, after several other users revealed that it was probably a fake, created to amplify pro-Trump content.


----------



## ekim68

Don't like how your government tracks air pollution? Do it yourself.



> Concerned about what they saw as deficiencies in official monitoring, German citizen scientists developed a tool for measuring airborne particulates that anyone can build.


----------



## ekim68

Chart: Is U.S. or China the World's Economic Superpower?



> Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world has had one undisputed economic superpower: the United States.
> 
> But while the U.S. has enjoyed its moment in the sun, the balance of power has been slowly shifting towards the inevitable rise of China. It's been a long time coming, but China now has the manpower, influence, and economic might to compete at a similar level - and if you ask people around the world, they've certainly taken notice.


----------



## ekim68

Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon



> Reports of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS, _New Scientist_ has learned. This could be the first hint of a new form of electronic warfare available to everyone from rogue nation states to petty criminals.
> 
> On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot - more than 32 kilometres inland, at Gelendzhik Airport.
> 
> After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the captain contacted other nearby ships. Their AIS traces - signals from the automatic identification system used to track vessels - placed them all at the same airport. At least 20 ships were affected.


----------



## ekim68

Silicon Valley billionaire loses bid to prevent access to public beach



> Court decision is blow to Vinod Khosla and other wealthy landowners seeking to buy renowned beaches, making public land private.


----------



## ekim68

There's an Unprecedented Wildfire in Greenland. That's Bad News for the Arctic.



> This is going to sound weird, but there's a wildfire right now in west Greenland. You know, that huge island of mostly ice? Part of it is on fire.
> 
> There's been nothing even close to this since reliable satellite-based fire detection records began in Greenland in 2000. Very small wildfires can evade satellite detection, and old-timer scientists who have worked in Greenland for decades say that micro-fires there aren't necessarily uncommon.
> 
> This week's fire, however, is on another level.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Uber and Lyft may cause lower car ownership in big cities: study



> A new study has shed light on what may turn out to be a growing trend: lower car ownership in cities where ridesharing services are available. Though the figures are still in their infancy at the moment, a study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute noted that both car usage and car ownership increased once Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, Texas.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Shows How Traditional Business Metrics Are Outdated



> At the core of the confusion over a company like Tesla is that traditional business metrics are outdated and can create overconfidence or underestimation. Classic metrics like market penetration and market share, which many leaders are measured on, are the very things causing us to miss market opportunities and threats. I consider someone like Musk to be a category creator - someone who doesn't rely on incremental innovation but instead changes the rules of the road entirely by creating a new category. In that landscape, our established modes of measurement just don't work.


----------



## ekim68

Tiny drone lands on Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier



> The Ministry of Defence is reviewing security after a tiny drone landed on the deck of Britain's biggest warship.
> 
> The Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier was docked at Invergordon in the Highlands when an amateur photographer flew the drone close to the giant ship.
> 
> When the aircraft sensed a high wind risk, it landed itself on the £3bn warship.


----------



## ekim68

Un-bustable myths and stubborn minds: Pro-vaccine efforts backfire



> Striking at a myth with facts may only shore it up, a new study suggests.
> 
> Researchers found that three main intervention strategies for combating anti-vaccine lies and falsehoods were ineffective at changing minds. But perhaps more concerning, they found that over-time exposure to the interventions strengthened participants' belief in those lies and falsehoods, researchers recently reported in _PLOS One_. The researchers speculate that the mere repetition of a myth during the process of debunking may be enough to entrench the myth in a believer's mind.


----------



## poochee

Interesting.


----------



## ekim68

I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked



> For crate-diggers of all stripes, the internet is awesome for one reason: The crate never ends.
> 
> There's always something new to find online, because people keep creating new things to throw into that crate. But that crate has a hole at the bottom. Stuff is falling out just as quickly, and pieces of history that would stick around in meatspace disappear in an instant online. So as a result, there aren't a lot of websites from 1995 that made it through to the present day. Gopher sites? Odds are low. Text files? Perhaps.


----------



## ekim68

DR-7 could make a flying DeLorean a reality




> DeLorean





> is a name associated with a certain brushed stainless steel supercar, but now it's being added to aircraft. DeLorean Aerospace is developing a two-person VTOL aircraft called the DR-7 that combines rotating ducted lift/propulsion fans with an autonomous flight control system, allowing it to be flown by a minimally trained pilot.


----------



## ekim68

Begone, silicon: New semiconductors touted as the future for our chips



> Researchers hope the future of our semiconductors lies not within silicon, but new materials which can be used to create transistors ten times smaller than our current circuitry.
> 
> Last week, Stanford associate professor of electrical engineering Eric Pop and post-doc Michal Mleczko revealed a new study into the applications of semiconductor material potentially able to support computer chips just a few atoms thick.
> 
> Published in the academic journal Science Advances, the engineers report how two semiconductors, hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide, either share or go beyond the traits that make silicon such a popular semiconductor today.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota Patents Cloaking Device to Make Car Pillars Appear Transparent



> You know how new cars have big, chunky pillars that make rollover safety better, but visibility worse? Toyota may have figured out a way to keep the safety benefit of big pillars while making driver visibility better than ever.
> 
> A cloaking device might sound like an unsafe thing to use on a car, but the "apparatuses and methods for making an object appear transparent" that Toyota just patented could make cars safer by turning parts of them appear invisible. It doesn't involve cameras or magic, just a lot of mirrors. Cleverly placed mirrors can bend light around an object making it visible from the other side. So you're not really seeing through the pillars, you're seeing around them.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://torrentfreak.com/roku-gets-tough-on-pirate-channels-warns-users-170815/']Roku Gets Tough on Pirate Channels, Warns Users
[/url]



> Users of the popular media player Roku receive a stark warning when they install channels outside of the official store. While these private or "non-certified" channels are still permitted, the company says that copyright-infringing channels may be pulled without prior notice. The news follows a few weeks after Roku was dragged into a piracy lawsuit in Mexico.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T's attempt to stall Google Fiber construction thrown out by judge



> AT&T has lost a court case in which it tried to stall construction by Google Fiber in Louisville, Kentucky.
> 
> AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County in February 2016 to stop a One Touch Make Ready Ordinance designed to give Google Fiber and other new ISPs quicker access to utility poles. But yesterday, US District Court Judge David Hale dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false.


----------



## ekim68

New treatment cures, vaccinates mice against cancer



> Aug. 18 (UPI) -- Researchers at Duke University have successfully cured and vaccinated mice against cancer in a recent small study using nanotechnology and immunotherapy.
> 
> The study, published on Aug. 17 in Scientific Reports, combined a Food and Drug Administration-approved cancer immunotherapy treatment with a new tumor-killing nanotechnology to improve the effectiveness of both therapies.


----------



## ekim68

Hyundai plans long-range premium electric car in strategic shift



> SEOUL (Reuters) - Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) said on Thursday it was placing electric vehicles at the center of its product strategy - one that includes plans for a premium long-distance electric car as it seeks to catch up to Tesla (TSLA.O) and other rivals.
> 
> Like Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T), Hyundai had initially championed fuel cell technology as the future of eco-friendly vehicles but has found itself shifting electric as Tesla shot to prominence and battery-powered cars have gained government backing in China.


----------



## ekim68

Machine gun-toting drone threatens to change combat forever



> In 2015, a video showing a semi-automatic handgun being fired from a custom-built drone went viral, raising concerns for authorities, including the FAA. The development of such a DIY device was only a matter of time, as was the commercialization of the technology. Now Florida-based startup Duke Robotics has unveiled the TIKAD, a custom-built multirotor that can carry and fire various military weapons, including semi-automatic rifles and grenade launchers.


----------



## ekim68

Google and ProPublica team up to build a national hate crime database



> Few things are certain in 2017's fraught national climate, but hate certainly doesn't look to be going away. In partnership with ProPublica, Google News Lab is launching a new tool to track hate crimes across America. Powered by machine learning, the Documenting Hate News Index will track reported hate crimes across all 50 states, collecting data from February 2017 onward.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.driverless.id/news/waymo-patent-shows-plans-replace-steering-wheel-pedals-with-push-buttons-0179498/']Waymo Patent Shows Plans to Replace Steering Wheel & Pedals with Push Buttons[/URL]



> Waymo just received approval on a patent for a push-button console that replaces not only a steering wheel in a car but the brake and gas pedals, too. This reflects Alphabet's driverless arm could remain true to its original mantra of developing cars that pilot themselves without human intervention.


----------



## ekim68

VW's electric microbus will become a reality in 2022



> When Volkswagen unveiled the ID Buzz, the assumption was that it would meet the same fate as many concept cars: it'd look good at an auto show, and promptly disappear when cold economic realities set in. Thankfully, the Buzz won't suffer that fate. VW has announced that it will put the Microbus-inspired EV into production, with a launch expected by 2022. We wouldn't expect everything about the Buzz to remain intact (those large wheels are likely the first things to go), but the '60s-inspired styling, semi-autonomous driving and all-wheel drive option will carry over.


----------



## ekim68

A Global Fish War is Coming



> The demand for fish as a protein source is increasing. The global population today is 7.5 billion people, and is expected to be 9.7 billion by 2050, with the largest growth coming in Africa and Asia. Fish consumption has increased from an average of 9.9 kilograms per person in the 1960s to 19.7 kilograms in 2013 with estimates for 2014 and 2015 above 20 kilograms. The ten most productive species are fully fished and demand continues to rise in regions generally with little governance and many disputed boundaries.


----------



## ekim68

No, the cops can't get a search warrant to just seize all devices in sight - US appeals court



> It's a ruling sending shockwaves through the worlds of privacy, device security, and law enforcement in America.
> 
> The US Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia on Friday overturned the conviction of a gang member because investigators obtained a search warrant for his devices without probable cause.
> 
> In other words, crucial evidence obtained by investigators using a search warrant to seize and scan all phones and other gadgets on sight has been thrown out.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk among tech founders to call for UN to ban 'killer robots'



> Tesla's Elon Musk and Google's Mustafa Suleyman are among a group of founders to call for a ban on the development and use of autonomous weapons -- otherwise known as "killer robots".
> 
> 116 founders of AI and robotics companies across 26 countries signed an open letter to the United Nations (UN) urging it to stop the arms race that is underway for killer robots.


----------



## ekim68

UK.gov to treat online abuse as seriously as IRL hate crime



> The UK's Crown Prosecution Service has pledged to tackle online abuse with the same seriousness as it does hate crimes committed in the flesh.
> 
> Following public concern about the increasing amount of racist, anti-religious, homophobic and transphobic attacks on social media, the CPS has today (August 21) published a new set of policy documents on hate crime.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> UK.gov to treat online abuse as seriously as IRL hate crime


...


----------



## ekim68

Avocado seed husks jam-packed with medicinal compounds



> In a first of its kind study, scientists have closely examined the contents of avocado seed husks and discovered these flaky coatings to be incredibly rich in useful chemical compounds. Among those discovered are compounds that could be used to improve treatments for cancers, heart disease and other conditions further down the track.


----------



## ekim68

Doctors Warm To Single-Payer Health Care



> Single-payer health care is still a controversial idea in the U.S., but a majority of physicians are moving to support it, a new survey finds.
> 
> Fifty-six percent of doctors registered either strong support or were somewhat supportive of a single-payer health system, according to the survey by Merritt Hawkins, a physician recruitment firm. In its 2008 survey, opinions ran the opposite way - 58 percent opposed single-payer.


----------



## ekim68

Is water the new drug for Mexico's cartels?



> It's rainy season here in Puebla, Mexico, and water is dripping through my concrete roof, taking chunks of plaster and paint from the ceiling with it. Ironically, we still don't have enough running water to shower everyday. Other people here have no running water at all, and our drainage system is in a state of utter abandonment.
> 
> Yet we all pay 10 times the rates of the rest of Mexico, because here in Puebla - unlike the rest of the country - our water is privatized. What's more, the men at the helm of the consortium that run it are a collection of corrupt millionaire and billionaire businessmen who have allegedly laundered money for some of the region's biggest drug cartels.


----------



## ekim68

Disney will price streaming service at $5 per month, analyst says



> Disney's upcoming branded streaming service will likely be priced around $5 per month in order to drive wider adoption, according to MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson.
> 
> Nathanson said that the new Disney streaming service and the upcoming ESPN streaming service need a clear distinction. The ESPN service will likely test different prices as it prepares ESPN to be ready to go fully over-the-top, according to the report, but the Disney service is about building asset value instead of taking licensing money from SVOD deals.


----------



## ekim68

Sea the possibilities: to fight climate change, put seaweed in the mix



> The next stage of humanity's fight to reduce greenhouse emissions may revolve around seaweed, according to tonight's episode of ABC's Catalyst, presented by Professor Tim Flannery, which asks the question "can seaweed save the world?"
> 
> With the help of me and colleagues around the world, the documentary explores seaweed's enormous potential to reduce greenhouse gases and draw CO₂ out of the atmosphere. In the case of seaweed, that could include giant kelp farms that de-acidify oceans, or feeding algae to cattle and sheep to dramatically reduce their methane emissions.


----------



## ekim68

The eclipse was a test, and the solar industry aced it.



> As the United States momentarily plunged into darkness on Tuesday, from California to North Carolina, the electricity grid ran smoothly - despite the loss of a predicted 12,000 megawatts of solar power supplies.
> 
> "Things went really, really well," said Eric Schmitt, vice president of California's grid operator, at a press briefing.


----------



## ekim68

By 2050, 139 countries could be powered by wind, solar, water



> Aug. 23 (UPI) -- Stanford scientists outline the infrastructure changes needed to make 139 countries powered 100 percent by wind, water and solar energy by 2050.
> 
> A transition of this kind could mean less worldwide energy consumption due to the efficiency of clean, renewable electricity -- leading to a net increase of more than 24 million long-term jobs, an annual decrease in 4 to 7 million deaths related to air pollution, stabilization of energy prices and annual savings of more than $20 trillion in health and climate costs.


----------



## ekim68

Warming Waters Could Mean Smaller Fish



> Fish will struggle to breathe as the ocean waters warm, researchers say, and bigger fish will have bigger problems.
> 
> That means important species could soon top out well short of their current sizes-shrinking fisheries and potentially causing problems up the food chain.
> 
> Fish have proved sensitive to subtle changes, and higher temperatures could present them with two problems-a change in the water and a change in their biology.


----------



## ekim68

99 percent of microbes in your body are completely unknown to science



> Whenever you feel lonely, just remember: you're always carrying several hundred trillion friends with you. A dizzying number of microbes call the human body home, and it turns out that science knows very little about most of them. In fact, a new Stanford survey of the foreign DNA fragments circulating in the human body has found that 99 percent of microbes inside us are completely unknown to science.


----------



## ekim68

EFF, Others Think It Would Be Cool If The FCC Stopped Hiding 47,000 Net Neutrality Complaints



> We've noted repeatedly that the Trump FCC has been engaged in some dubious-if-not-downright-comical behavior to try and justify their plan to kill popular net neutrality protections. These efforts have ranged from ignoring bot-driven fraudulent abuse of the agency's comment system to allegedly making up a DDos attack to try and downplay the "John Oliver" effect in the media, after Oliver highlighted the myopia of the FCC's efforts on his HBO program. The goal appears singular: sow doubt about the validity of the 20 million + comments made to the FCC, mostly in opposition to its plan.


----------



## ekim68

Sensor tracks who is driving in your neighbourhood



> A start-up that lets residents monitor who drives in and out of their neighbourhood was among the companies revealed at a Silicon Valley event on Monday.
> 
> Flock's sensor, which it offers for $50 a year per house, logs the number plates of every car that drives into a street and takes a picture. The sensor could eventually provide facial recognition.
> 
> Residents of monitored neighbourhoods can opt-out of being tracked - but visitors, or people passing through, cannot.


----------



## ekim68

These are the 10 most popular mobile apps in America



> Between smartphones and tablets, Americans spend more than half of their digital media consumption time - 57 percent - in apps, according to comScore's annual U.S. mobile apps report. That's about the same as a year ago - evidence that the dramatic shift to mobile has now leveled out in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

One of the biggest criticisms against wind and solar energy has been quashed



> One of the biggest criticisms of the renewable-energy industry is that it has been propped up by government subsidies. There is no doubt that without government help, it would have been much harder for the nascent technology to mature. But what's more important is whether there has been a decent return on taxpayers' investment.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://torrentfreak.com/entire-kim-dotcom-spying-operation-was-illegal-high-court-rules-170825/']Entire Kim Dotcom Spying Operation Was Illegal, High Court Rules



> The whole New Zealand-based spying operation against Kim Dotcom and his Megaupload co-defendants was illegal, the High Court has ruled. The revelation appears in a newly released decision, which shows the GCSB spy agency refusing to respond to questions about its activities on the basis that could jeopardize national security.


[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

'Data is the new oil': Your personal information is now the world's most valuable commodity



> There was a time that oil companies ruled the globe, but "black gold" is no longer the world's most valuable resource - it's been surpassed by data.
> 
> The five most valuable companies in the world today - Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google's parent company Alphabet - have commodified data and taken over their respective sectors.


----------



## ekim68

Tanker Crosses Arctic Without Icebreaker for First Time Due to Rapid Melting of Sea Ice



> In the Arctic, where warming is happening twice as fast as the rest of the planet, a Russian tanker sailed across the Northern Sea Route in record speed and without the aid of an icebreaker for the first time.
> 
> On its maiden journey, the 984-foot Christophe de Margerie tanker transported liquefied natural gas from Norway to South Korea in 19 days, about 30 percent faster than the regular route through the Suez Canal, the ship's owner Sovcomflot boasted.


----------



## ekim68

Thawing Alaska permafrost alarms scientists



> As the planet's temperatures continue what appears to be a steady march upward, scientists in northern Alaska are watching the ground beneath them melt away.
> 
> Now, a group of researchers is taking core samples of the ground to better understand what the effects of this process could be, according to The New York Times.


----------



## ekim68

China to launch world's first quantum communication network



> The network, known as a quantum key distribution (QKD) network, is more secure than widely used electronic communication equivalents. Unlike a conventional telephone or internet cable, which can be tapped without the sender or recipient being aware, a QKD network alerts both users to any tampering with the system as soon as it occurs. This is because tampering immediately alters the information being relayed, with the disturbance being instantly recognisable. Once fully implemented, it will make it almost impossible for other governments to listen in on Chinese communications.



[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40457106/taser-weapons-police-encounters-largest-study-to-date']Tasers Are A Deadly Factor In Far More Police Encounters Than Previously Thought, Study Finds[/URL]



> The Taser is thought to be a "less than lethal" alternative to a firearm during aggressive police encounters. But in a new tally, Reuters has counted 1,005 incidents in the U.S. in which people died after police stunned them with the electrical weapons, most since the early 2000s. The Taser was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in 153 of those deaths-far more than the 24 cases the company has counted.


----------



## RT

Having watched a marathon of _The Walking Dead _I feel like I'm about to become one...I know it's kinda passe now and in fact I tired of it in the day.
But I found something a bit more scary.


----------



## ekim68

East Africa is leading the world in drone delivery



> A second East African nation announced Thursday it will launch a fully automated drone delivery program. The drones will fly themselves, far from the view of humans -- a move that's not yet legal in the U.S. While plenty of countries have dabbled in drone delivery, no program has matched the scale and impact of what's unfolding in Rwanda and now, Tanzania.


----------



## ekim68

To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining



> The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you'll be eating something else - without a second bottle of wine, because you can't find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out.
> 
> The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands of ATMs go down in Indonesia after satellite problems



> JAKARTA (Reuters) - Thousands of ATMs and electronic card payment machines in Indonesia went offline over the weekend, and it might take two more weeks before full service is restored, after an outage from a satellite belonging to state-controlled telecom giant PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom).
> 
> Around 15,000 ground sites across Indonesia were affected by the problem on the 'Telkom-1' satellite, whose service is used by government agencies, banks, broadcasters and other corporations, Telkom's president director Alex Sinaga told reporters on Monday.
> 
> A shift in the direction of the satellite's antenna, which was first detected last Friday, had disrupted connectivity.


----------



## ekim68

Texas Resources, Charities, Donations for Storm Harvey Relief

Good information....


----------



## ekim68

17 Photos That Show Just How Bad The Flooding In Houston Really Is



> And it's still raining.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/08/28/electric-car-emissions-electricity-generation-goes-green/']Electric car emissions slashed by two thirds as electricity generation goes green[/URL]



> A recurring argument from EV naysayers and the fossil fuel industry is that electric cars are not really as green as perceived because they consume electricity produced by polluting power plants.
> 
> While persistent and still believed to be viable by a large part of the population, this argument has been crumbling in recent years as electric grids have been getting cleaner around the world.
> 
> We have seen evidence of that in the US where the average electric car now gets the equivalent efficiency of a non-existent 73 mpg gas-powered vehicle - and that's before accounting for refining, transportation, etc., when it comes to petrol.


----------



## ekim68

Ford, Domino's team up to deliver pizzas with self-driving cars



> Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Starting Wednesday, Domino's Pizza will begin testing deliveries with self-driving vehicles.
> 
> Domino's has teamed up with Ford for the project, which will be tested in Ann Arbor, Mich.
> 
> "The next time you order pizza, you might be helping shape the future of pizza delivery," Ford Vice President Sherif Marakby said Tuesday. "We're kicking off a research collaboration with Domino's Pizza to understand the role self-driving vehicles can play in food delivery."


----------



## ekim68

India's Supreme Court Rules Privacy Is A Fundamental Right; Big Ramifications For The Aadhaar Biometric System And Beyond



> In a move that will have major implications for the online world in India and beyond, nine Supreme Court judges have ruled unanimously that privacy is a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution.


----------



## ekim68

Alaska's Small Villages Turn Toward Renewables-And Don't Look Back



> Oil companies like to push the narrative that Alaskans want more oil development, but that's not true.


----------



## ekim68

98.5% of unique net neutrality comments oppose Ajit Pai's anti-Title II plan




> Besides form letters, ISP-funded study finds almost no support for repealing rules.


----------



## ekim68

The Scale Of Moderating Facebook: It Turns Off 1 Million Accounts Every Single Day



> It's difficult for most people to comprehend even slightly the scale involved here. As a former Facebook employee who worked on this stuff once told me, "Facebook needs to make one million decisions each day -- one million today, one million tomorrow, one million the next day." The idea that they won't make errors (both of the Type 1 and Type 2 category) is laughable.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese company plans to build futuristic hyperloop train with max speed of 4000 km/h



> Apparently not content with lumbering across the country at a mere 350 km/h, China is now working on developing technology that will boost its max speed all the way up to 4,000 km/h.
> 
> Earlier today, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), one of the nation's major space contractors, announced that it had begun research and development into a new, futuristic type of transport which would operate via supersonic "near ground flight."


----------



## ekim68

NYT Only the Latest Corporate Media Outlet to Give Free Publicity to Mercenary Profiteer



> The* New York Times *(8/30/17) decided to turn over a large chunk of the most precious opinion space in the English-speaking world to mercenary entrepreneur Erik Prince, so he could promote his plan to privatize and profit from the US occupation of Afghanistan.


----------



## ekim68

Mass civil disobedience campaign obstructs one of Europe's largest polluters



> Red and yellow circus tents rose over the Rhineland farmland of western Germany last weekend, as over 6,000 climate justice activists converged for a series of action days to protest coal mining in the region. This included a mass civil disobedience campaign called Ende Gelände (or Here and No Further), in which 3,000 participants illegally obstructed the coal mining infrastructure on Friday and Saturday.


----------



## ekim68

Traditional Radio Faces a Grim Future, New Study Says



> UPDATED: A new study published today by the head of New York University's Steinhart Music Business Program casts a sobering outlook on the future of terrestrial radio. (Not surprisingly, the National Association of Broadcasters and Nielsen responded to the report; see their responses here.)
> 
> In the 30-page report, Larry Miller argues that traditional radio has failed to engage with Generation Z - people born after 1995 - and that its influence and relevance will continue to be subsumed by digital services unless it upgrades. Key points made in the study include:
> 
> *Generation Z, which is projected to account for 40% of all consumers in the U.S. by 2020, shows little interest in traditional media, including radio, having grown up in an on-demand digital environment;


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Traditional Radio Faces a Grim Future, New Study Says


..


----------



## RT

Man, that's sad...first printed newspapers have diminished due to digital demand, and now perhaps radio...
Friend of mine was a radio jock in Nebraska for a while, he walked away when he was told he couldn't play what he wanted. I told him he should have gone to WKRP in Cincinnati


----------



## ekim68

In China, facial recognition is used to buy KFC, board planes, and catch drug users



> China is facing a tech boom that's equal parts inspiring and alarming.
> 
> Over the past several months, private companies and government entities have successfully deployed facial recognition technology for a number of different purposes, ranging from shopping to public safety. The speed of the rollout is a sign of how China's ambitions in artificial intelligence are advancing rapidly-and in a manner that will make Western techies envious, and privacy advocates queasy.


----------



## ekim68

Electric Car Incentives In Norway, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, & Belgium



> All across the globe, aggressive mandates are being set up to transition countries away from petrol and diesel cars. In fact, according to _Climate Change News_, "the European commission is considering implementing an electric car quota to be achieved by automakers by 2030, according to diplomats and sources familiar with the issue. With France, the Netherlands and Britain planning diesel bans by 2040, commission officials are said to view a new mandate as a natural step."


----------



## ekim68

Power company kills nuclear plant, plans $6 billion in solar, battery investment



> On Tuesday, power provider Duke Energy Florida announced a settlement with the state's public service commission (PSC) to cease plans to build a nuclear plant in western Florida. The utility instead intends to invest $6 billion in solar panels, grid-tied batteries, grid modernization projects, and electric vehicle charging areas. The new plan involves the installation of 700MW of solar capacity over four years in the western Florida area.


----------



## ekim68

Finland to introduce law next year phasing out coal



> HELSINKI, Aug 31 (Reuters) - Finland will introduce legislation next year to phase out coal and increase carbon taxes, a top government official told Reuters, which would require the country to find alternative energy sources to keep its power system stable.
> 
> Coal produces roughly 10 percent of the energy consumed by Finland, which is the Nordics' heaviest coal consumer and burned about 4.1 million tonnes of oil equivalent in 2016.


----------



## ekim68

Why America Still Hasn't Learned the Lessons of Katrina



> As the effects of climate change play out, the risks posed by storms like Katrina and Harvey stand to get only worse. A not-yet-final draft of National Climate Assessment, produced by scientists across 13 federal agencies, predicts that global sea levels will likely rise between half a foot and 1.2 feet by 2050, and between 1 and 4 feet by the end of the century. In areas like the Northeast and the Gulf of Mexico, relative sea-level rise will happen much faster, researchers say. Coastal Louisiana is currently losing a football field's worth of wetlands every 90 minutes, making it a harbinger for the crises that coastal communities around the country are expected to face.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists use molecular 'sieve' to purify water



> Researchers have taken a major step forward in making previously undrinkable water drinkable, therefore tackling one of the biggest challenges faced by the planet -- some 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water (a number which is set to grow as populations increase). By modifying graphene oxide membranes, the international team of researchers has created what is essentially a molecular "sieve". The selectively permeable membrane lets some molecules through while trapping others behind, producing water at various levels of cleanliness suitable for drinking or for industrial applications.


----------



## ekim68

Lilium raises $90 million in funding to make our taxis fly



> Led by Tencent, the funding round is centered on Lilium's vision of building viable five-seat all-electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) jets suitable for use as zero-emissions air taxis.
> 
> While traditional taxi firms and mobile booking companies such as Uber and Lyft fight over the rights to the road, Lilium instead wants to make airspace available for smartphone users who need a ride to their destination.


----------



## ekim68

Hurricane Harvey's Impact - And How It Compares To Other Storms



> Hurricane Harvey, which dumped an estimated 27 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana, looks to be one of the most damaging natural disasters in U.S. history. Flooding continues to affect large areas of Houston, Beaumont and other areas of Texas. Tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate their homes, and rig shut downs and evacuations along the Gulf have curbed oil and gas production. The White House, meanwhile, is expected to ask Congress for $14.5 billion in relief funding. While we don't know Harvey's ultimate toll on life and property - and won't for some time - here are the best estimates of the hurricane's impacts so far, and how they compare to the destruction wrought by other major storms.


----------



## ekim68

House passes bill to speed deployment of self-driving cars



> The House voted Wednesday to speed the introduction of self-driving cars by giving the federal government authority to exempt automakers from safety standards not applicable to the technology, and to permit deployment of up to 100,000 of the vehicles annually over the next several years.


----------



## ekim68

Executives say AI will change business, but aren't doing much about it



> American business executives expect artificial intelligence to have a large impact on their companies, but few are actually doing anything with AI, according to a new MIT- Boston Consulting Group survey.


----------



## ekim68

Large ISP & Silicon Valley CEOs Were Too Afraid To Publicly Testify On Net Neutrality



> While ISP lobbyists are pushing the government to kill net neutrality protections, they're also pushing hard for a new net neutrality law. Why? With our current historically-dysfunctional and cash-compromised Congress, large ISPs like AT&T and Comcast know that _their lawyers and lobbyists will be the ones writing the law_ -- if it gets passed at all. The end result will be a law ISPs will profess "puts the debate to bed," but which contains so many loopholes as to be effectively meaningless when it comes to protecting consumers and competition.


----------



## ekim68

A real Sign of the Times......


Disney is pulling Star Wars and Marvel films from Netflix



> If you want access to the full catalog of films from the Star Wars franchise or the Marvel universe after 2019, you'll need to sign up for Disney's forthcoming streaming service, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced on Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

67% of Americans use social media to get some of their news



> Sixty-seven percent of Americans report getting some of their news via social media at some point, according to a Pew Research survey of just under 5,000 U.S. adults conducted last month and published Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

Hacking Germany's Vote Counting Software Was 'Trivial,' Researchers Warn




> A group of researchers found that the software to count votes was a "total disaster."


----------



## ekim68

Six leading car makers seek to electrify e-vehicle plan 



> NEW DELHI: Six leading car makers are eyeing the government's plan to buy 10,000 electric vehicles while policy makers are considering generous fiscal incentives to make their capital and running cost cheaper than petrol cars within five years.
> 
> Broadly, the aim is to put on roads 1 million electric three-wheelers and 10,000 electric city buses by mid-2019 and make India the world leader in at least some segments of the market as the country strives to shift entirely to battery-power ..


----------



## ekim68

Three Equifax Managers Sold Stock Before Cyber Hack Revealed

Timing?


----------



## ekim68

China builds world's largest EV charging network with 167,000 stations



> A total of 167,000 charging piles have now been connected to the telematics platform of the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), making it the world's largest electric vehicle (EV) charging network.
> 
> By cooperating with 17 charging station operators, the SGCC now offers more than 1 million kilowatt-hours of power each day. In addition, users can complete their payment for the service within the system.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-suggests-human-beings-are-a-geological-for-1751429480']New Evidence Suggests Human Beings Are a Geological Force of Nature[/URL]



> For years, the term "Anthropocene" has been used to informally describe the human era on Earth. But new evidence suggests there's nothing informal about it. We're a true force of nature - and there's good reason to believe we've sparked a new and unprecedented geological epoch.
> 
> A team of international geoscientists say the time has come for us to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a new epoch, one as significant as previous geological eras like the Holocene and Pleistocene. According to the new study, which appears in the latest issue of _Science_, it began sometime around the midpoint of the 20th century, and is fueled by a number of unquestionably human influences - including elevated greenhouse gas levels and the global proliferation of invasive species, along with the spread of materials such as aluminium, concrete, fly ash, and even fallout from nuclear testing.


----------



## ekim68

Jamie Dimon's $13 Billion Secret-Revealed



> Dimon had harsh words, of course, for the Obama administration over his belief that his bank was treated unfairly by the Department of Justice in the $13 billion settlement. Instead of penalizing the bank for its bad behavior, Dimon argued, it should be celebrated for helping to save the financial system from its further free fall. That may be true to some degree, but Wagner's 92-page draft complaint puts the wood to Dimon's spin machine and shows that he and his colleagues at the bank were no different than the rest of the Wall Street banksters who received big bonuses for packaging up mortgages they knew would not be repaid into securities that they could sell to investors for big fees. Dimon's pay package for 2013, the year of the big government settlement, was $20 million-a raise of 74 percent from the year before.


----------



## ekim68

Keyboard warrior: the British hacker fighting for his life



> Lauri Love is charged with masterminding a 2013 attack by Anonymous on US government websites. Will Britain allow him to spend the rest of his days in an American prison?


----------



## ekim68

A Fake-News Warning From a Former Propagandist



> From pizza-parlor pedophilia rings to Sharia law in Florida, viral fake news stories often seem propelled by their own preposterousness. It's a different matter for professionally produced disinformation. That, I learned from a former pro, requires a core of logic and verifiable fact.
> 
> Larry Martin, a retired professor who lives in the seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, used to be Ladislav Bittman, deputy commander of the Department for Active Measures and Disinformation in the Soviet-directed Czechoslovak intelligence service. To create the kind of disinformation that changes the world, he told me, you need a story that's at least 60, 70 or even 80 percent true. Even well-educated people will swallow untruth without too many questions if it's plausible and it reinforces their existing beliefs.
> 
> Today, Martin's worried about the fate of his adopted country -- not just because of the epidemic of fake news, but because so many citizens have lost trust in the professional editors and reporters who spend their days trying to sort fact from fiction.


----------



## ekim68

Mercedes-Benz will electrify its entire car lineup by 2022



> Mercedes-Benz is the latest automaker to embrace electrification, announcing that it will be electrifying its entire vehicle lineup by 2022. Get used to it: Car makers are going to be making these announcements at an increasing clip, especially now that China, the most important car market in the world right now, has announced plans to eventually move to ban the sale of fossil fuel vehicles entirely.


----------



## ekim68

And they're not alone.....:up:


VW to Build Electric Versions of All 300 Models by 2030


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-09-11/electric-cars-reach-a-tipping-point']Electric Cars Reach a Tipping Point[/URL]



> Say goodbye to gasoline. The world's slow drift toward electric cars is about to enter full flood.
> 
> China, one-third of the world's car market, is working on a timetable to end sales of fossil-fuel-based vehicles, the country's vice minister of industry and information technology, Xin Guobin, told an industry forum in Tianjin on Saturday. That would probably see the country join Norway, France and the U.K. in switching to a wholly electric fleet within the lifetime of most current drivers.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/09/09/tesla-extends-range-vehicles-for-free-in-florida-escape-hurricane-irma/']Tesla remotely extends range of vehicles for free in Florida to help owners escape Hurricane Irma[/URL]



> Millions of people are currently affected by the evacuation of Florida as Hurricane Irma starts reaching the state and creates some difficult traffic situation when escaping north. There are reports of traffic jams and gas stations running out gas.
> 
> There are a lot Tesla owners in Florida and they are also escaping north using the Supercharger network.
> 
> Now Tesla has even facilitated travels for some of them as the automaker remotely unlocked the full battery pack capacity of Model S/X 60/60D vehicles with 75 kWh battery packs.


----------



## ekim68

UK bans fully autonomous weapons after Elon Musk letter



> The UK has sided with global robotics and AI experts in formally declaring that humans will always retain control over the country's robotic weapons systems.
> 
> In August, Elon Musk led 116 experts in robotics and AI in calling for a ban on autonomous weapons. The letter, with signatories from 26 countries, was sent to the UN with an ominous warning:
> 
> "We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora's box is opened, it will be hard to close."


----------



## ekim68

The Future of Drivetrains.....


Long, luxurious Aicon previews the self-driving Audi of the future


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/09/13/samsung-electric-car-batteries-range/']Samsung unveils new electric car batteries for up to 600 km (430 miles) of range[/URL]



> At the Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA Cars 2017) this week, Samsung's battery division, Samsung SDI, showcases a new "Multifunctional battery pack" solution to enable more range in electric vehicles as the Korean company tries to carve itself a bigger share of the growing automotive battery market.


----------



## Jimmyjackjumpup

ekim68 said:


> Tesla remotely extends range of vehicles for free in Florida to help owners escape Hurricane Irma


Is it just me or does anybody else want to know what gives Tesla the right to sell you a car and then *not* let you use it without paying them for the right first?

Now *that* is a sign of the times. Not only Tesla's greed but our willingness to just lay down
and take it.

Just a thought.


----------



## ekim68

Yet another trove of sensitive US voter records has leaked



> A cache of voter records on over a half-million Americans has been found online.
> 
> The records, totaling 593,328 individual sets of records, appear to contain every registered voter in the state of Alaska, according to security researchers at the Kromtech Security Research Center, who found the database.
> 
> The records were stored in a misconfigured CouchDB database, which was accessible to anyone with a web browser -- no password needed -- until Monday when the data was secured and subsequently pulled offline.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Superchargers coming to city centers



> Over the five years since its launch, Tesla has expanded its Supercharger network to include more than 5,400 outlets across the globe, but city folks looking to charge up their rides still aren't exactly flush with options outside their own home. The company has now announced plans to fit out downtown centers with Supercharger stations, to help ease the range anxiety for urban dwellers.
> 
> Tesla has played a big part in driving the adoption of electric cars themselves, but it is very conscious of the fact that extensive charging infrastructure will have an equally important role to play. To this end, it has quite aggressively expanded its network along highways and busy routes, recently announcing plans to double the total number of outlets to more than 10,000 by year's end, including a 150 percent increase in North America.


----------



## ekim68

Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser



> The biggest advertising organizations say Apple will "sabotage" the current economic model of the internet with plans to integrate cookie-blocking technology into the new version of Safari.
> 
> Six trade groups-the Interactive Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, the 4A's and two others-say they're "deeply concerned" with Apple's plans to release a version of the internet browser that overrides and replaces user cookie preferences with a set of Apple-controlled standards. The feature, which is called "Intelligent Tracking Prevention," limits how advertisers and websites can track users across the internet by putting in place a 24-hour limit on ad retargeting.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop One reveals 10 strongest potential Hyperloop routes in the world



> Hyperloop One wants to build a real, working Hyperloop - but it'll need strong partners to make it a reality, across both industry and government. That's why, in part, it held a global competition requesting proposals for routes around the world. The winners of that competition have now been announced, and the resulting routes span the U.S., the U.K, Mexico, India and Canada.


----------



## ekim68

ISPs claim a privacy law would weaken online security and increase pop-ups



> The country's biggest Internet service providers and advertising industry lobby groups are fighting to stop a proposed California law that would protect the privacy of broadband customers.
> 
> AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Frontier, Sprint, Verizon, and some broadband lobby groups urged California state senators to vote against the proposed law in a letter Tuesday. The bill would require Internet service providers to obtain customers' permission before they use, share, or sell the customers' Web browsing and application usage histories. California lawmakers could vote on the bill Friday of this week, essentially replicating federal rules that were blocked by the Republican-controlled Congress and President Trump before they could be implemented.


----------



## ekim68

The House just passed a bill that could politicize churches



> The U.S. House of Representatives quietly passed a spending bill on Thursday that could transform churches and other houses of worship into entities more closely resembling SuperPACs.
> 
> When House members passed a $1.2 trillion "megabus" spending bill yesterday in a 211-198 vote, media attention largely focused on the proposal's high cost and potential challenges in the Senate. But according to the House Appropriations Committee press release, the bill contains a rider with a provision that would make it difficult to enforce the so-called Johnson Amendment, a part of the tax code that prohibits churches and other houses of worship from endorsing political candidates.


----------



## ekim68

Mystery of sonic weapon attacks at US embassy in Cuba deepens



> The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room.


----------



## poochee

Strange.


----------



## ekim68

Kids Praised for Being Smart Are More Likely to Cheat



> An international team of researchers reports that when children are praised for being smart not only are they quicker to give up in the face of obstacles they are also more likely to be dishonest and cheat. Kids as young as age 3 appear to behave differently when told "You are so smart" vs "You did very well this time."


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Kids Praised for Being Smart Are More Likely to Cheat


Interesting.


----------



## ekim68

Navy plans to use Xbox controllers for new periscope systems



> The U.S. Navy plans to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard its newer submarines.
> 
> The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, reported Saturday that the Navy's Virginia-class subs don't have a traditional rotating periscope. They're being replaced by high-resolution cameras and large monitors.
> 
> They can be controlled by a helicopter-style stick. But the Navy plans to integrate an X-box controller into the system because they're more familiar to younger sailors and require less training.


----------



## ekim68

Solar-to-fuel system recycles CO2 to make ethanol and ethylene



> Scientists have harnessed the power of photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into fuels and alcohols at efficiencies far greater than plants. The achievement marks a significant advance in the effort to move toward sustainable sources of fuel.


----------



## ekim68

Aye Be Gar Mate......

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day


----------



## ekim68

EFF Resigns From W3C After DRM In HTML Is Approved In Secret Vote



> This is not a huge surprise, but it's still disappointing to find out that the W3C has officially approved putting DRM into HTML 5 in the form of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). Some will insist that EME is not technically DRM, but it _is_ the standardizing of how DRM will work in HTML going forward. As we've covered for years, there was significant concern over this plan, but when it was made clear that the MPAA (a relatively new W3C member) required DRM in HTML, and Netflix backed it up strongly, the W3C made it fairly clear that there was no real debate to be had on the issue. Recognizing that DRM was unavoidable, EFF proposed a fairly straightforward covenant, that those participating agree not to use the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (DMCA 1201) to go after _security researchers_, who cracked DRM in EME. The W3C already has similar covenants regarding patents, so this didn't seem like a heavy lift. Unfortunately, this proposal was more or less dismissed by the pro-DRM crowd as being an attempt to relitigate the question of DRM itself (which was not true).


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Aye Be Gar Mate......
> 
> Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day


...


----------



## ekim68

Quiet energy revolution underway in Japan as dozens of towns go off the grid



> TOKYO/HIGASHI MATSUSHIMA, JAPAN (Reuters) - A northern Japanese city's efforts to rebuild its electric power system after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami mark a quiet shift away from the country's old utility model toward self-reliant, local generation and transmission.
> 
> After losing three-quarters of its homes and 1,100 people in the March 2011 temblor and tsunami, the city of Higashi Matsushima turned to the Japanese government's "National Resilience Program," with 3.72 trillion yen ($33.32 billion) in funding for this fiscal year, to rebuild.
> 
> The city of 40,000 chose to construct micro-grids and de-centralized renewable power generation to create a self-sustaining system capable of producing an average of 25 percent of its electricity without the need of the region's local power utility.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter Suspends 300,000 Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 




> Twitter Inc.





> , under pressure from governments around the world to combat online extremism, said that improving automation tools are helping block accounts that promote terrorism and violence.
> 
> In the first half of the year, Twitter said it suspended nearly 300,000 accounts globally linked to terrorism. Of those, roughly 95 percent were identified by the company's spam-fighting automation tools. Meanwhile, the social network said government data requests continued to increase, and that it provided authorities with data on roughly 3,900 accounts from January to June.
> 
> The increasing role of machines is fighting extremism is a function of necessity, with manually identifying violent material within the millions of messages sent every day an impossible task. Twitter currently has around 328 million users, with monthly active users in the U.S. around 68 million.


----------



## ekim68

PC Gaming Is Back in Focus at Tokyo Game Show



> After taking a back seat to consoles for the past few years, personal computers are enjoying a resurgence in gaming, thanks to the popularity of e-sports, customizable machines and faster software releases.


----------



## ekim68

Lockheed Martin's laser weapon takes down 5 drones in live-fire demonstration



> It was 5-0 at the US Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico as a Lockheed Martin prototype laser weapon system shot down five unmanned drones with a 100 percent success rate. The August test of the Advanced Test High Energy Asset (ATHENA) system against five Outlaw drones was designed to demonstrate how the system's advanced beam control technology and an solid-state fiber laser could decisively destroy unmanned aerial threats.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft's subsea speed monster: A cable 16 million times faster than your broadband



> Microsoft, Facebook and Telefonica have hit a key milestone in delivering their new trans-Atlantic subsea cable with a data capacity of 160 terabits per second.
> 
> Telefonica subsidiary Telxius has finished laying the Microsoft- and Facebook-backed Marea subsea cable, which stretches 4,000 miles (6,600km) across the Atlantic ocean from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao in northern Spain.
> 
> Microsoft boasts that its 160-terabit/s cable is 16 million times faster than your home broadband and could stream 71 million HD videos simultaneously. The cable contains eight pairs of fiber-optic threads wrapped in copper.
> 
> Telxius, which will operate the cable once it goes live, began construction in August 2016.


----------



## ekim68

Bloomberg publication covers Nestle's push to pump more water out of Michigan



> The Michigan operation is only one small part of Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage company. But it illuminates how Nestlé has come to dominate a controversial industry, spring by spring, often going into economically depressed municipalities with the promise of jobs and new infrastructure in exchange for tax breaks and access to a resource that's scarce for millions. Where Nestlé encounters grass-roots resistance against its industrial-strength guzzling, it deploys lawyers; where it's welcome, it can push the limits of that hospitality, sometimes with the acquiescence of state and local governments that are too cash-strapped or inept to say no. There are the usual costs of doing business, including transportation, infrastructure, and salaries. But Nestlé pays little for the product it bottles-sometimes a municipal rate and other times just a nominal extraction fee. In Michigan, it's $200.


----------



## ekim68

After the breach, Equifax now faces the lawsuits



> Since it announced a massive data breach earlier this month, Equifax has been hit with dozens of lawsuits from shareholders, consumers and now one filed by a small Wisconsin credit union that represents what could be the first by a financial institution attempting to preemptively recoup losses caused by alleged fraud the hack could cause.
> 
> Equifax has said its breach exposed sensitive information about 143 million consumers, including Social Security and driver's license numbers. This kind of data could be used for identity theft and to create fake accounts, cybersecurity experts have said.


----------



## ekim68

Anatomy of a Moral Panic
[/URL]



> On September 18, the British Channel 4 ran a news segment with the headline, 'Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are 'frequently bought together' on Amazon.'
> 
> The piece claims that "users searching for a common chemical compound used in food production are offered the ingredients to produce explosive black powder" on Amazon's website, and that "steel ball bearings often used as shrapnel" are also promoted on the page, in some cases as items that other customers also bought.
> 
> The 'common chemical compound' in Channel 4's report is potassium nitrate, an ingredient used in curing meat. If you go to Amazon's page to order a half-kilo bag of the stuff, you'll see the suggested items include sulfur and charcoal, the other two ingredients of gunpowder. (Unlike Channel 4, I am comfortable revealing the secrets of this 1000-year-old technology.)


----------



## ekim68

Japanese turbines catch the waves to harvest energy and protect the coastline



> Star-shaped concrete structures called tetrapods are often used to protect coastlines from eroding away under the constant barrage of waves. Now a project from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has outlined plans for turbines that would sit alongside tetrapods, helping to not only dissipate wave energy, but harvest it.
> 
> The constant crashing of the waves represents an essentially limitless amount of energy. Current techniques to tap into it include; Azura in Hawaii, which uses a 360-degree rotating float mechanism; a system of buoys attached to a jetty in Gibraltar that rise and fall with the waves; a proposed system from UC Berkeley that would absorb that energy by carpeting the seafloor; and an "artificial blowhole" in development in Australia that captures energy from air displaced by waves.


----------



## ekim68

Dubai starts tests in bid to become first city with flying taxis



> DUBAI (Reuters) - Dubai staged a test flight on Monday for what it said would soon be the world's first drone taxi service under an ambitious plan by the United Arab Emirates city to lead the Arab world in innovation.
> 
> The flying taxi developed by German drone firm Volocopter resembles a small, two-seater helicopter cabin topped by a wide hoop studded with 18 propellers.
> 
> It was unmanned for its maiden test run in a ceremony arranged for Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed.


----------



## ekim68

Governments turn tables by suing public records requesters



> IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - An Oregon parent wanted details about school employees getting paid to stay home. A retired educator sought data about student performance in Louisiana. And college journalists in Kentucky requested documents about the investigations of employees accused of sexual misconduct.
> 
> Instead, they got something else: sued by the agencies they had asked for public records.
> 
> Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests - taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.


----------



## ekim68

How Electric Cars Can Create the Biggest Disruption Since the iPhone



> It's been 10 years since Apple Inc. unleashed a surge of innovation that upended the mobile phone industry. Electric cars, with a little help from ride-hailing and self-driving technology, could be about to pull the same trick on Big Oil.
> 
> The rise of Tesla Inc. and its rivals could be turbo charged by complementary services from Uber Technologies Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit, just as the iPhone rode the app economy and fast mobile internet to decimate mobile phone giants like Nokia Oyj.


----------



## ekim68

Consciousness sparked in man after 15 years in vegetative state



> After 15 years in a vegetative state with no signs of consciousness a man is now showing minimal signs of "waking" following the implantation of an experimental nerve stimulation device into his chest.
> 
> Angela Sirigu and colleagues at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Bron set out to develop a novel way of regaining lost consciousness. The research examined whether stimulating the vagus nerve could have any effect on returning a vegetative patient back to a state of consciousness.
> 
> The vagus nerve has been the source of a great deal of compelling research in recent years. Running from the brain to the abdomen, the nerve is responsible for a huge array of different bodily tasks, and it comes into contact with a number of different organs, including the heart, lungs and stomach.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing slams $2m on the desk, bellows: Now where's my jetpack?



> Boeing and its pals today offered a whopping $2m (£1.49m) in prizes to anyone who can design and build a working "personal flying device."
> 
> The GoFly competition aims to spur on the development of safe, quiet, ultra-compact jetpacks that can hover, take off and land, and fly for at least 20 miles. "Now is the time," as the contest's website put it.


----------



## ekim68

James Dyson to invest £2.5bn on 'radically different' electric car



> British inventor Sir James Dyson has announced plans to build an electric car that will be "radically different" from current models and go on sale in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Happy birthday Google.....


Here are 19 random facts about Google on its 19th anniversary



> Google is celebrating its 19th birthday today. Naturally, the search engine giant is celebrating in the most Google-y way possible - by releasing a special Google Doodle.
> 
> This doodle is a bit different, though - it has a game built into it. Users can spin a wheel to open one of 19 surprises Google has launched over the years.


----------



## ekim68

Dubai announces giant Mars city simulation designed by Bjarke Ingels



> Dubai is not known for doing things by half, from the world's tallest building to the world's largest mall, this is a town that likes things big. Now the UAE government has announced it is building the world's largest space simulation city, and to top it off it will be designed by one of the world's flashiest architects, Bjarke Ingels, whose company is literally called BIG.
> 
> The project is called the Mars Science City and will cover 1.9 million sq ft (176,516 sq m) at a cost of nearly US$140 million dollars. The city will span several domes, including a space for a team to live for up to a year as part of a Mars simulation.


----------



## poochee

...


----------



## ekim68

Comcast's New Skinny Bundle Streaming Service is Charging $18 For What Antennas Offer for Free



> Comcast announced this week that they plan on rolling out their streaming service, 'Xfinity Instant TV' as an option for broadband-only customers. At our very first glance, it seemed like a pretty good deal, a live-streaming service for $18 a month, not bad right?
> 
> But once we actually looked into the offering, we noticed something funny. Almost the entirety of what they're planning on charging $18 a month for could be viewed free with an antenna. According to the WSJ, the antenna as an option is apparently a long lost TV option for many consumers.


----------



## ekim68

FalconSAT-3 Now Open for Amateur Radio Use



> The Air Force Academy satellite *FalconSAT-3* is now open for Amateur Radio use as a digital store-and-forward system. Built in 2005 and 2006 by cadets and faculty in the Space Systems Research Center at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, FalconSAT-3 was launched in 2007.
> 
> The satellite has completed its scientific and training missions, and the Academy now is making it available for Amateur Radio use.


----------



## ekim68

Spanish court orders Google to delete app used for Catalan independence vote



> MADRID (Reuters) - Catalonia's High Court on Friday ordered Google to delete an application that it said Catalan separatists were using to spread information about a disputed independence vote this Sunday.
> 
> The court said the "On Votar 1-Oct" application on the Google Play smartphone app store opposed an order in September from Spain's Constitutional Court to suspend the referendum while it determined its legality.


----------



## ekim68

The Equifax Hack Has the Hallmarks of State-Sponsored Pros



> In the corridors and break rooms of Equifax Inc.'s giant Atlanta headquarters, employees used to joke that their enormously successful credit reporting company was just one hack away from bankruptcy. They weren't being disparaging, just darkly honest: Founded in the 19th century as a retail credit company, Equifax had over the years morphed into one of the largest repositories of Americans' most sensitive financial data, which the company sliced and diced and sold to banks and hedge funds. In short, the viability of Equifax and the security of its data were one and the same.
> 
> Nike Zheng, a Chinese cybersecurity researcher from a bustling industrial center near Shanghai, probably knew little about Equifax or the value of the data pulsing through its servers when he exposed a flaw in popular backend software for web applications called Apache Struts. Information he provided to Apache, which published it along with a fix on March 6, showed how the flaw could be used to steal data from any company using the software.
> 
> The average American had no reason to notice Apache's post but it caught the attention of the global hacking community.


----------



## ekim68

Equifax Board Forms Panel to Review Executives' Share Sales



> Equifax Inc.'s board of directors has formed a special committee to review the stock sales that top executives made days after the company found out it was hacked.


----------



## ekim68

Why buy the cow when you can biofabricate the milk for free?



> We can now get cow-less steaks and leather as well.


----------



## ekim68

Britain opens first subsidy-free solar power farm



> LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's first solar power farm to operate without a government subsidy is due to open in eastern England on Tuesday, as a sharp fall in costs has made renewable energy much more economical.
> 
> Britain needs to invest in new energy capacity to replace aging coal and nuclear plants that are due to close in the 2020s.


----------



## ekim68

Steve Wozniak: Net neutrality rollback 'will end the internet as we know it'



> Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak penned an op-ed on Friday with a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, urging the current FCC to stop its proposed rollback of Obama-era net neutrality regulations.
> 
> In the op-ed published by USA Today, Wozniak and Michael Copps, who led the FCC from 2001 to 2011, argued the rollback will threaten freedom for internet users and may corrode democracy.
> 
> "The path forward is clear. The FCC must abandon its ill-conceived plan to end net neutrality," wrote Wozniak and Copps. "Instead of creating fast lanes for the few, it should be moving all of us to the fast lane by encouraging competition in local broadband connectivity and pushing companies to deliver higher speeds at more affordable prices. It's the right thing for us as consumers and as citizens."


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is Shipping Hundreds of Powerwall Batteries to Puerto Rico



> In a continued streak of goodwill during this year's devastating hurricane season, Tesla has been shipping hundreds of its Powerwall batteries to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Since the hurricane hit on 20 September, much of the U.S. territory has been left without power - about 97 percent, as of 27 September - hampering residents' access to drinkable water, perishable food, and air conditioning. The island's hospitals are struggling to keep generators running as diesel fuel dwindles.
> 
> Installed by employees in Puerto Rico, Tesla's batteries could be paired with solar panels in order to store electricity for the territory, whose energy grid may need up to six months to be fully repaired. Several power banks have already arrived to the island, and more are en route.


----------



## ekim68

10 businesses facing extinction in 10 years



> Determining which industries aren't long for this world may seem easy enough. But some types of businesses, such as telemarketing, are surprisingly hard to kill.
> 
> And then again, other industries, probably the ones you're sad to see go, can't find a way to survive.
> 
> So start setting up your office pool, because here are our picks for 10 businesses facing extinction in 10 years.


----------



## ekim68

The real problem with credit reports is the astounding number of errors



> Your most personal information - home address, Social Security number, etc. - has likely been hacked as one of the 143 million American consumers whose Equifax credit files were breached. Equifax CEO Richard Smith resignation, potential illegal stock trades of senior executives, has drawn the attention of Congress with a Senate hearing scheduled.
> 
> Policy makers need to resist the headlines and focus on the real problem that directly harms millions of Americans: the astounding number of errors in the credit reports that are the result of misaligned economic and legal incentives.


----------



## ekim68

UK government could imprison people for looking at terrorist content



> Not content with trying to "combat" encryption, the UK government also wants to criminalize looking at terrorist content. The leading Conservative party has announced plans which threaten those who "repeatedly view terrorist content online" with time behind bars.
> 
> New laws will be introduced that could see consumers of terrorist content imprisoned for up to 15 years. The same maximum sentence would face those who share information about police, soldiers or intelligence agencies with a view to organizing terrorist attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Forced Arbitration Is a 'Get-Out-of-Jail-Free' Card for Banks That Cheat Customers



> The Senate leadership is pushing to roll back the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's arbitration rule using the Congressional Review Act's (CRA) expedited process and has until early November to act. The rule allows consumers to join together in class actions to challenge wrongdoing in court. Widespread wrongdoing and negligence at Wells Fargo and Equifax and their attempts to evade legal accountability using forced arbitration "rip-off" clauses have transformed the issue from an obscure regulatory debate into a leading national story.
> 
> Forced arbitration clauses buried in the fine print of take-it-or-leave-it contracts may be the single most important tool that predatory banks, payday lenders, credit card companies and other financial institutions have used to escape accountability for cheating and defrauding consumers. These clauses push disputes into secretive arbitration proceedings rigged to favor financial companies and conceal wrongdoing from regulatory authorities. The average consumer forced into arbitration ends up paying more than $7,700 to the bank or lender, according to the Economic Policy Institute.


----------



## ekim68

Roll-out solar panels to power Welsh island



> Solar panels that can be unfurled like carpet could be a game changer where portable power solutions are needed, such as in the wake of a natural disaster, for example. Cardiff Council in the UK is about to test out this technology on a small island off the coast of Wales, as a new way of possibly shoring up its energy requirements for the future.
> 
> Flexible solar panels can pack more of a punch than stiff, regular old panels because they allow for a higher energy capacity from a smaller package.


----------



## ekim68

For-profit charter schools bill taxpayers for empty desks



> COLUMBUS, Ohio - Last school year, Ohio's cash-strapped education department paid Capital High $1.4 million in taxpayer dollars to teach students on the verge of dropping out. But on a Thursday in May, the storefront charter school run by for-profit EdisonLearning was mostly empty.
> 
> In one room, vacant chairs faced 25 blank computer monitors. Three students sat in a science lab down the hall, and another nine in an unlit classroom, including one youth who sprawled out, head down, sleeping.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/turkish-archeologists-think-they-may-have-discovered-th-1819136539']Turkish Archeologists Think They May Have Discovered the Grave of 'Santa Claus'[/URL]



> Archeologists in Turkey think they may have reason to rewrite Christian history. Saint Nicholas, the inspiration for Santa Claus, is believed to have been born in the Demre district in Antalya, and new research at a church that bears his name there has uncovered a tomb that could house his undisturbed remains.


----------



## ekim68

How the Elderly Lose Their Rights




> Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent-and reap a profit from it.


----------



## ekim68

Anybody Claiming Net Neutrality Rules Killed Broadband Investment Is Lying To You



> In 2015 the FCC passed some fairly basic net neutrality rules designed to keep broadband duopolies from abusing a lack of broadband competition to hamstring internet competitors. Despite the endless pearl clutching from ISP lobbyists and allies, the rules were relatively modest, falling well short of the more comprehensive rules we've seen passed in places like Canada, Japan, and India. Still, ISPs have spent every day since trying to claim that the rules somehow utterly devastated broadband sector investment, despite the fact that independent economists and journalists have repeatedly proven that to be a lie.


----------



## ekim68

NRA spent more than reported during 2016 election



> The NRA told the Federal Election Commission it spent $55 million during the 2016 election cycle. But according to two insiders at the powerful gun lobby, the total was far greater.


----------



## ekim68

Butterfly swarm shows up on Denver radar system



> A colourful, shimmering spectacle detected by weather radar over the US state of Colorado has been identified as swarms of migrating butterflies.
> 
> Scientists at the National Weather Service (NWS) first mistook the orange radar blob for birds and had asked the public to help identifying the species.
> 
> They later established that the 70-mile wide (110km) mass was a kaleidoscope of Painted Lady butterflies.


----------



## ekim68

The bold tech-fuelled plan to save Africa's big beasts



> Kenya's rhinos, elephants, and zebras pull in millions of tourism dollars and supply jobs. Poachers threaten that - but an ambitious programme is combining the influence of local communities and innovative technology to keep them at bay.


----------



## poochee

ekim68 said:


> Butterfly swarm shows up on Denver radar system


Cool.


----------



## ekim68

Special Report: HP Enterprise let Russia scrutinize cyberdefense system used by Pentagon



> WASHINGTON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Hewlett Packard Enterprise allowed a Russian defense agency to review the inner workings of cyber defense software used by the Pentagon to guard its computer networks, according to Russian regulatory records and interviews with people with direct knowledge of the issue.
> 
> The HPE system, called ArcSight, serves as a cybersecurity nerve center for much of the U.S. military, alerting analysts when it detects that computer systems may have come under attack. ArcSight is also widely used in the private sector.
> 
> The Russian review of ArcSight's source code, the closely guarded internal instructions of the software, was part of HPE's effort to win the certification required to sell the product to Russia's public sector, according to the regulatory records seen by Reuters and confirmed by a company spokeswoman.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon might be lowering the rate of inflation globally



> Another investment bank analyst has signed on to the idea that the internet is holding down the rate of inflation.
> 
> Bilal Hafeez, the global head of G10 FX strategy and head of EMEA research at Nomura, published two notes last month on whether the value of the dollar was being held down by Amazon and its ilk. In one note he called it "the Amazonisation of inflation."


----------



## ekim68

Toshiba's new fast-charging battery could triple the range of electric vehicles



> A key focus of electric vehicle (EV) makers is maximizing the range users can get from each charge, and for that reason new battery technologies are poised to play a huge part in driving their adoption. Toshiba has developed a new fast-charging battery it claims could allow EVs to travel three times as far as they do now, and then be fully recharged again in a matter of minutes.
> 
> Toshiba's SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery) has been around in various forms since 2007, with its chief claim to fame an ability to charge to 90 percent of capacity in just five minutes. It also boasts a life-span of 10 years and high levels of safety, and has found its way into a number of notable EVs, including Mitsubishi's i MiEV and Honda's Fit EV.


----------



## ekim68

Dollars for Docs



> Pharmaceutical and medical device companies are now required by law to release details of their payments to a variety of doctors and U.S. teaching hospitals for promotional talks, research and consulting, among other categories. Use this tool to search for general payments (excluding research and ownership interests) made from August 2013 to December 2015.


----------



## ekim68

Android App Lets Users Detect Credit Card Skimmers at Gas Pumps



> There is now an Android app that can search and detect gas pump skimmers based on their Bluetooth fingerprint.
> 
> The app - *Skimmer Scanner* - was put together by Nate Seidle, CEO of SparkFun, a Colorado-based electronics firm. Seidle uploaded the app on the official Google Play Store and open-sourced its code on GitHub for public review.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Is Abandoning Customers in the Name of Free Speech

*



Two very American stories

Click to expand...

*


> about high-speed internet access are colliding right now, and the dissonance is striking. One is like a five-minute Shakespearean tragedy, neatly telling the story of what a high-priced local cable monopoly does (and doesn't do). The other is a hopeful narrative of intelligent, effective government intervention.
> 
> For the brief but evocative tragedy, you probably can guess who the high-priced local cable monopoly is: Comcast. In Vermont, this litigation-happy monolith is suing the state Public Utility Commission, claiming, among many other things, that its First Amendment rights have been violated (because the company is unhappy about the terms under which it is obliged to provide service there). Comcast took in more than $200 million in Vermont last year.


----------



## ekim68

Sodium-ion battery beats lithium for cost effectiveness



> Lithium-ion batteries are the current reigning energy-storage champion, powering everything from phones to cars. But as good as it is as an electrode material, lithium is relatively rare, and the cost of mining and refining it can blow out the budget for large-scale applications. The search for a cheaper alternative has led some scientists to plain old salt, and now a Stanford team has developed a sodium-ion battery that would beat lithium-ion batteries in terms of cost per storage capacity.


----------



## ekim68

Are Electric Vehicles Pushing Oil Demand Over a Cliff?




> With China now planning to phase out gas-powered cars, automakers are talking about an all-electric future. It could mean a big drop in emissions.


----------



## ekim68

More on this...


[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/10/10/netherlands-dutch-ban-petrol-diesel-cars-2030-electric-cars/']The Dutch government confirms plan to ban new petrol and diesel cars by 2030[/URL]



> Today, the new Dutch government presented its detailed plan for the coming years and it includes making all new cars emission-free by 2030 - virtually banning petrol- and diesel-powered cars in favor of battery-powered vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Deutsche Post DHL is developing its own fleet of autonomous delivery vehicles



> In 1995, at a time when email was beginning to replace snail mail, Deutsche Bundespost was privatized, becoming Deutsche Post. Like most other privatized postal services in the world, the company faced an uncertain future, but the national institution is now the dominant freight and logistics company in the world, and is looking to cement its future by developing its own fleet of autonomous delivery vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Google Will Hit 100 Percent Renewable Energy This Year




> Google





> has announced that after 10 years a carbon-neutral company, it will be able to brag running on entirely renewable energy at the end of 2017. That means that all of the electricity the company consumes in both its data centers and offices are provided by wind and solar energy.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers find 450,000 financial scams operating on social media



> Financial scams have doubled in the past year on social media but only a small pool of cyberattackers appear to be behind the surge.
> 
> According to ZeroFOX researchers, around 250,000 finance and banking scams were lurking on social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook in 2016, but now, this estimate has almost doubled having reached a total of 437,165 fraudulent campaigns.


----------



## ekim68

California DMV changes rules to allow testing and use of fully autonomous vehicles




> The California Department of Motor Vehicles





> is changing its rules to allow companies to test autonomous vehicles without a driver behind the wheel - and to let the public use autonomous vehicles.
> 
> The DMV released a revised version of its regulations and has started a 15-day public comment period, ending October 25, 2017.
> 
> California law requires the DMV to work on regulations to cover testing and public use of autonomous vehicles, and the regulator said that this is the first step.


----------



## ekim68

Secret files on jets and navy ships stolen in 'extensive and extreme' hack



> Information about F-35 joint strike fighter was taken in cyberattack on Australian defence contractor, official reveals.


----------



## ekim68

Virgin gets on board Hyperloop One with "substantial investment"



> Thanks to Sir Richard Branson, Hyperloop One is now Virgin Hyperloop One. The rebranding was announced by the Virgin Group founder and CEO on his blog, in which he said that the change follows an undisclosed, but substantial investment by Virgin in the US-based transportation start up.
> 
> According to Sir Richard, the investment in Virgin Hyperloop One is in line with the company's commitment to disruption and investment in innovative companies, including Virgin Airways and Virgin Galactic. He said that Virgin was particularly attracted to the Hyperloop's all-electric design, which is in line with the brand's commitment to sustainable green technologies.


----------



## ekim68

Why China is winning the clean energy race



> U.S. politicians have been warning for years that America couldn't let China win the clean energy race. That's exactly what has happened, with the trends most stark in electric cars, solar and nuclear energy.


----------



## ekim68

Policing in the future involves citizen detectives and a Pokémon Go-like app




> Using the Automon app, a Dutch "police of the future" technology initiative, citizens can score points by finding stolen cars.


----------



## ekim68

San Francisco Is Suing Major Oil Companies to Protect its Citizens from Climate Change



> On a Tuesday morning in October, just before noon, the San Francisco port is bustling with life. Shoppers line up for late summer produce and specialty coffee at a farmer's market in front of the iconic Ferry Building, and suited professionals settle on benches near the water to enjoy their lunches. It's unlikely that many of these daytime revelers realize that they are just a few feet from the seawall: a critical barricade protecting San Francisco from the looming impacts of climate change, and an accessory in a lawsuit that's demanding oil companies pay for these impacts.


----------



## ekim68

In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out



> When Hurricane Maria knocked out power in Puerto Rico, residents there realized they were going to need physical cash - and a lot of it.


----------



## ekim68

Dubai police will ride hoverbikes straight out of 'Star Wars'



> Dubai is aggressively turning itself into a "Future City," putting self-flying taxis in the skies and a facial recognition system in its airport. The Dubai police department's latest ride is now adding another sci-fi transportation staple: the hoverbike.
> The Dubai police, which already has luxury patrol cars, self-driving pursuit drones, and a robot officer, just announced it will soon have officers buzzing around on hoverbikes, which look like an early version of the speeder bikes used by the scout troopers on Endor in _Return of the Jedi._
> 
> The force (see what I did there?) unveiled its new Hoversurf Scorpion craft at the Gitex Technology Week conference, according to UAE English language publication _Gulf News_. The police force will use the hoverbike for emergency response scenarios, giving officers the ability to zoom over congested traffic conditions by taking to the air.


----------



## ekim68

World's first "negative emission" power plant turns CO2 into stone



> After opening the world's first commercial Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant designed to pull CO2 out of the air, Swiss company Climeworks is now joining forces with a geothermal power plant in Iceland to create the world's first "negative emission" power plant.
> 
> For several years an international team of scientists has been working on a novel way to turn captured CO2 into solid minerals. The project is dubbed CarbFix and involves bounding the CO2 to water and then pumping it 700 meters (2,300 ft) underground. This CO2 solution, on contact with the deep basalt rock, was found to quickly form into a carbonate mineral.


----------



## ekim68

DOJ Continues Its Push For Encryption Backdoors With Even Worse Arguments



> Early last week, the Deputy Attorney General (Rod Rosenstein) picked up the recently-departed James Comey's Torch of Encroaching Darkness +1 and delivered one of the worst speeches against encryption ever delivered outside of the UK.
> 
> Rosenstein apparently has decided UK government officials shouldn't have a monopoly on horrendous anti-encryption arguments. Saddling up his one-trick pony, the DAG dumped out a whole lot of nonsensical words in front of a slightly more receptive audience. Speaking at the Global Cyber Security Summit in London, Rosenstein continued his crusade against encryption using counterintuitive arguments.
> 
> After name-dropping his newly-minted term -- responsible encryption™ -- Rosenstein stepped back to assess the overall cybersecurity situation. In short, it is awful. Worse, perhaps, than Rosenstein's own arguments. Between the inadvertently NSA-backed WannaCry ransomware, the Kehlios botnet, dozens of ill-mannered state actors, and everything else happening seemingly all at once, the world's computer users could obviously use all the security they can get.


----------



## ekim68

The Air Force Just Bought 100 Stealth Fighters That Can't Fight



> The U.S. military has signaled that it might cancel essential upgrades for more than 100 early model F-35 stealth fighters flown by the Air Force, rendering the radar-evading jets incompatible with many of the latest weapons.In that case, some 6 percent of the flying branch's planned 1,700-strong F-35 fleet would be unfit for combat, sticking U.S. taxpayers with a $20 billion tab for fighters... that can't fight.


----------



## ekim68

First floating wind farm, built by offshore oil company, delivers electricity



> The world's first floating offshore wind farm began delivering electricity to the Scottish grid today.
> 
> The 30MW installation, situated 25km (15.5mi) from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, will demonstrate that offshore wind energy can be harvested in deep waters, miles away from land, where installing giant turbines was once impractical or impossible. At peak capacity, the wind farm will produce enough electricity to power 20,000 Scottish homes.


----------



## ekim68

CNN gets a first-of-its-kind waiver to fly drones over crowds



> CNN has won an interesting waiver regarding its commercial drone operating license with the FAA - an exemption that allows it to fly its Vantage Robotics Snap drone over open-air crowds of people at altitudes of up to 150 feet. This is a new precedent in this kind of waiver: Previous exemptions allowed flight of drones over people in closed set operations (like for filmmaking purposes) and only when tethered, with a max height of 21 feet.
> 
> The new waiver granted to CNN, as secured through its legal counsel Hogan Lovells, allows for flight of the Vantage UAV (which is quite small and light) above crowds regardless of population density.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Battles Google for Renewable Energy Crown



> Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump, clean-energy developers are finding plenty of interest in wind and solar power from businesses with sustainability targets, especially technology companies.
> 
> That was on display in a video tweeted Thursday by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, as he christened the 253-megawatt Amazon Wind Farm Texas in Scurry County. Amazon has bought more than 1.22 gigawatts of output to date from U.S. clean-energy projects, second only to Alphabet Inc.'s Google, with 1.85 gigawatts.
> 
> Corporations have agreed to buy 1.9 gigawatts of clean power in the U.S. this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and are on pace to match the 2.6 gigawatts signed last year.


----------



## ekim68

Turning the Optical Fiber Network into a Giant Earthquake Sensor



> Optical fibers can do more than transmit data-they can actually sense what's going on around them, including the earliest rumbles of an earthquake.
> 
> For the past year, Biondo Biondi, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University, has used a 4.8-kilometer (or 3-mile) test loop of optical fibers installed on the Stanford campus to record vibrations caused by earthquakes, and distinguish those from vibrations caused by other sources, such as passing cars.
> 
> His team has recorded 800 seismic events using this fiber optic seismic observatory since September 2016, including signals from the recent Mexico earthquake and vibrations from blasting at quarries in the area.


----------



## ekim68

'Access Mars' Lets You Explore Mars In VR--From Your Browser



> Unless you have superhuman powers, the only way to "visit" Mars is by looking at online images captured by the Curiosity rover. For a more immersive experience, you could view these images as one massive 3D model in AR (that is, if you're lucky to have one of Microsoft's HoloLens devices). That changes today as Google announced Access Mars, which allows you to explore the Red Planet's surface with the same 3D model right from your web browser.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/smartwatches-for-kids-are-a-total-privacy-nightmare-1819678508']Smartwatches for Kids Are a Total Privacy Nightmare[/URL]



> Kids' smartwatches are usually intended to help parents feel at ease that their children are safe when they're not around. But as it turns out, a number of these devices may do more harm than good. A 49-page report on smartwatches for children (with the unfortunate title of #WatchOut) details all the ways in which they are a security nightmare.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Wants to Use Drones to Recharge the Batteries of Electric Vehicles



> Amazon has been granted a patent for an ambitious new method of maintaining a charge in electric vehicles (EVs). The company wants to use drones to allow drivers to top up their vehicles without having to visit a charging station.
> 
> Drivers would request a top up from a central server, which would dispatch a charging drone to their location. The drone would then dock with the vehicle and start transferring power, without the car ever needing to come to a stop.


----------



## ekim68

EPA's climate website removes resources to fight climate change



> In George Orwell's infamous dystopian novel "1984," the so-called Ministry of Truth is an agency that spews propaganda, determining what is and, perhaps even more importantly, what isn't the truth.
> 
> A recent analysis from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) was made public on Friday revealed that an Environmental Protection Agency climate website had gotten rid of "dozens of online resources dedicated to helping local governments address climate change," the New York Times reports. It's the latest move the agency has taken to delegitimize, or otherwise downplay the threat climate change presents.
> 
> EDGI said a "substantial" amount of information had vanished.


----------



## ekim68

Facing Public Outcry, New Mexico Restores Evolution and Global Warming to Science Standards



> New Mexico's public education agency announced late Tuesday that it would restore references to evolution, global warming, and the age of the Earth that had been stripped out of the state's proposed science education standards. The reversal comes after an outcry by teachers, scientists, students, and others-the culmination of which was a day-long public hearing on Monday in which scores of people spoke out against the draft standards.


----------



## ekim68

The US government keeps spectacularly underestimating solar energy installation



> The only thing certain in this life are death, taxes and the US department of energy's massive underestimate of renewable energy capacity.


----------



## ekim68

'What real journalism looks like': Orlando Sentinel exposes Florida's $1 billion school voucher scam



> The _Orlando Sentinel_ is being praised for a months long investigation on Florida's school voucher program, inspecting fifty percent more schools than state education officials inspected in all of last year.
> 
> The newspapers three-part, Schools Without Rules expose on the state's nearly $1 billion tax credit scholarship program.
> 
> "That is what real journalism looks like - a team of journalists doing shoe-leather reporting, conducting the kind of inspections, investigations and interviews that even the state's education officials don't," _Sentinel_ columnist Scott Maxwell explained. "This little-regulated system needs an overhaul. And the world needs more real journalists."


----------



## ekim68

The US is rapidly outpacing its clean energy forecasts



> In a February 2007 report, the United States Department of Energy made thirty year predictions for the country's energy usage and production. As our infographic shows, using data from the non-profit international environmental pressure group Natural Resources Defense Council, these forecasts have so far been smashed.
> 
> Actual CO2 emissions in 2016 have undercut the 2006 predictions by 24 percent. In fact, energy consumption in total was also 17 lower than expected. In terms of the energy mix, power generated from coal was 45 percent beneath the forecast while clean(er) alternatives natural gas and wind/solar power saw overshoots of 79 and 383 percent, respectively.


----------



## ekim68

Poland Is Cutting the 'Last Fuses' on Democracy, Official Warns



> Twenty-eight years after Poland led eastern Europe's break with communism and its embrace of western-style democracy, the country's human rights commissioner is sounding the alarm with a warning that the European Union's largest eastern nation is on a road that leads back to authoritarian rule.
> 
> The latest plan by President Andrzej Duda and the ruling party to revamp the Supreme Court and a powerful judicial body would remove the last safety mechanism protecting the rule of law in Poland, said Adam Bodnar, elected in 2015 by the previous parliament as the country's ombudsman. His voice adds to EU and U.S. concerns over a two-year effort to subdue the judiciary, just as the drive enters what could be the final stage.


----------



## ekim68

CRISPR Bacon: Chinese Scientists Create Genetically Modified Low-Fat Pigs



> Here's something that may sound like a contradiction in terms: low-fat pigs.
> 
> But that's exactly what Chinese scientists have created using new genetic engineering techniques.
> 
> In a paper published Monday in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_, the scientists report that they have created 12 healthy pigs with about 24 percent less body fat than normal pigs.


----------



## ekim68

Hong Kong Has No Space Left for the Dead



> When Fung Wai-tsun's family carried their grandfather's ashes across the Hong Kong border to mainland China in 2013, they worried Customs officers, thinking the urn was full of drugs, would stop them.
> 
> Fung, like many others in Hong Kong, could not find a space to lay his loved one to rest in his own city and would have to settle for a site across the border and hours away.


----------



## ekim68

In Victory for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Court Finds That Approval of Dakota Access Pipeline Violated the Law



> The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe won a significant victory today in its fight to protect the Tribe's drinking water and ancestral lands from the Dakota Access pipeline.
> 
> A federal judge ruled that the federal permits authorizing the pipeline to cross the Missouri River just upstream of the Standing Rock reservation, which were hastily issued by the Trump administration just days after the inauguration, violated the law in certain critical respects.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous construction equipment is here



> Autonomous construction equipment could be the intermediate step between automated factory equipment and self-driving cars. Although there is plenty of justified enthusiasm for self-driving cars, there are still many technical and regulatory challenges to overcome before we can move automation from enclosed industrial settings to the open road.
> 
> "I actually think we'll see autonomous equipment commonplace on job sites much sooner than on public roads," says Noah Ready-Campbell, founder of Built Robotics. His company launched out of stealth in October with self-driving construction equipment.


----------



## ekim68

Italy proposes phasing out coal power plants by 2025



> MILAN, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Italy has set its sights on phasing out coal power plants by 2025, the Italian Industry Minister said on Tuesday presenting a consultation document on a new energy strategy.
> 
> "We have asked (grid company) Terna to identify the infrastructure needed," Minister Carlo Calenda said in a parliamentary hearing on the document.
> 
> Italy's biggest utility Enel has said it will not invest in new coal-fired power plants.


----------



## ekim68

The occupations with the highest and lowest divorce rates in the US



> Much ink has been spilled over divorce rates in the United States: they're rising; they're falling; they've barely changed in the past 50 years. In reality, while Americans are getting married later, the 50% divorce rate statistic is a myth. Divorce rates vary by factors like race, education level, and employment status, and now we have a pretty good picture of how they vary by occupation.
> 
> Statistician Nathan Yau, reporting for Flowing Data, recently aggregated divorce data from the US Census Bureau's 5-Year American Community Survey from 2015, which covers a broad range of social, economic, and demographic topics and includes data on roughly 500 occupations. For each occupation, Yau calculated a divorce rate based on the percentage of people who divorced out of those who married at least once.
> 
> Among his findings: Actuaries, whose job is to predict and manage risk and uncertainty, fittingly have the lowest divorce rate, at 17%. If you're more of a gambler, you might roll the dice with marriage to a casino manager-gaming managers have the highest divorce rate, at nearly 53%.


----------



## ekim68

New Zealand bans foreign home buyers



> New Zealand will ban foreign buyers from purchasing existing homes in the country in an effort to cool soaring property prices.
> 
> Prime minister-elect Jacinda Ardern said the ban only applied to non-residents.
> 
> The country is facing a housing affordability crisis which has left home ownership out of reach for many.


----------



## ekim68

Honolulu now fines people up to $99 for texting while crossing road



> Our smartphone obsession has reached a new low. The Hawaiian city of Honolulu has resorted to fining people up to $99 for staring at the devices, to try and force people to look up from their phones while crossing the road.
> 
> The new law gives police the power to fine people up to $35 (£26.41) for their first offence, $75 for their second and $99 thereafter, perhaps expecting it to take quite some effort to get people to take notice.


----------



## Brigham

fines for texting while crossing the road

There are lots of things on the internet that require answering a set of questions. Very often I have had to stop my inquiries as my cell phone number is wanted to continue. I don't have a cell phone, and I don't want one!!!


----------



## ekim68

Introducing Neom, the 500 billion-dollar, ultra-high tech future megacity of Saudi Arabia



> Saudi Arabia is looking toward a post-oil future by sinking some US$500 billion into a massive, ultra-futuristic megacity project it calls Neom (or Neo-Mostaqbal; new future). Saudi Crown Prince Mohhamed bin Salman announced the giant project on Tuesday, a brand new city on the intersection of three countries, where "there is no room for old thinking."
> 
> This bold new vision comes with a startling and unequivocal message from Saudi Arabia's next king to its ultra-conservative Wahhabi clerics: "We are returning to what we were before, a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world. We will not waste 30 years of our lives, wasting time dealing with extremist ideas. We will destroy them today."


----------



## ekim68

Potential Economic Effects of Climate Change



> How we adapt to climate change is going to be the biggest challenge facing society over the next half century. Barring a miraculous technological innovation (about a 10% chance), how and when the climate changes is going to be a significant economic issue. Most people and many businesses remain unprepared for both the economic and investing effects of these changes.
> 
> We continue to see signs that Insurance companies will be dealing with increased storm activity; agriculture will confront longer growing seasons but increased pests and insects. Depending upon where you live, Droughts, Floods, and Wildfires are going to be increasingly common. Infrastructure costs - already an underfunded sector of the economy - will rise.


----------



## ekim68

China Shuts Down Tens Of Thousands Of Factories In Widespread Pollution Crackdown



> Buildings in China are shrouded in smog
> 
> China has implemented an unprecedented pollution crackdown in recent months as the country shuts down tens of thousands of factories. The effort is part of a national effort to address China's infamous pollution and has affected wide swaths of China's manufacturing sector.
> 
> In total, it is estimated that 40 percent of all China's factories have been shut down at some point in order to be inspected by environmental bureau officials. As a result of these inspections over 80,000 factories have been hit with fines and criminal offenses as a result of their emissions.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo to test self-driving cars in Michigan's winter conditions



> Waymo plans to test its self-driving car technology on the cold, icy roads of the greater Detroit region this winter, the company said Thursday.
> 
> "For human drivers, the mix of winter conditions can affect how well you can see, and the way your vehicle handles the road. The same is true for self-driving cars," wrote CEO John Krafcik in a blog post.


----------



## ekim68

World's witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires' wealth swells to $6tn



> Not since the time of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the 20th century was so much owned by so few.


----------



## ekim68

Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner and Sicker In-Between



> The U.S. retirement age is rising, as the government pushes it higher and workers stay in careers longer.
> 
> But lifespans aren't necessarily extending to offer equal time on the beach. Data released last week suggest Americans' health is declining and millions of middle-age workers face the prospect of shorter, and less active, retirements than their parents enjoyed.


----------



## ekim68

Hewlett-Packard historical archives destroyed in Santa Rosa fires



> When deadly flames incinerated hundreds of homes in Santa Rosa's Fountaingrove neighborhood earlier this month, they also destroyed irreplaceable papers and correspondence held nearby and once belonging to the founders of Silicon Valley's first technology company, Hewlett-Packard.
> 
> The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. Military is conducting Secret missions all over Africa



> U.S. troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises, programs, and engagements per year, an average of nearly 10 missions per day, on the African continent, according to the U.S. military's top commander for Africa, General Thomas Waldhauser. The latest numbers, which the Pentagon confirmed to VICE News, represent a dramatic increase in U.S. military activity throughout Africa in the past decade, and the latest signal of America's deepening and complicated ties on the continent.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's first tunnel beneath LA starts to take shape



> Building a tunnel is a traditionally painstaking process that moves along at glacial pace, but The Boring Company believes it can get things done a whole lot quicker. And if an image shared by CEO Elon Musk over the week is anything to go by, it is wasting little time getting started, with what appears to be the beginnings of a fully formed tunnel stretching beneath LA.


----------



## ekim68

Tyson Foods Linked to the Largest Toxic Dead Zone in U.S. History



> What comes to mind when you think of Tyson Foods? A chicken nugget? A big red logo?
> 
> How about the largest toxic dead zone in U.S. history? It turns out the meat industry-and corporate giants like Tyson Foods-are directly linked to this environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, and many others.
> 
> Industrial-scale agriculture to support America's livestock is the number one source of water pollution in the country. But while industrial agriculture to feed animals raised for meat is currently resource-intensive and ecologically destructive, it doesn't have to be. Solutions exist which, if adopted, would allow the meat industry and agricultural corporations that sustain it to reduce their impact on water and the planet.


----------



## ekim68

Colorado taking steps to get its own hyperloop



> FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Colorado transportation officials are looking at possibility of a Rocky Mountain hyperloop to curb traffic woes.
> 
> Elon Musk's idea of a levitating transit pod that can reach speeds of 700 mph sounds as far-fetched as flying cars. You could travel from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, a distance of about 125 miles with Denver in the middle, in less than 20 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Brigham said:


> fines for texting while crossing the road
> 
> There are lots of things on the internet that require answering a set of questions. Very often I have had to stop my inquiries as my cell phone number is wanted to continue. I don't have a cell phone, and I don't want one!!!


Do you have a landline phone?


----------



## ekim68

Does Alzheimer's originate outside the brain?



> Scientists have long thought that Alzheimer's disease originates in the brain, but new research suggests that a key protein that triggers the disease could be carried to the brain from elsewhere in the body. The research offers pathways to new drug therapies that could potentially stop or slow the disease without working directly on the brain.


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Do you have a landline phone?


Yes I do, but if I try to put in a landline number it says "valid mobile number required"


----------



## ekim68

Major car companies partner for Europe-wide EV charging network



> A group of the biggest names in the car industry have announced a joint partnership to develop a Europe-wide high-power charging (HPC) network for electric vehicles. The venture, named IONITY, draws on expertise from BMW, Daimler, Ford, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche, and aims to launch 400 HPC stations by 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Hilton Was Fined $700K for a Data Breach. Under GDPR It Would Be $420M



> Consider $2 per lost record versus $1,200 per lost record. That's the difference between what Hilton will pay to New York State versus what it will pay to EU regulators once the GDPR takes effect in May.


----------



## ekim68

And the beat goes on......................


[URL='https://gizmodo.com/equifax-investigation-clears-execs-who-dumped-stock-bef-1820127634']Equifax Investigation Clears Execs Who Dumped Stock Before Hack Announcement[/URL]



> Equifax discovered on July 29th that it had been hacked, losing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 143 million Americans-and then just a few days later, several of its executives sold stock worth a total of nearly $1.8 million. When the hack was publicly announced in September, Equifax's stock promptly tanked, which made the trades look very, very sketchy.


----------



## ekim68

Shoppers more likely to return items bought online than in store



> Almost a third of all online orders are returned compared to only 9% of purchases made in a brick-and-mortar store, according to Bloomberg. This is largely due to free shipping offered by most companies, which has also caused an increase of online purchases by almost three times those of physical stores.


----------



## ekim68

The war against Pope Francis



> His modesty and humility have made him a popular figure around the world. But inside the church, his reforms have infuriated conservatives and sparked a revolt.


----------



## ekim68

Jenna Abrams, Russia's Clown Troll Princess, Duped the Mainstream Media and the World




> Roseanne Barr and Michael McFaul argued with her on Twitter. BuzzFeed and The New York Times cited her tweets. But Jenna Abrams was the fictional creation of a Russian troll farm.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/10/31/brexit-was-not-the-voice-of-the-working-class-nor-of-the-uneducated-it-was-of-the-squeezed-middle/']Brexit was not the voice of the working class nor of the uneducated - it was of the squeezed middle[/URL]



> Over the past year or so, Brexit has been interpreted as the symbol of a historical shift to anti-establishment politics, kicking off a surge in the 'outsider' vote across Europe and the United States. In line with this narrative, initial interpretations of the vote depicted Leave voters as marginalised segments of the population - both educationally and economically - who had channelled their discontent through the referendum.
> 
> Another popular view that emerged is that Brexit was the unified response of the working class which finally found its long-lost voice. Yet subsequent, rigorous analysis showed that the profile of Brexit voters is more heterogeneous than initially thought and that it includes voters with high education and 'middle class' jobs. If Brexit is really connected to socio-economic factors, how do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?


----------



## ekim68

Humans Are Still Better Than AI at StarCraft-for Now



> That was clear on Tuesday after professional StarCraft player Song Byung-gu defeated four different bots in the first contest to pit AI systems against pros in live bouts of the game. One of the bots, dubbed "CherryPi," was developed by Facebook's AI research lab. The other bots came from Australia, Norway, and Korea.
> 
> The contest took place at Sejong University in Seoul, Korea, which has hosted annual StarCraft AI competitions since 2010. Those previous events matched AI systems against each other (rather than against humans) and were organized, in part, by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a U.S.-based engineering association.


----------



## ekim68

Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth



> The world's biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain's offshore empires.
> 
> The details come from a leak of 13.4m files that expose the global environments in which tax abuses can thrive - and the complex and seemingly artificial ways the wealthiest corporations can legally protect their wealth.


----------



## ekim68

Harvard study uncovers why fasting can lead to a longer and healthier life



> Intermittent fasting diets are all the rage these days. We are seeing everything from the conservative 5:2 diet to more extreme fasting methods gaining prominence in Silicon Valley circles, but while there has been plenty of observational research pointing out the correlation between fasting and positive health outcomes, we still don't have a good understanding of any underlying biological mechanism at play.
> 
> A new study from Harvard researchers has now shown how fasting can increase lifespan, slow aging and improve health by altering the activity of mitochondrial networks inside our cells.


----------



## ekim68

How Monsanto Captured the EPA (And Twisted Science) To Keep Glyphosate on the Market



> Since 1973, Monsanto has cited dubious science, like tests on the uteri of male mice, and the EPA has let much of it slide.


----------



## ekim68

Companies Should Never Hack Back Because They Could Start Wars



> The former director of the NSA and the US military's cybersecurity branch doesn't believe private companies should be allowed to hit back at hackers.
> 
> Without using the popular term "hack back," Keith Alexander, the ex-director of the spy agency and the Cyber Command, said that corporations should never be allowed to hack a group or individual in retaliation for getting hacked.
> 
> "If it starts a war, you can't have companies starting a war. That's an inherently governmental responsibility, and plus the chances of a company getting it wrong are fairly high," Alexander said during a meeting with a small group of reporters on Monday.


----------



## ekim68

China blocks Facebook. But state-owned media still target English-speaking audiences on the platform
[/URL]


> It's no secret Facebook has been trying to make its way into China.
> 
> Mark Zuckerberg is painfully learning Chinese. He's put himself through a jog in Tiananmen Square under an extremely smoggy sky. Facebook has worked on censorship tools with the aim of appealing to the Chinese government. It's tried a photo-sharing app "Colorful Balloons," that doesn't bear its name. It's looked for office space in Shanghai. To no avail, at least not yet: Facebook's still officially blocked there.
> 
> But Chinese media agencies are all over Facebook, and spending big to target English-speaking audiences on the platform the country has blocked its people from using, according to a report from The New York Times. (Testifying before Congress last week, Facebook's general counsel said "to his knowledge" China hadn't meddled in the 2016 U.S. elections the way Russia-linked groups had.)


----------



## ekim68

Nearly Half of Colorado Counties Have Formally Rejected a Comcast-Backed Law Restricting City-Run Internet



> A lesson for Colorado's state government: telling Coloradans they can't have something is a surefire way to make them do whatever it takes to get it.
> 
> In Tuesday's Coordinated Election, two Colorado counties voted on ballot measures to exempt themselves from a state law prohibiting city-run internet services. Both Eagle County and Boulder County voters approved the measures, bringing the total number of Colorado counties that have rejected the state law to 31-nearly half of the state's 64 counties.


----------



## ekim68

Human at fault in accident with Las Vegas driverless shuttle



> Chalk up one for the machines.
> 
> The driverless electric shuttle bus that made its debut downtown Wednesday was involved in a minor accident in its first few hours of service, but the human driver of the other vehicle was at fault, police said.
> 
> The Metropolitan Police Department said officers responded at 12:07 p.m. to an accident involving the shuttle and a delivery truck on the 100 block of South Sixth Street, near Fremont Street. Damage was minor, and no one was hurt, police said.


----------



## ekim68

Full-body, genetically modified skin transplant saves life of boy with rare disease



> After losing 80 percent of his skin to a devastating genetic disease, a seven-year-old boy underwent an experimental treatment replacing his epidermis with new skin grown in a lab from genetically modified stem cells. Two years on from the dramatic surgery the boy is alive, well, and back at school.


----------



## ekim68

Sorry, Comcast: Voters say "yes" to city-run broadband in Colorado



> Voters in Fort Collins, Colorado, yesterday approved a ballot question that authorizes the city to build a broadband network, rejecting a cable and telecom industry campaign against the initiative.


----------



## ekim68

Delhi Air Pollution Forces Public Health Emergency as Chief Minister Compares City to a 'Gas Chamber'



> Suffocating smog forced the Indian capital of New Delhi, a city of more than 21 million people, to declare a public health emergency on Tuesday.
> 
> As a thick grey haze settled on the city, the government announced Wednesday morning that schools would be closed for the rest of the week as air pollution worsened and criticism escalated over Indian government's failure to curb pollution levels.


----------



## ekim68

IBM Raises the Bar with a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer



> IBM established a landmark in computing Friday, announcing a quantum computer that handles 50 quantum bits, or qubits. The company is also making a 20-qubit system available through its cloud computing platform.
> 
> IBM, Google, Intel, and a San Francisco startup called Rigetti are all currently racing to build useful quantum systems. These machines process information in a different way from traditional computers, using the counterintuitive nature of quantum physics.
> 
> The announcement does not mean quantum computing is ready for common use. The system IBM has developed is still extremely finicky and challenging to use, as are those being built by others. In both the 50- and the 20-qubit systems, the quantum state is preserved for 90 microseconds-a record for the industry, but still an extremely short period of time.


----------



## ekim68

Paradise Papers reveal the rise of a new class: The global oligarchy



> In response to the recent leak of 13.4 million files from two offshore service providers earlier this week, which documents how the world's wealthiest individuals and corporations avoid paying taxes on their fortunes, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., warned that the world is quickly becoming an "international oligarchy."
> 
> "The major issue of our time is the rapid movement toward international oligarchy in which a handful of billionaires own and control a significant part of the global economy," Sanders said in a statement to The Guardian, one of the major newspapers reporting on the so-called Paradise Papers. "The Paradise Papers shows how these billionaires and multinational corporations get richer by hiding their wealth and profits and avoid paying their fair share of taxes."


----------



## ekim68

One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week



> Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency.
> 
> An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.


----------



## ekim68

How to Hire Fake Friends and Family



> Money may not be able to buy love, but here in Japan, it can certainly buy the appearance of love-and appearance, as the dapper Ishii Yuichi insists, is everything. As a man whose business involves becoming other people, Yuichi would know. The handsome and charming 36-year-old is on call to be your best friend, your husband, your father, or even a mourner at your funeral.
> 
> His 8-year-old company, Family Romance, provides professional actors to fill any role in the personal lives of clients. With a burgeoning staff of 800 or so actors, ranging from infants to the elderly, the organization prides itself on being able to provide a surrogate for almost any conceivable situation.


----------



## RT

Dang Mike, that is a weird one...don't think I would like a "fake" anything


----------



## ekim68

Must be a booming success with a staff of 800....


----------



## ekim68

Matrix PowerWatch hands-on: The promise of a world without chargers



> When Matrix co-founder Douglas Tham handed me my review unit of the PowerWatch, I had to fight the instinct to ask for a charger. This thermal-powered wearable doesn't need one -- it gets energy by converting your body heat into electricity.


----------



## RT

but does anybody know what time it really is? 
If I looked at my watch and it said "5,155" I would have ??? coming out my head~!


----------



## ekim68

The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: 'There is reason for hope'



> Everybody gets paralysed by bad news because they feel helpless," says Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who delivered the landmark Paris climate change agreement. "It is so in our personal lives, in our national lives and in our planetary life."
> 
> But it is becoming increasingly clear that it does not need to be all bad news: a series of fast-moving global megatrends, spurred by trillion-dollar investments, indicates that humanity might be able to avert the worst impacts of global warming. From trends already at full steam, including renewable energy, to those just now hitting the big time, such as mass-market electric cars, to those just emerging, such as plant-based alternatives to meat, these trends show that greenhouse gas emissions can be halted.


----------



## ekim68

The EU signed a "historic" deal to integrate 23 armies to shake off its US dependence



> It took 70 years, but the European Union finally signed a pact today (Nov. 13) agreeing to integrate military funding, weapons development, and deployment of European defenses. In a way, creating a unified mega army.
> 
> US president's Donald Trump's frequent accusations that EU countries do not pay enough into NATO has been one catalyst for them move forward with a unified plan for military cooperation. The other is that it could legitimately diminish the bloc's dependence on US military support.


----------



## ekim68

California may reach 50% renewable power goal by 2020 - 10 years early



> Two years ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed an ambitious law ordering California utility companies to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
> 
> It looks like they may hit that goal a decade ahead of schedule.
> 
> An annual report issued Monday by California regulators found that the state's three big, investor-owned utilities - Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. - are collectively on track to reach the 50 percent milestone by 2020, although individual companies could exceed the mark or fall just short of it.
> 
> In 2016, 32.9 percent of the electricity PG&E sold to its customers came from renewable sources, according to the report. Edison reached 28.2 percent renewable power in 2016, while SDG&E - the state's smallest investor-owned utility - hit 43.2 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Payphones Still Make Millions of Dollars



> Disruption-y tech companies like Uber and Twitter are a big part of "the discourse" and our daily lives, but neither of them make any profit. You know what once-groundbreaking technology doesn't have any problems making bank year after year?
> 
> That's right, it's payphones.
> 
> Most people now have a cell phone, so you may have wondered who still uses those rusted, quarter-eating boxes. As it turns out, a lot of people do.


----------



## ekim68

Thirty countries use 'armies of opinion shapers' to manipulate democracy - report



> The governments of 30 countries around the globe are using armies of so called opinion shapers to meddle in elections, advance anti-democratic agendas and repress their citizens, a new report shows.
> 
> Unlike widely reported Russian attempts to influence foreign elections, most of the offending countries use the internet to manipulate opinion domestically, says US NGO Freedom House.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40495831/compuserves-forums-which-still-exist-are-finally-shutting-down']CompuServe's forums, which still exist, are finally shutting down[/URL]



> Before there was a World Wide Web, a sizable chunk of all meaningful conversation between computer users happened in the forums at CompuServe, which was the dominant online service until AOL came along. There was a CompuServe forum for everything from PC hardware to comic books, the signal-to-noise ratio was generally high, and if you had a question chances were that a fellow member would answer it-just to be helpful.
> 
> CompuServe was acquired by AOL in 1998, and was never the same thereafter. AOL itself is now part of Oath, which is part of Verizon. And time is finally running out for the forums, which have stuck around in diminished form even as the rest of CompuServe has dwindled away. They'll be *removed from what remains of CompuServe on December 15*, a fact I learned from my Facebook friend Howard Sobel, the cofounder of WUGNET, which has managed tech forums for CompuServe for decades.


----------



## ekim68

China Pulls Ahead of U.S. in Latest TOP500 List



> The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list's inception 25 years ago.


----------



## ekim68

Walmart is raising prices online to increase in-store traffic



> Walmart is taking a bit of an nontraditional approach to boost sales ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events by raising prices for products sold online and discounting those same items in physical retail stores.


----------



## ekim68

AP Exclusive: US scientists try 1st gene editing in the body



> OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Scientists for the first time have tried editing a gene inside the body in a bold attempt to permanently change a person's DNA to cure a disease.
> 
> The experiment was done Monday in California on 44-year-old Brian Madeux. Through an IV, he received billions of copies of a corrective gene and a genetic tool to cut his DNA in a precise spot.
> 
> "It's kind of humbling" to be the first to test this, said Madeux, who has a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome. "I'm willing to take that risk. Hopefully it will help me and other people."
> 
> Signs of whether it's working may come in a month; tests will show for sure in three months.


----------



## ekim68

Study shows U.S. spends 5.6 trillion dollars on wars since 9/11



> WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- The United States may have spent a whopping 5.6 trillion U.S. dollars on regional wars since the Sept.11 terror attack in 2001, more than triple official figures, according to one study released Thursday.
> 
> The study by Brown University as a part of a cost of wars project, said U.S. combat missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan have cost the average taxpayer 23,386 dollars over the past 16 years.


----------



## ekim68

Federal extreme vetting plan castigated by tech experts



> Leading researchers castigated a federal plan that would use artificial intelligence methods to scrutinize immigrants and visa applicants, saying it is unworkable as written and likely to be "inaccurate and biased" if deployed.
> 
> The experts, a group of more than 50 computer and data scientists, mathematicians and other specialists in automated decision-making, urged the Department of Homeland Security to abandon the project, dubbed the "Extreme Vetting Initiative."


----------



## ekim68

Norway Idea to Exit Oil Stocks Is 'Shot Heard Around the World'



> Norway's proposal to sell off $35 billion in oil and natural gas stocks brings sudden and unparalleled heft to a once-grassroots movement to enlist investors in the fight against climate change.
> 
> The Nordic nation's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund said Thursday that it's considering unloading its shares of Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and other oil giants to diversify its holdings and guard against drops in crude prices. European oil stocks fell.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla reveals insanely fast next gen Roadster



> At at Tesla launch event last night, a surprise popped out of its upcoming electric semi-truck as Elon Musk announced the resurrection of the car that started it all - the Tesla Roadster. Based on prototype performance, the next generation Roadster is on track to zoom from 0-60 mph in under 2 seconds, have a top speed of 250+ mph and a single charge range of 620 miles.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen accelerates push into electric cars with $40 billion spending plan



> WOLFSBURG/HAMBURG (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) approved a 34 billion euro ($40 bln) spending plan on Friday that accelerates its efforts to become a global leader in electric cars.


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon Says 3,000 More U.S. Troops In Afghanistan Since August



> Aside from additional troops, Trump's new strategy also envisages an open-ended U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, where his predecessor, Barack Obama, had ordered a calendar-based drawdown of American forces.


----------



## ekim68

Americans Own 42 Percent of the World's Guns



> One must be wary of assessments that attribute a complex problem to only one factor, as this one does. However, the United States has 4.4 percent of the world population but 42 percent of the world's guns. Consider this reality alongside the fact that, among nations with more than 10 million people, only Yemen exceeds the US in mass killings, according to the study by Lankford. Yemen has the second highest gun ownership rate, after the US. These facts indicate a correlation between the rate of a nation's gun ownership and the prevalence of mass shootings.


----------



## ekim68

First Ever Anti-Ageing Gene Discovered in a Secluded Amish Family



> For the first time, scientists have found a genetic mutation that appears to offer a measure of protection against some of the biological effects of ageing.
> 
> And, as far as we know, it looks like the only community in the world known to harbour it is an Old Order Amish community living in Indiana.


----------



## ekim68

Asgardia-1 Enters Space, Establishing the Space Nation's Sovereign Territory



> On 12 November 2017, the space nation's first satellite, Asgardia-1, was successfully launched into space from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, USA. Head of Nation Igor Ashurbeyli was present to oversee the launch.
> 
> The launch of Asgardia's first satellite establishes the nation's sovereign territory in space and satisfies the last condition necessary for admission to the UN: that in addition to the Constitution, a government and a currency, the nation must have a territory. Asgardia's Constitution has already been accepted; its cryptocurrency, the Solar, is registered at the European Union Intellectual Property Office, and the government formation is underway.


----------



## ekim68

Volvo Cars to supply Uber with up to 24,000 self-driving cars



> STOCKHOLM/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Uber plans to buy up to 24,000 self-driving cars from Volvo, marking the transition of the U.S. firm from an app used to summon a taxi to the owner and operator of a fleet of cars.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists develop reliable kill switches -- in case bioengineered microbes go rogue



> Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Scientists at Harvard have developed a pair of new kill switches that can be used to thwart bioengineered microbes that go rogue.
> 
> Researchers have been testing the use of bioengineered microbes for a variety of purposes, from the diagnosis of disease in the human body to the neutering of mosquitoes.
> 
> But there remain concerns about releasing manipulated microbes into nature. Could their augmented genes have unintended consequences? Could they morph and proliferate?
> 
> Kill-switches ensure the microbes effectively shutdown, or commit suicide, after they've executed their intended function.


----------



## ekim68

If you tax the rich, they won't leave: US data contradicts millionaires' threats



> Does raising taxes on the rich really trigger their migration to more obliging states or countries? This study of every million-dollar earner in the US shows otherwise.


----------



## ekim68

Trump's FCC announces plans to kill net neutrality



> The people want net neutrality, but FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, announced his plan to take it away from them. With this, you can expect to see your internet bills go up.


----------



## ekim68

More on this: 
The FCC's craven net neutrality vote announcement makes no mention of the 22 million comments filed



> For someone who claims to be working for the American people, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sure doesn't seem to care what they have to say. In his announcement today that the Commission would vote whether to roll back net neutrality rules on December 15, he made no mention of the inconvenient and embarrassing fact that his proposal had attracted historic attention, garnering over 22 million comments - the majority of which opposed it.


----------



## ekim68

And yet again more on this:


[URL='https://lifehacker.com/what-the-end-of-net-neutrality-means-for-you-1820647171']What the End of Net Neutrality Means for You[/URL]



> We knew it was coming, but on Tuesday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced his plan to gut net neutrality and hand over control of the internet to service providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon (which also happens to be Pai's former employer).


----------



## ekim68

Hydrogen cars for the masses one step closer to reality, thanks to UCLA invention



> UCLA researchers have designed a device that can use solar energy to inexpensively and efficiently create and store energy, which could be used to power electronic devices, and to create hydrogen fuel for eco-friendly cars.
> 
> The device could make hydrogen cars affordable for many more consumers because it produces hydrogen using nickel, iron and cobalt-elements that are much more abundant and less expensive than the platinum and other precious metals that are currently used to produce hydrogen fuel.


----------



## ekim68

FCC will _also_ order states to scrap plans for their own net neutrality laws



> In addition to ditching its own net neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission also plans to tell state and local governments that they cannot impose local laws regulating broadband service.


----------



## ekim68

Russia to act against Google if Sputnik, RT get lower search rankings: official



> SAN FRANCISCO/MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin will take action against Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google if articles from Russian news websites Sputnik and Russia Today are placed lower in search results, the Interfax news service cited Russia's chief media regulator as saying on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial meteor shower planned for Japan in 2019




> Meteors





> are nature's fireworks, but mankind is catching up as the artificial shooting star project Sky Canvas attempts to recreate colorful cosmic showers. Using miniature satellites that shoot special alloy ball bearings, the showers can be created to order over any spot on Earth for both a spectacular fireball display and to help better understand how to dispose of space debris.


----------



## ekim68

Light pollution: Night being lost in many countries



> Between 2012 and 2016, the planet's artificially lit outdoor area grew by more than 2% per year.
> 
> Scientists say a "loss of night" in many countries is having negative consequences for "flora, fauna, and human well-being".


----------



## ekim68

'We are disappointed': Tech firms are speaking up against the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality



> Pro-net neutrality activists, who argue the principle creates a level playing-field online, are up in arms about the plan. And some tech companies are now speaking out in support of net neutrality as well, from Facebook to Netflix.
> 
> Business Insider reached out to some of the biggest tech firms in America today to ask for their reaction to the FCC's plan. Their initial responses are below, and we will continue to update this post as more come in.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla finishes installing mega-battery in Australia



> The 100-megawatt battery in South Australia is designed to provide security to the state's electricity grid.
> 
> It will store enough energy to power 30,000 homes for about an hour.
> 
> Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk had said the battery would be free if it was not installed within 100 days of signing a contract for the project.
> 
> It appears the company will meet the 1 December deadline for installation of the battery array, which will be connected to a wind farm run by French renewable energy company Neoen.


----------



## ekim68

Singapore to use driverless buses 'from 2022'



> Singapore plans to introduce driverless buses on its public roads by 2022.
> 
> The government says they will be piloted in three new neighbourhoods which will have less-crowded roads designed to accommodate the buses.
> 
> The buses will be used to help residents travel in their communities, and to nearby train and bus stations.
> 
> Densely-populated Singapore hopes driverless technology will help the country manage its land constraints and manpower shortages.


----------



## ekim68

The death of the MBA



> U.S. graduate business schools - once magnets for American and international students seeking a certain route to a high income - are in an existential crisis. They are losing droves of students who are balking at sky-high tuition and, in the case of international applicants, turned off by President Trump's politics.
> 
> *Why it matters*: The once-venerated MBA is going the way of the diminished law degree, pushed aside by tech education. Graduates of the top 25 or so MBA schools still command the elite Wall Street and corporate jobs they always did, but the hundreds of others are scrambling, and some schools are shutting down their programs. Survivors are often offering new touchy-feely degrees like "master of social innovation."


----------



## ekim68

Mobile Homes Are So Expensive Now, Hurricane Victims Can't Afford Them



> Hurricane victims emerging from ravaged trailer parks are discovering that the U.S. mobile-home market has left them behind. In Florida and Texas, dealerships are swarmed by buyers looking to rebuild their lives after hurricanes Harvey and Irma, but many leave disappointed.
> 
> The industry, led by Warren Buffett's Clayton Homes Inc., is peddling such pricey interior-designer touches as breakfast bars and his-and-her bathroom sinks. These extras, plus manufacturers' increased costs for labor and materials, have pushed average prices for new double-wides up more than 20 percent in five years, putting them out of reach for many of the newly homeless.


----------



## ekim68

Costa Rica Runs on Renewable Energy for 300 Days



> According to the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE), the Central American country has run on 100 percent power generated from renewable energy for 300 days.
> 
> Currently, Costa Rica is receiving 99.62 percent of its electricity from five renewable energy sources, the highest percentage for the country since 1987.
> 
> The breakdown is 78.26 percent of electricity from hydropower, 10.29 percent from wind, 10.23 percent from geothermal energy and 0.84 percent from biomass and solar.


----------



## ekim68

Bipartisan Harvard panel recommends hacking safeguards for elections



> SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A bipartisan Harvard University project aimed at protecting elections from hacking and propaganda will release its first set of recommendations today on how U.S. elections can be defended from hacking attacks.
> 
> The 27-page guidebook shown to Reuters ahead of publication calls for campaign leaders to emphasize security from the start and insist on practices such as two-factor authentication for access to email and documents and fully encrypted messaging via services including Signal and Wickr.
> 
> The guidelines are intended to reduce risks in low-budget local races as well as the high-stakes Congressional midterm contests next year.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace.




> Using "waste heat" from digital infrastructure to stay warm downtown.


----------



## ekim68

Nothing Trump Does Can Save Coal



> On the campaign trail and in the White House, Donald Trump has warmly embraced coal. He has rolled back regulations on its use and eliminated some federal subsidies for alternative energies like solar and wind, along with electric cars. A few coal miners even landed jobs in the industry as the producers anticipate rising use. "Coal is BACK, baby!," Breitbart News declared.
> 
> Only not really.
> 
> Sorry, but coal is not back. If anything, it's on life support. Contrary to the arguments some have made, it wasn't killed by regulations and liberals, but by capitalism and technology.


----------



## ekim68

Keystone's existing pipeline spills far more than predicted to regulators



> (Reuters) - TransCanada Corp's (TRP.TO) existing Keystone pipeline has leaked substantially more oil, and more often, in the United States than indicated in risk assessments the company provided to regulators before the project began operating in 2010, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.


----------



## ekim68

Ryan Dismisses Deficit Concerns to Chase a Political Win on Taxes



> House Speaker Paul Ryan has spent much of his political career warning against the pitfalls of deficit spending and government debt.
> 
> But that argument has been bent in service to another long-held priority, one that has political urgency for Republicans trying to hang on to their congressional majorities: tax cuts.
> 
> The tax overhaul legislation that Ryan shepherded through the House -- the Senate takes up its version this week -- would add at least $1 trillion to budget deficits over the next decade, even when accounting for economic growth, according to independent tax analysts.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.com/mexico-just-created-a-marine-reserve-the-size-of-michig-1820768246']Mexico Just Created a Marine Reserve the Size of Michigan[/URL]



> On Friday, Mexico announced it had created the largest marine reserve in North America. The sprawling reserve encompasses the Revillagigedo Islands, a series of volcanic islands off the coast of the Baja Peninsula.
> 
> At more 57,000 square miles, the new reserve is bigger than Michigan. Prior to the expansion, protections only extended six nautical miles around the islands. Now, a huge swath of ocean will be off-limits to fishing and other commercial activity, insulating the islands dubbed the "little Galapagos" from human impacts, and allowing biodiversity to flourish.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo's fleet clocks up 4 million self-driving miles



> Google started experimenting with self-driving cars in 2009 and by the following year its small Californian fleet had logged 140,000 miles. Last year, Alphabet branched off the project into a new entity called Waymo, while boasting that its cars had driven themselves more than 2 million miles since the adventure began. Now the collective odometer has notched up an incredible 4 million self-driving miles on public roads in 23 cities across the US, making a Waymo car the world's most experience driver.


----------



## ekim68

Three quarters of Android apps track users with third party tools - study



> More than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party "tracker", according to a new analysis of hundreds of apps.
> 
> The study by French research organisation Exodus Privacy and Yale University's Privacy Lab analysed the mobile apps for the signatures of 25 known trackers, which use various techniques to glean personal information about users to better target them for advertisements and services.


----------



## ekim68

Solid-state magnesium-ion batteries could lick lithium



> Lithium-ion batteries are the undisputed top dog of the battery world at the moment, but magnesium-ion devices have the potential to steal the crown - if scientists can crack the problem of finding an efficient electrolyte. Now a collaboration between Berkeley Lab, MIT and Argonne National Laboratory has developed a solid-state material that appears to be one of the fastest conductors of magnesium-ions, which could lead to safer and more efficient batteries.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's Model 3 has a range of 310 miles, EPA confirms



> Tesla's Model 3, the most important car to come out in decades, has a confirmed range of 310 miles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That figure applies to the long-range version of the Model 3, and echoes the vehicle specs released by Tesla back in July. It also makes the Model 3 one of the most efficient passenger electric vehicles on the market.
> 
> The EPA's range is used as the advertised figure for electric vehicles that are sold in the US. The 310-mile range is an estimate of the number of miles the vehicle should be able to travel in combined city and highway driving from a full charge.


----------



## ekim68

GM unveils self-driving Chevy Bolt in San Francisco test drives



> Nov. 29 (UPI) -- General Motors unveiled its autonomous Chevy Bolt on Wednesday and allowed media and analysts to take a test ride in the self-driving vehicle.
> 
> GM provided a look at the results of its work with San Francisco startup Cruise Automation. Company President Dan Ammann said GM plans to mass produce its self-driving cars in a matter of "quarters, not years."
> 
> "Stay tuned," he said.


----------



## ekim68

Sinister sparkle? Scientists warn glitter pollutes oceans



> Whether you love to add a little sparkle to your skin, or you think glitter truly is the herpes of the craft world (once it's on you, it never comes off), some scientists are now claiming that glitter is a hazard to the environment.
> 
> Glitter, along with microbeads, are considered to fall under the category of microplastics, which are defined as plastics which are less than five millimeters in length. Microbeads are often found in facial scrubs, toothpaste, soaps, cosmetics and more.
> 
> These microbeads pass through water filtration systems after usage but don't disintegrate, and often end up being consumed by marine life, causing concern among scientists keeping a close eye on how pollution effects fish.


----------



## ekim68

A Century of America's Top 10 Companies, in One Chart



> Economists like to explain the constant churn of the economy as "creative destruction." It implies a silver lining when a single company breaks up-something better might take its place. An interesting way to think about this concept is by looking at historical examples of companies that have come and gone. That's exactly what our new chart does.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's giant battery farm is now live in South Australia



> With a little lot of help from Tesla, Australia is now home to the world's largest lithium-ion battery. Back in March, Elon Musk promised Atlassian CEO and billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes that he could create a 100MWh battery storage farm within 100 days -- otherwise, his company would do the job for free. The Twitter pledge was in response to ongoing power shortages in South Australia, which were causing blackouts and political uncertainty about the country's push toward renewable energy sources. The batteries were delivered in the summer -- well ahead of the deadline -- and installed last week. Today, the site is operational for the first time.
> 
> Tesla's Powerpacks are connected to a wind farm in Hornsdale, owned by French renewable energy company Neoen. Jaw Weatherill, a politician and current Premier of South Australia, says it's the first time the state has been able to reliably dispatch wind energy to the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was possible, of course, to capture this energy resource before -- the problem has been controlling when, and how much of the resulting electricity is fed back into the grid. With a 100MWV battery farm, the state can now power more than 30,000 homes, regardless of the weather.


----------



## ekim68

ISPs Are Already Using The FCC's Planned Net Neutrality Repeal To Harm Consumers



> So if you've been reading Techdirt, you know that the FCC's myopic assault on net neutrality is just a small part of a massive, paradigm-shifting handout to the uncompetitive telecom sector that could have a profoundly negative impact on competition, innovation, privacy, and consumer welfare for the next decade.
> 
> The government telecom industry's plan goes something like this: gut nearly all FCC oversight of giant ISPs (including the modest privacy protections killed earlier this year), then shovel any dwindling remaining authority to an FTC that lacks the authority or resources to actually protect competition, businesses and consumers. If any states get the crazy idea to step in and try to fill in the consumer protection gaps, the FCC (again, at Comcast and Verizon's lobbying behest) has clearly stated it will try and use federal authority to slap them down (so much for that dedication to "states rights" applied only when convenient).


----------



## ekim68

Blockchains Are Poised to End the Password Era



> The massive password heists keeping coming, and one thing is certain: the way we prove our identities online is in need of a major upgrade. A growing chorus of technologists and entrepreneurs is convinced that the key to revolutionizing digital identity can be found in the same technology that runs cryptocurrencies.
> 
> Their bet is that we are on the verge of a fundamental shift-away from a model in which our valuable digital identities are managed by companies, banks, governments, and other central authorities to one in which this information is kept on a decentralized ledger, or blockchain, under the full control of individuals.


----------



## ekim68

Electric cars already cheaper to own and run than petrol or diesel - study



> Electric cars are already cheaper to own and run than petrol or diesel cars in the UK, US and Japan, new research shows.
> 
> The lower cost is a key factor driving the rapid rise in electric car sales now underway, say the researchers. At the moment the cost is partly because of government support, but electric cars are expected to become the cheapest option without subsidies in a few years.
> 
> The researchers analysed the total cost of ownership of cars over four years, including the purchase price and depreciation, fuel, insurance, taxation and maintenance. They were surprised to find that pure electric cars came out cheapest in all the markets they examined: UK, Japan, Texas and California.
> 
> Pure electric cars have much lower fuel costs - electricity is cheaper than petrol or diesel - and maintenance costs, as the engines are simpler and help brake the car, saving on brake pads. In the UK, the annual cost was about 10% lower than for petrol or diesel cars in 2015, the latest year analysed.


----------



## ekim68

Was Your Name Stolen to Support Killing Net Neutrality?[/quote]



> New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched a [URL='https://ag.ny.gov/fakecomments']new tool





> for users interested in knowing whether their identity was stolen and used to fraudulently support the FCC's attack on popular net neutrality rules. The NY AG's office announced earlier this month that it was investigating identity theft and comment fraud during the FCC's public comment period. Researchers have noted repeatedly how "someone" used a bot to fill the comment proceeding with bogus support for the FCC plan, with many of the names being those of folks who'd never heard of net neutrality -- or were even dead.


[/url]


----------



## ekim68

Google's AI Built Its Own AI That Outperforms Any Made by Humans



> In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that's capable of generating its own AIs.
> 
> More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a 'child' that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.


----------



## ekim68

'Mind's eye blink' proves 'paying attention' is not just a figure of speech



> When your attention shifts from one place to another, your brain blinks. The blinks are momentary unconscious gaps in visual perception and came as a surprise to the team of Vanderbilt psychologists who discovered the phenomenon while studying the benefits of attention.


----------



## ekim68

128-laser LiDAR sensor significantly sharpens autonomous cars' vision



> In what promises to be a big step forward in 3D vision systems for autonomous vehicles, Velodyne has announced a new 128-channel LiDAR sensor that boasts the longest range and highest-resolution on the market.
> 
> LiDAR sensors are used to provide real-time 3D mapping and object detection in many autonomous driving systems. Velodyne LiDAR developed and patented the world's first 3D real-time rotating LiDAR sensor for advanced automotive safety applications in 2005. Its first application was during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge that year, in which autonomous vehicles competed to complete a course through a mock urban environment.


----------



## ekim68

Germany's War on Coal Is Over. Coal Lost.




> Its last mine is about to close.


----------



## ekim68

Man Hacks Jail Computer Network to Get Friend Released Early



> A Michigan man pleaded guilty last week to hacking the computer network of the Washtenaw County Jail, where he modified inmate records in an attempt to have an inmate released early.


----------



## ekim68

Nations agree to ban fishing in Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years



> Nine nations and the European Union have reached a deal to place the central Arctic Ocean (CAO) off-limits to commercial fishers for at least the next 16 years. The pact, announced yesterday, will give scientists time to understand the region's marine ecology-and the potential impacts of climate change-before fishing becomes widespread.


----------



## ekim68

A giant botnet behind one million malware attacks a month just got shut down



> A major botnet, which incorporated millions of PCs and is associated with over 80 different malware families, has been taken down in an international cyber-operation.
> 
> Authorities including the FBI, Europol's European Cybercrime centre (EC3), the Joint Cybercrime Action Task Force, the Luneburg Central Criminal Investigation Inspectorate in Germany, and the European Union's Eurojust agency worked with companies including Microsoft and ESET in order to dismantle the botnet created by the Andromeda malware.


----------



## ekim68

The next generation of cybersecurity professionals is being created by the Girl Scouts



> Girl Scouts of the USA is rolling out a set of 18 new cybersecurity badges next year, to teach young women in grades K-12 programming, ethical hacking, and identity theft prevention.


----------



## ekim68

'The President Stole Your Land': Patagonia blasts Trump for monuments move



> On Monday night, just hours after President Donald Trump announced that he would be reducing the size of two national monuments by some 2 million acres, Patagonia's website went dark save for a simple message in bold white lettering.
> 
> "The President Stole Your Land," the homepage of Patagonia.com read, adding, "In an illegal move, the president just reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. This is the largest elimination of protected land in American history."


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Installs Six More Battery Systems in Puerto Rico in 'Humanitarian Effort'



> After deploying a solar and battery system to a children's hospital in San Juan this October, Tesla has installed six more similar systems to help power the hurricane-wrecked islands of Vieques and Culebra in Puerto Rico.
> 
> In a statement to Bloomberg, Governor Ricardo Rossello's office said that Tesla installed the new units as "a humanitarian effort."
> 
> More than two months have passed since Hurricane Maria destroyed Puerto Rico's already weakened electric grid. Restoration of power has been set back by frequent outages and mired in controversy (i.e. Whitefish Energy). Electric capacity is only at 68 percent after the Sept. 20 storm hit.
> 
> As reported by Electrek, Tesla's Powerpack systems on Vieques and Culebra will act as microgrids until the main grid connected via underwater cables switches back on.


----------



## ekim68

"We Don't Want to Repress": Police in Honduras Refuse Orders to Stamp Out Pro-Democracy Protests



> Amid widening violence and ongoing protests, members of the Honduras National Police force-including those within the U.S.-trained units known as the Cobras-say they are refusing to obey orders from the right-wing government of the incumbent president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who has used the security forces to crackdown on demonstrators and imposed a curfew amid allegations of voter fraud in recent elections.


----------



## ekim68

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell paid no tax in Australia for 2016



> MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) and Chevron Corp (CVX.N) paid no tax in Australia in the 2016 financial year, the third year in a row, despite reporting billions of dollars in income from operations in the country, a report from the tax office showed on Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

EU urges internet companies to do more to remove extremist content



> (Reuters) - Internet groups such as Facebook (FB.O), Google's YouTube (GOOGL.O) and Twitter (TWTR.N) need to do more to stem the proliferation of extremist content on their platforms, the European Commission said after a meeting on Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

Here lies Santa Claus? Researchers zero in on bones of St Nick



> The legend of Santa Claus is inspired by the story of St Nicholas, a Christian saint who died around 343 CE. A new radiocarbon dating study by Oxford University researchers on a bone attributed to St Nicholas has been dated to around the 4th century CE, bringing us closer to uncovering the authentic remains of the original Santa.


----------



## ekim68

Cryptocurrency Miners Are Using Old Tires to Power Their Rigs



> An entrepreneurial cryptocurrency mining company has just announced an unusual deal: it has partnered with a tire-based waste-to-energy company in the United States to power its mining computers.
> 
> Standard American Mining and PRTI, a tire "thermal demanufacturing" company based in North Carolina, are powering graphics cards-based mining equipment to earn a range of alternative cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.


----------



## ekim68

Inside Oracle's cloak-and-dagger political war with Google



> The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones.
> 
> But missing from the news site's report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google's fiercest foes: Oracle.


----------



## ekim68

Tech can see through walls, based on new research from Duke University



> Duke University researchers can see through walls. No, seriously.
> 
> Without knowing what the walls were made of, researchers at the North Carolina university were able to see through them with the help of a narrow band of frequencies and a special algorithm, according to a press release.
> 
> Most technologies in use today need to know the wall materials in order to predict how the materials themselves will affect the frequency waves used to scan the wall. Duke's new approach, however, needs no previous knowledge of the wall's build to perform a scan.


----------



## ekim68

Anheuser-Busch orders 40 Tesla trucks



> The Budweiser brewer says this is part of its strategy to reduce the company's carbon emissions by 30% by 2025.
> 
> "At Anheuser-Busch, we are constantly seeking new ways to make our supply chain more sustainable, efficient, and innovative," said James Sembrot, Anhesuer-Busch's head of logistics strategy. "This investment in Tesla semi-trucks helps us achieve these goals while improving road safety and lowering our environmental impact."
> A number of other companies have placed orders for the truck, which Tesla says will be available in 2019. Walmart (WMT), for instance, has confirmed an order for 15 and the trucking company J.B. Hunt said it had ordered "multiple" trucks.


----------



## ekim68

Direct Line offers 5-percent Tesla 'auto-pilot' incentive



> (Reuters) - Britain's largest motor insurer Direct Line is offering Tesla Inc drivers in Britain a 5-percent discount for switching on the car's autopilot system, seeking to encourage use of a system it hopes will cut down on accidents.


----------



## ekim68

China Has Launched the World's First All-Electric Cargo Ship



> The first ever all-electric cargo ship is in operation in China's Pearl River. While it's a step in the right direction to eliminate fossil fuels, the ship is being used to carry coal - the very material that encouraged the shift to clean energy.


----------



## ekim68

'Firefighting at Christmas' may become normal in California



> FALLBROOK, Calif. (AP) - A week of destructive fires in Southern California is ending but danger still looms.
> 
> Well into what's considered the wet season, there's been nary a drop of rain. That's good for sun-seeking tourists, but could spell more disaster for a region that emerged this spring from a yearslong drought and now has firefighters on edge because of parched conditions and no end in sight to the typical fire season.
> 
> "This is the new normal," Gov. Jerry Brown warned Saturday after surveying damage from the deadly Ventura County fire that has caused the most destruction and continued burning out of control. "We're about ready to have firefighting at Christmas. This is very odd and unusual."


----------



## ekim68

Bitcoin uses more power than Serbia - the environmental cost of cryptocurrencies



> Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have promised a revolution in capital, but at what cost? The Bitcoin network alone is now burning a horrific 240 kilowatt-hours of electricity per transaction, using as much energy as the entire nation of Serbia, and heralding an environmental disaster.


----------



## ekim68

Net Neutrality isn't the only thing the current FCC is screwing up



> Lost amid the furor over the Federal Communications Commission's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decision to reverse net neutrality requirements is another, equally awful decision that has slipped through the cracks.
> 
> In mid-November, the Commission decided to "re-think" it's Lifeline program, which provides subsidies for broadband internet subscriptions to low-income Americans in cities and tribal regions around the country.


----------



## ekim68

College Presidents Making $1 Million Rise With Tuition and Student Debt



> A seven-figure salary to run a nonprofit college? You know what they say: _Pro Humanitate._
> 
> That's the motto of Wake Forest University, where President Nathan Hatch came in first in the Chronicle of Higher Education's new ranking of compensation for heads of U.S. colleges. In 2015, the latest year for which data are available, he earned $4 million.
> 
> Hatch is one of 58 college presidents with total compensation of more than $1 million, up from 39 in 2014 and 32 in 2013, according to the Chronicle's calculations. Average total compensation for school heads serving the full year was $569,932, up 9 percent from 2014's average. The data were drawn from federal tax filings for 500 private, nonprofit schools.


----------



## ekim68

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-salaries-rise-9-and-1-million-paydays-double

FCC explains how net neutrality will be protected without net neutrality rules




> Net neutrality will depend almost entirely on ISPs' promises.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube TV is available in 34 new markets



> YouTube TV is the streaming service's live TV subscription service, which debuted in a limited number of markets. However, yesterday, YouTube TV tweeted that the service is now available in 34 new metro areas. That is a drastic increase over the 49 available previously (for a grand total of 83 markets).


----------



## ekim68

PepsiCo makes biggest public pre-order of Tesla Semis: 100 trucks



> SEATTLE (Reuters) - PepsiCo Inc (PEP.N) has reserved 100 of Tesla Inc's (TSLA.O) new electric Semi trucks, the largest known order of the big rig, as the maker of Mountain Dew soda and Doritos chips seeks to reduce fuel costs and fleet emissions, a company executive said on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

France gives 'Make our Planet Great Again' grants to US scientists



> France has backed up statements that it's willing to reward America's climate researchers now that the US has backed out of the Paris global warming accord. President Emmanuel Macron handed out 13 of 18 "Make our Planet Great Again" grants worth millions of euros to US-based scientists. "You will now settle in, develop projects, enrich French, European research, because we've decided to give even bigger resources and to fully recognize what you are doing," Macron said in a speech at Paris startup hub Station F.


----------



## ekim68

After Investigating Itself, CenturyLink Proclaims There's Just No Way It Committed Billing Fraud



> The whistleblower account was followed up by lawsuits from several state attorneys general, who say they discovered ample evidence that misleading pricing and overbilling was a consistent occurrance. An investigation by Minnesota AG Lori Swanson, for example, found numerous examples where customers were overbilled -- yet CenturyLink refused to fix the problem -- even when customers had the ISP's original promises in writing.
> 
> But worry not! CenturyLink last week issued a press release stating it had investigated itself, and found that company executives were completely and utterly innocent of any wrong doing. According to CenturyLink, the company constructed a "special committee" filled with CenturyLink board members, who collectively dug through 9.7 million documents, 4.3 terabytes of billing data consisting of over 32 billion billing records -- and interviewed 200 current and former Company employees. They found, impressively, precisely what CenturyLink CEO Glen Post hoped they would


----------



## ekim68

Total ban on smartphones in schools: Should others follow France's lead?



> France thinks it's time children stopped spending all their time staring at smartphone screens.


----------



## ekim68

RIP, AOL Instant Messenger



> We knew this day would come. One of the major parts of our formative years on the worldwide web -- we called it that back in the day -- will cease to be. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) came to a close a few hours ago.


----------



## ekim68

Net neutrality supporters vow lawsuits in resistance to FCC vote



> A broad coalition of public officials, activists and content producers vowed to hit Control-Alt-Delete on the Federal Communications Commission's vote Thursday to end "net neutrality" rules intended to make sure that all internet traffic is treated equally.
> 
> The FCC's party-line 3-2 vote after a lengthy and fractious public comment period had long been expected, and when it came Thursday, defenders of the Obama-era rules were already swinging into action.
> 
> New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman immediately said he would lead a multistate lawsuit to roll back the vote. Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he would also sue.


----------



## ekim68

Japan pledges $2.9 billion to support countries pursuing universal health coverage



> Japan will contribute about $2.9 billion to programs combating infectious disease and treating young children in developing countries that are pursuing universal health coverage, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday at an international forum on the topic in Tokyo.
> 
> Universal health coverage - ensuring that every person can obtain the health care services they need without suffering financial hardship - is part of the sustainable development goals U.N. members aim to achieve by 2030.


----------



## ekim68

Norway becomes first country to switch off FM radio



> Norway on Wednesday completed its transition to digital radio, becoming the first country in the world to shut down national broadcasts of its FM radio network despite some grumblings.
> 
> As scheduled, the country's most northern regions and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic switched to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) in the late morning, said Digitalradio Norge (DRN) which groups Norway's public and commercial radio.


----------



## ekim68

Brexit: A cheat sheet



> Brexit throws up a raft of questions for tech companies about how Britain's departure from the EU will change how they do business. Find out how it'll affect you.


----------



## ekim68

The coal miner's president: Trump moves to weaken black lung protections




> Trump praised coal miners on the campaign trail, but hasn't been treating them well in office.


----------



## ekim68

Google is using light beam tech to connect rural India to the internet



> Google is preparing to use light beams to bring rural areas of the planet online after it announced to a planned rollout in India.
> 
> Alphabet's X - the company formerly known as Google X - is working with a telecom operator in Indian state Andhra Pradesh, home to over 50 million people, to use Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC), a technology that uses beams of light to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances .


----------



## ekim68

China hopes cold war nuclear energy tech will power warships, drones



> China is to spend 22 billion yuan (US$3.3 billion) trying to perfect a form of technology largely discarded in the cold war which could produce a safer but more powerful form of nuclear energy.
> 
> The cash is to develop two "molten salt" reactors in the Gobi Desert in northern China.
> 
> Researchers hope that if they can solve a number of technical problems the reactors will lead to a range of applications, including nuclear-powered warships and drones.
> 
> The technology, in theory, can create more heat and power than existing forms of nuclear reactors that use uranium, while producing only one thousandth of the radioactive waste.


----------



## ekim68

China's big brother: how artificial intelligence is catching criminals and advancing health care



> Zhu Long, co-founder of pioneering Yitu Technologies, whose facial-recognition algorithms have logged 1.8 billion faces and caught criminals across China, says AI will change the world more than the industrial revolution


----------



## ekim68

Krill "deposits" transport atmospheric carbon to the ocean depths



> Krill may be small, but scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) say that these tiny crustaceans play an important role in the transportation of carbon within the oceans. Not only are they a key element of the ocean's food pyramid, but they also move through the depths in such a way that they could have a major impact on the world's climate. According to a recent study, the way in which krill move between different depths can accelerate how atmospheric carbon moves into the deep ocean.


----------



## ekim68

See what was trending in 2017


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40505226/the-year-that-software-bugs-ate-the-world']The Year That Software Bugs Ate The World[/URL]




> In 2017, bugs banned people from Twitter, secretly recorded them in their homes, and even caused a train crash. Is there anything they _can't_ do?


----------



## ekim68

UPS pre-orders 125 Tesla electric semi-trucks, largest order yet



> DETROIT (Reuters) - United Parcel Service Inc (UPS.N) said on Tuesday it is buying 125 Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) all-electric semi-trucks, the largest order for the big rig so far, as the package delivery company expands its fleet of alternative-fuel vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota outlines plan for fully electrified lineup by 2025



> Following in the footsteps of other legacy automakers like BMW and Volvo, Toyota has revealed plans to go big on electric vehicles over the next decade. The Japanese company today outlined a roadmap that will see the entire Toyota and Lexus lineup come with electric drivetrain options by 2025, with battery only and plug-in hybrids a key part of this strategy.


----------



## ekim68

The Salton Sea Is Dying



> WHEN THE DUST RISES IN NORTH SHORE, a small farmworker town at the edge of the Salton Sea, Jacqueline Pozar's nose often starts to bleed. Then her teacher at Saul Martinez Elementary School in nearby Mecca calls her mom, Maria, and asks her to come pick up her daughter.
> 
> Jacqueline is seven years old. "I feel really bad because I can't do anything for her," Maria Pozar says. "Even the doctor says he can't do anything, that she's suffering from the dust in the air. Most of the children in North Shore have this problem. He just says not to let them play outside."


----------



## ekim68

World's first solar-powered train mixes the old and the new along Australian coast



> The train rooftops have been fitted with custom-built curved solar panels to charge the onboard batteries, which also draw on a regenerative braking system said to recapture around 25 percent of energy the train uses to accelerate. The batteries can also be charged at the platform thanks to a large rooftop solar array on the storage shed. Failing that, it can draw power from the grid, which the company says is sourced from a local green energy provider.


----------



## ekim68

Virgin Hyperloop One sets new speed record



> Virgin Hyperloop One has set a new speed record at its DevLoop test center outside of Las Vegas. During its third test phase, which was completed on December 15, an unmanned test pod reached a speed of nearly 387 km/h (240 mph) while running through an evacuated cylinder depressurized to 0.0002 atmospheres (0.003 lb/in²), or the equivalent air pressure of an altitude of 200,000 feet (37 mi, 61 km) above sea level.
> 
> According to Virgin Hyperloop One, the December tests not only saw a record speed run that broke the company's previous best of 310 km/hr (193 mph), but included trials of a new airlock system to allow the pods to move between the 500 m (1,600 ft) evacuated tube and normal air pressure, as well as the electric motor, controls and power electronics, magnetic levitation and guidance, and pod suspension systems. The end goal is to develop a transportation system capable of carrying passengers and freight through a system of tubes at airline speeds across continental distances.


----------



## ekim68

Two billion dollars in stolen wages were recovered for workers in 2015 and 2016-and that's just a drop in the bucket

*



What this study finds:

Click to expand...

*


> In 2015 and 2016, a total of $2 billion in stolen wages ($880.3 million in 2015; $1.1 billion in 2016) were recovered for workers by the U.S. Department of Labor ($246.8 million in 2015; $266.6 million in 2016); by state departments of labor and attorneys general in 39 states ($170.0 million in 2015; $147.5 million in 2016); and through class action settlements ($463.6 million in 2015; $695.5 million in 2016). These represent wages stolen by employers who, for example, refuse to pay promised wages, pay employees for only some of the hours worked, or fail to pay overtime premiums when employees work more than 40 hours in a week.


----------



## ekim68

Tech's leaps, limps and likes: The 7 trends that defined 2017



> With 2017 almost in the record books, it's worth a review of the main topics as well as what we learned from them. Here's a look at the seven trends identified by ZDNet editors and a crib sheet to the broader video discussion.


----------



## ekim68

Russia-linked Twitter accounts 'tried to divide UK' after terrorist attacks



> University researchers find at least 47 accounts that posted at least 475 messages, reposted more than 153,000 times.


----------



## ekim68

Revealed: The Secrets Of One Of The World's Dirtiest Banks And Its Powerful Western Protectors



> Blatant forgery. Snarling guard dogs. Shredded evidence. Leaked documents reveal the farcical scramble inside one of the world's dirtiest banks to conceal incriminating information - while some of the planet's most prestigious accountants and lawyers used their powers to keep the bank in business.


----------



## ekim68

Harvey victims deserve more than what Congress offers.



> The day before Congress rolled out its latest Hurricane Harvey recovery bill, Ted Cruz was on Twitter arguing with Luke Skywalker. Apparently our state's junior senator and Mark Hamill don't see eye-to-eye on net neutrality.
> 
> John Cornyn was on ABC News' "This Week" to dutifully defend President Trump against Robert Mueller's ongoing criminal investigation. The words "hurricane" and "Harvey" do not appear in the transcript.
> 
> U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican, was arguing about the tax bill with reporters. And U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Democrat, has been trying to impeach the president.
> 
> The solidarity and unity once palpable after Harvey has been left to the history books.


----------



## ekim68

The UK decides 10 Mbps broadband should be a legal right



> Over the past decade, the UK government has attempted to lock in a basic level of broadband service across Britain. The idea is that by 2020, members of the public will have the legal right to request speeds of at least 10 Mbps from their ISP, whether they happen to live in a big city or in the countryside. It's all part of the government's Universal Service Obligation (USO), which was laid out in the Digital Economy Act passed earlier this year.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/a-pharma-company-raised-the-price-of-a-daily-vitamin-by-1821217649']A Pharma Company Raised the Price of a Daily Vitamin by 800 Percent[/URL]



> If you would like to take niacin, a B vitamin that is believed to lower cholesterol and the chance of having a heart attack, you could buy a month's supply online for about $5. Or you could get a prescription for a bottle of virtually the same pills for almost $300, thanks to a pharmaceutical company using price gouging tactics similar to those of Pharma Bro Marin Shkrelli, according to a report from the Financial Times.


----------



## ekim68

LA to put 25 Proterra electric buses into service in 2019



> Proterra has made some big strides with its long-range electric bus in the past year or so, and has claimed that the zero-emissions vehicle could cover most North American transit routes on a single charge. We will soon see how it fares in the real world, with the LA Department of Transportation (LADOT) buying 25 of the buses as part of a shift toward greener public transit.


----------



## ekim68

Lithuania calls on EU to stop adjusting clocks for daylight savings



> Lithuania has said that it would push the European Union to abolish its law on daylight saving time, claiming that most people find it annoying to have to adjust their clocks twice a year.
> 
> The Baltic nation's parliament voted 76 to seven, with seven abstentions, in favour of the government's proposal to open negotiations with the EU Commission.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung could make $22 billion off next year's iPhones



> Sure, Apple and Samsung are competitors with their fair share of legal disagreements, but that doesn't stop the frenemies from using each other to make a buck.
> 
> According to a report by Korean outlet ETnews (via The Investor), Apple placed an order for 180 million to 200 million OLED displays from Samsung's manufacturing branch, Samsung Display, for the next round of iPhones. Each display is estimated to cost $110 (roughly £82 or AU$143), which could mean the deal is worth up to $22 billion (or £16.4 billion or AU$28.7 billion). That's a serious chunk of change.


----------



## ekim68

Is Google Making Us Stupid?



> It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.


----------



## ekim68

Russian submarine activity increases around Atlantic internet cables: report



> Russian submarine activity around undersea cables that provide internet and other communications connections to North America and Europe has raised concerns among NATO officials, according to The Washington Post.
> 
> NATO officials say an unprecedented amount of Russian deep-sea activity, especially around undersea internet lines, constitutes a newfound "vulnerability" for NATO nations.
> 
> "We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don't believe we have ever seen," said NATO submarine forces commander and U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Andrew Lennon. "Russia is clearly taking an interest in NATO and NATO nations' undersea infrastructure."


----------



## ekim68

From hotumn to meatmares: The words that defined our planet this year



> For the record, people _did_ try to apply words to the vast planetary changes that occurred this year: the fast-melting Arctic ice, the balmy autumn days, the monster hurricanes that flattened entire islands. I set out to document them. After scouring news stories, conducting a few calculated Google searches, and begging Twitter for ideas, here's what I came up with: the top 11 terms that shaped environmental discussion in 2017 - the kind that could end up in a dictionary a few years from now.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/china-solar-roadways-transparent-concrete-solar-cells-charge-cars/']China is building solar roadways - 'transparent concrete' atop solar cells that charge driving cars[/URL]



> China is building roadways with solar panels underneath that may soon have the ability to charge cars wirelessly and digitally assist automated vehicles. This second solar roadway project - part of the Jinan City Expressway - is a 1.2 mile stretch. The building technique involves transparent concrete over a layer of solar panels.
> 
> Construction is complete and grid connection is pending, but is expected to be complete before the end of the year.


----------



## ekim68

No, bitcoin isn't likely to consume all the world's electricity in 2020









> Estimates of bitcoin's soaring energy use are likely overstating the electric power required to mine the cryptocurrency, top experts warn.
> One model from Digiconomist is being widely cited by journalists, analysts and investors, but researchers say its estimate is not based on hard data.
> Digiconomist's estimate of bitcoin's energy consumption is the basis for a lofty projection that reminds some experts of debunked forecasts that led businesses to over-invest in internet infrastructure.


----------



## ekim68

Dead coal mines everywhere are being reincarnated as solar farms



> The world is quickly abandoning coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels. But that's not the end of the road for coal mines-in many countries they're coming back to life as solar farms.
> 
> Over the weekend, the world's biggest floating solar project began operating in the eastern Chinese city of Huainan, which accounted for nearly 20% of the country's coal reserves in a 2008 estimate. The 150-megawatt (MW) project consists of panels floating on a lake formed in a collapsed coal mine, according to (link in Chinese) the state-owned power company China Three Gorges Corporation, which began building the project in July.


----------



## ekim68

Months Later, And People Are Still Discovering Their Dead Loved Ones Were Used To Support Killing Net Neutrality



> By now we've well-established that the FCC's attempt to repeal net neutrality rules has been rife with fraud. From fake DDOS attacks to bogus comments during the open comment period, there was a fairly obvious effort made by the FCC and a _mysterious_ ally (gosh, who benefits?) to downplay massive public opposition to the plan. And while the FCC has completely blocked law enforcement investigations into which group was behind these efforts, you can expect significantly more details to emerge during the court battles in the new year.
> 
> That said, nearly four months have passed since the FCC closed its public comment period, and we're _still finding new instances of identity theft_, or cases where a dead loved one's identity was used to justify the FCC's blatant handout to telecom duopolies. For example, the brother of _Stranger Things_ star Sean Astin posted on Twitter that their dead mother's identity had been used to help kill net neutrality:


----------



## ekim68

China to Overtake U.S. Economy by 2032 as Asian Might Builds



> The growing importance of Asia's major economies will continue in 2018 and beyond, according to a league table that sees the region dominating in terms of size in just over a decade.
> 
> The report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research in London sees India leapfrogging the U.K. and France next year to become the world's fifth-biggest economy in dollar terms. It will advance to third place by 2027, moving ahead of Germany.


----------



## ekim68

Cities With Uber Have Lower Rates Of Ambulance Usage



> Many potential emergency room patients are too sick to drive themselves to a hospital. But an ambulance can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars without insurance.
> 
> This where a popular ride-sharing app can step in, while also freeing up the ambulances for those who need them most.
> 
> With demand for ambulances decreased by available Uber drivers, emergency personnel have been able reach critical patients faster while also applying necessary treatment on the way to the hospital, according to a new economic study from the University of Kansas:


----------



## ekim68

World's first vending machine for homeless people launched in the UK



> Homelessness charity Action Hunger has launched a vending machine to give folks who sleep rough on city streets round-the-clock access to essentials such as food and clothing. The free-to-use service has been two years in the making and went into operation last week. It will run as a month-long trial at a shopping center in Nottingham, UK.


----------



## ekim68

China's Shanghai sets population at 25 million to avoid 'big city disease'



> China's financial hub of Shanghai will limit its population to 25 million people by 2035 as part of a quest to manage "big city disease", authorities have said.
> 
> The State Council said on its website late on Monday the goal to control the size of the city was part of Shanghai's masterplan for 2017-2035, which the government body had approved.
> 
> "By 2035, the resident population in Shanghai will be controlled at around 25 million and the total amount of land made available for construction will not exceed 3,200 square kilometres," it said.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2017/12/26/elon-musk-tesla-pickup-truck-coming-after-model-y/']Elon Musk confirms Tesla pickup truck coming 'after Model Y'[/URL]



> After some confusion over Tesla's plan to build an electric pickup truck at the Tesla Semi event last month, CEO Elon Musk now confirms that a Tesla pickup truck is coming "right after Model Y."


----------



## ekim68

People who know how the news is made resist conspiratorial thinking



> Conspiracy theories, like the world being flat or the Moon landings faked, have proven notoriously difficult to stomp out. Add a partisan twist to the issue, and the challenge becomes even harder. Even near the end of his second term, barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the US.
> 
> If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem. But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy. This isn't knowledge of the news, per se, but knowledge of the companies and processes that help create the news. While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism.


----------



## ekim68

Porsche's electric Mission E will pack up to 670 horsepower



> We've already noted that Porsche is gunning for Tesla with its Mission E sports car, and has even been spotted testing it against the Model X and Model S. Now we know more about what you'll be able to buy when it goes on the market, reportedly in 2019. _Automobile_ reports that it will likely release three all-wheel drive versions with 300 kW, 400 kW and 500 kW (402, 536 and 670 horsepower). It'll have a two-speed transmission and, as we've noted earlier, will hit 0 to 60 mph in around 3.5 seconds with a top speed of 155 mph, and go around 300 miles on a charge.


----------



## ekim68

Sea Level Rise Is Creeping into Coastal Cities. Saving Them Won't Be Cheap.




> Norfolk and Miami frequently see nuisance flooding now. The cost to protect them and other coastal cities in the future is rising with the tide.


----------



## ekim68

Discovery of Self-Healing Polymer Could Lead to an End of Brittle Screens



> Japanese scientists have discovered a new polymer glass that can heal itself and could be used as screen material for smartphones, TVs, PCs, laptops, tablets, and other electronics equipment.
> 
> Just like many scientific advances, the polymer glass was discovered by accident by a Japanese student at the University of Tokyo.


----------



## ekim68

The Nigerian Prince Sugar Daddy Email Spammer Has Finally Been Busted



> Most of you reading this have probably at some point been contacted by someone claiming you are the beneficiary in a will of a Nigerian prince. As the scam goes, all you have to do is submit your personal information and Western Union some funds to process the necessary paperwork, and in return you will receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. One of the people behind the popular scam, Michael Neu, has been arrested by police in Slidell, Louisiana.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/']Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments[/URL]




> In September of





> last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted "incitement." The meetings - called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked - came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.
> 
> The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders:


----------



## ekim68

A physicist who always dreamed of working in the US says it's no longer the 'global center of science'



> Part of a family that zigzagged the globe in pursuit, and defense, of science, Arkani-Hamed always knew he would pursue his career in the United States.
> 
> "It was obvious that the place in the world where you go and freely think as big as you wanted and all that mattered was the quality of your ideas and your ambition, it was completely obvious that it was America more than anyone else," says Arkani-Hamed.
> 
> But now, he's not so sure.


----------



## ekim68

Even with 'Star Wars' surge, moviegoing could hit 22-year low. Blame bad sequels, rising ticket prices and streaming



> Hollywood is celebrating the end of 2017 with astronomical sales from "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," which is on track to soon exceed $1 billion in global ticket sales and eventually become the biggest movie of the year. But that won't be enough to write a happy storyline for the industry.


----------



## ekim68

Iceland becomes first country to legalise equal pay



> A new law making it illegal to pay men more than women has taken effect in Iceland.
> 
> The legislation, which came into force on Monday, the first day of 2018, makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women.
> 
> Under the new rules, companies and government agencies employing at least 25 people will have to obtain government certification of their equal-pay policies.


----------



## ekim68

Efforts grow to help students evaluate what they see online



> IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - Alarmed by the proliferation of false content online, state lawmakers around the country are pushing schools to put more emphasis on teaching students how to tell fact from fiction.
> 
> Lawmakers in several states have introduced or passed bills calling on public school systems to do more to teach media literacy skills that they say are critical to democracy. The effort has been bipartisan but has received little attention despite successful legislation in Washington state, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Mexico.


----------



## ekim68

2018 Is the Last Year of America's Public Domain Drought



> Happy Public Domain Day, every-some of you! In New Zealand and Canada, published works by artists who died in 1967-Rene Magritte, Dorothy Parker, John Coltrane, and many others-have entered the public domain; Kiwis and Canadians can now freely distribute, perform, and remix a wealth of painting, writing, and music. In Europe, work published by artists who died in 1947 are now public domain. In the United States, well, we get nothing for the 20th year in a row, with one more to go. Our public domain drought is nearly old enough to drink.


----------



## ekim68

UK faces build-up of plastic waste



> The UK's recycling industry says it doesn't know how to cope with a Chinese ban on imports of plastic waste.
> 
> Britain has been shipping up to 500,000 tonnes of plastic for recycling in China every year, but now the trade has been stopped.
> 
> At the moment the UK cannot deal with much of that waste, says the UK Recycling Association.
> 
> Its chief executive, Simon Ellin, told the BBC he had no idea how the problem would be solved in the short term.


----------



## ekim68

Germany starts enforcing hate speech law



> Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material.
> 
> Sites that do not remove "obviously illegal" posts could face fines of up to 50m euro (£44.3m).
> 
> The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about law-breaking material.
> 
> Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law's provisions.


----------



## ekim68

Noninvasive brainwave technology improved post-traumatic stress symptoms in military



> WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Dec. 22, 2017 - A noninvasive brainwave mirroring technology significantly reduced symptoms of post-traumatic stress in military personnel in a pilot study conducted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The study is published in the Dec. 22 online edition of the journal _Military Medical Research_.


----------



## ekim68

New bill could finally get rid of paperless voting machines




> The bill reads like a computer security expert's wish list.


----------



## ekim68

Norway powers ahead (electrically): over half new car sales now electric or hybrid



> OSLO (Reuters) - Sales of electric and hybrid cars rose above half of new registrations in Norway in 2017, a record aided by generous subsidies that extended the country's lead in shifting from fossil-fuel engines, data showed on Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

NASA-inspired "speed breeding" boosts wheat production threefold



> Our planet is expected to host an extra two billion people by 2050, but the amount of arable land we've got to work with won't be changing all that much. How exactly we're going to feed all these hungry mouths is a problem scientists are looking at from every angle, including creating heat-resistant cows, vertical farms and lab-grown hamburgers. Researchers are now reporting an advance in a NASA-inspired field known as "speed breeding" that relies on intense lighting regimes to raise crops several times faster, and boost their health at the same time.


----------



## ekim68

The 99 best things that happened in 2017



> If you're feeling despair about the fate of humanity in the 21st century, you might want to reconsider.
> 
> In 2017, it felt like the global media picked up all of the problems, and none of the solutions. To fix that, here are 99 of the best stories from this year that you probably missed.


----------



## ekim68

As of today, no US airlines operate the mighty Boeing 747



> On Wednesday, Delta Airlines flight 9771 flew from Atlanta to Pinal Airpark in Arizona. It wasn't a full flight-just 48 people on board. But it was a milestone-and not just for the two people who got married mid-flight-for it marked the very last flight of a Boeing 747 being operated by a US airline. Delta's last scheduled passenger service with the jumbo was actually late in December, at which point it conducted a farewell tour and then some charter flights. But as of today, after 51 long years in service, if you want to ride a 747 you'll need to be traveling abroad.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's online trip planner maps out life as a EV owner



> Although charging points are becoming more commonplace, buying an electric vehicle still brings some uncertainty with regard to how far and where you'll be able to travel. Tesla is removing some of the guesswork for prospective buyers, bringing a new trip-planning tool online to help you map out potential routes.
> 
> Tesla is expanding its Supercharger network in a big way. First launched in 2012, it now includes more than 5,400 outlets across the globe with plans to grow to 10,000 in the near future. These points provide up to 170 mi (273 km) of range on as little as 30 minutes of charging, and are billed as a way for Tesla owners to stay on the move when out on the road.


----------



## ekim68

This Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI to Find Hate Symbols on Twitter



> In August of this year, a white supremacist plowed through a crowd of protesters gathered in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. The attack injured around 20 people and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The violent clashes that weekend shocked Americans, among them Emily Crose, who wanted to be there to protest against the white supremacists but couldn't make it. A friend of hers was there, and was attacked and hurt by neo-Nazis.
> 
> Crose is a former NSA analyst and ex-Reddit moderator who now works at a cybersecurity startup. Inspired by her friend's courage, and horrified by the events in Charlottesville, Crose now spends her free time teaching an AI how to automatically spot Nazi symbols in pictures spread online, be it on Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook.


----------



## ekim68

Here come the lawyers! Intel slapped with three Meltdown bug lawsuits



> Just days after _The Register_ revealed a serious security hole in its CPU designs, Intel is the target of three different class-action lawsuits in America.
> 
> Complaints filed in US district courts in San Francisco, CA [PDF], Eugene, OR [PDF], and Indianapolis, IN [PDF] accuse the chip kingpin of, among other things, deceptive practices, breach of implied warranty, negligence, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment.


----------



## ekim68

And we return to Munich's migration back to Windo- it's going to cost what now?! €100m!



> Munich City officials could waste €100m reversing a 15-year process that replaced proprietary software with open source following an official vote last year.
> 
> Munich officials in 2003 voted to migrate to an in-house custom version of Ubuntu Linux called LiMux and tailor digital docs to be compatible with LibreOffice. Now the councillors have decided that Munich will switch some 29,000 PCs to Windows 10 and phase out Linux by early 2023.


----------



## ekim68

Whizzes' lithium-iron-oxide battery 'octuples' capacity on the cheap



> A band of boffins from Illinois have published a paper detailing a new battery design for mobile devices and electric vehicles that could increase capacity up to eight times while reducing costs.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40514424/after-iceland-and-germany-now-france-declares-war-on-the-gender-wage-gap']After Iceland and Germany, now France declares war on the gender wage gap[/URL]



> France says it wants to make good on at least one-third of its motto of "liberté, egalité, and fraternité," by ensuring pay equality. The French government announced it is devising a "tough, concrete" plan to make the gender pay gap as much a thing of the past as Madame DeFarge's knitting habit.


----------



## ekim68

What's the best company to work for in your country?




> Forbes





> assembled the list by looking at things like salaries, perks and benefits, quality of food served, parental leave policies, on the job napping, all manner of metrics were worked into the ranking. Companies in the top 10 received above average results for basically all criteria, but were evaluated in an outstanding way especially for the criteria of "trustworthiness/honesty" and "performance of the product/service."


----------



## ekim68

These psychedelic stickers blow AI minds



> Machine learning systems are very capable, but they aren't exactly _smart_. They lack common sense. Taking advantage of that fact, researchers have created a wonderful attack on image recognition systems that uses specially printed stickers that are so interesting to the AI that it completely fails to see anything else. Why do I get the feeling these may soon be popular accessories?


----------



## ekim68

2017 Shatters Records With $306 Billion In Damages From Climate-Linked Disasters




> Sixteen $1 billion-plus weather- and climate-related events killed at least 362 people.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's New York Gigafactory Kicks Off Solar Roof Production




> Tesla Inc.





> has kicked off production of its long-awaited electricity-producing shingles that Elon Musk says will transform the rooftop solar industry.
> 
> Manufacturing of the photovoltaic glass tiles began last month at a factory in Buffalo built with backing from New York State, the company said in an email Tuesday. It comes more than a year after Tesla unveiled the shingles to a mix of fanfare and skepticism.
> 
> The appeal: a sleek, clean solar product, especially for homeowners seeking to replace aging roofs. The tiles -- from most angles -- look like ordinary shingles. They allow light to pass from above and onto a standard flat solar cell.


----------



## ekim68

This Weed Killer Is Wreaking Havoc on America's Crops



> When farmer Darvin Bentlage surveyed his southwestern Missouri soybean fields in August, he knew something was amiss in one of them. "I've been looking at soybeans for about 60 years, and these didn't look right," he says. The plants' leaves had shriveled upward, taking the shape of little cups: a telltale sign they'd been exposed to dicamba-a potent herbicide that Bentlage does not use. It had wafted onto his farm from his neighbors' fields.


----------



## ekim68

Is Undoing Rules That Make it Easier for Small ISPs to Compete With Big Telecom



> Even as President Donald Trump spends his time promising rural Americans that closing the digital divide is a top priority, his agencies are taking steps that will only make that goal harder to achieve.
> 
> The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a rule change that would alter how it doles out licenses for wireless spectrum. These changes would make it easier and more affordable for Big Telecom to scoop up licenses, while making it almost impossible for small, local wireless ISPs to compete.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home



> An exodus triggered by abundant capital, growing innovation and flourishing career opportunities


----------



## ekim68

After Being AWOL From The Fight For Years, Google & Facebook To Fund Lawsuits Over Net Neutrality



> Not surprisingly, the Internet Association has stated that the organization intends to participate in the looming lawsuits against the FCC for its repeal of net neutrality. The group, which represents countless tech companies including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy and more, stated that the organization will not only participate in the coming lawsuits (which should arrive shortly after the repeal hits the Federal Register), but would support a "legislative solution" to help make net neutrality permanent (though as we've noted, folks should be careful on that front):


----------



## ekim68

Will Cape Town be the first city to run out of water?



> Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water.
> 
> Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population.
> 
> The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes.


----------



## ekim68

China to Plant New Forests the Size of Ireland This Year




> China





> 's government announced plans for a major reforestation project. The country aims to grow about 6.66 million hectares of new forests this year, an area roughly the size of Ireland.
> 
> The announcement was made last week by Zhang Jianlong, the head of China's State Forestry Administration, in an effort to shed the country's image as a major polluter and become a global environmental leader, the Telegraph reported.


----------



## ekim68

In China, facial recognition is sharp end of a drive for total surveillance



> Facial recognition is the new hot tech topic in China. Banks, airports, hotels and even public toilets are all trying to verify people's identities by analyzing their faces. But the police and security state have been the most enthusiastic about embracing this new technology.


----------



## ekim68

Virgin Galactic completes transonic glide test



> Virgin Galactic's passenger-carrying spaceship VSS Unity has completed its seventh unpowered glider test flight. Test pilots Mark "Forger" Stucky and Michael "Sooch" Masucci ran the craft through a series of maneuvers over Mojave, California during which it reached a transonic velocity of Mach 0.9 (690 mph) - almost the highest it can attain without an engine.


----------



## ekim68

How Millions of Iranians Are Evading the Internet Censors



> Iran's new offensive against social media is showing signs of backfiring.
> 
> Authorities in Tehran have ratcheted up their policing of the internet in the past week and a half, part of an attempt to stamp out the most far-reaching protests in Iran since 2009.
> 
> But the crackdown is driving millions of Iranians to tech tools that can help them evade censors, according to activists and developers of the tools. Some of the tools were attracting three or four times more unique users a day than they were before the internet crackdown, potentially weakening government efforts to control access to information online.


----------



## ekim68

Google Maps available again in China after eight years



> BEIJING -- Chinese internet users are finding it much easier to use Google Maps after eight years of the service being tightly limited.
> 
> While Google's flagship search function is still inaccessible in the country, the renewed availability of its map service could signal a shift in the Chinese government's stance toward the U.S. tech behemoth.
> 
> Until recently, internet users in China could not access Google Maps through apps on their mobile phones. But in recent days, users have found that applications that offer maps based on Google data have become accessible.


----------



## ekim68

Steve Jobs changed the future of laptops 10 years ago today



> "It's the world's thinnest notebook," said Steve Jobs as he introduced the MacBook Air 10 years ago today. Apple's Macworld 2008 was a special one, taking place just days after the annual Consumer Electronics Show had ended and Bill Gates bid farewell to Microsoft. Jobs introduced the MacBook Air by removing it from a tiny paper office envelope, and the crowd was audibly shocked at just how small and thin it was. We'd never seen a laptop quite like it, and it immediately changed the future of laptops.


----------



## ekim68

AirSpaceX's autonomous, electric air taxi lands in Detroit



> Airspace Experience Technologies, LLC (AirSpaceX) has given a preview of its vision for the future of air taxi services at this year's North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit. The company unveiled a sub-scale model of its vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, Mobi-One, an autonomous, tilt-wing electric aircraft designed to carry both passengers and cargo at speeds of up to 250 mph (400 km/h).


----------



## ekim68

Coal's death spiral, in 3 charts



> The latest reports suggest that coal has the equivalent of black-lung disease: the condition is chronic, and the long-term prognosis is dire.
> 
> Power companies plan to shutter more than 10 big coal plants in 2018, extinguishing a major portion of coal burning in the United States (see the map below). According to projections released by the Energy Information Administration this week, coal-fired plants will produce less than 30 percent of the electricity Americans use this year.


----------



## ekim68

Lyft says nearly 250K of its passengers ditched a personal car in 2017



> Lyft has a new report out detailing its 'economic impact' for 2017, and the document includes a lot of stats on its performance throughout the year. The ride-hailing provider claims 375.5 million rides for the year, which is 130 percent growth measured year-over-year. It served 23 million different passengers, itself a 92 percent YoY increase, and had 1.4 million drivers on the platform - 100 percent growth vs. its total for 2016.
> 
> Lyft is making some especially strong claims regarding its impact on car ownership trends: In 2017 alone, it said that almost a quarter of a million passengers on its platform dropped owning a personal vehicle, due to the availability of ridesharing specifically.


----------



## ekim68

China builds 'world's biggest air purifier' (and it seems to be working)



> An experimental tower over 100 metres (328 feet) high in northern China - dubbed the world's biggest air purifier by its operators - has brought a noticeable improvement in air quality, according to the scientist leading the project, as authorities seek ways to tackle the nation's chronic smog problem.


----------



## ekim68

24-Hour Solar Energy: Molten Salt Makes It Possible, and Prices Are Falling Fast



> SolarReserve is trying to prove that the technology that drives Crescent Dunes can make solar power an affordable, carbon-free, day-and-night energy source, dispatched on the electric grid like any fossil fuel plant. Here, concentrated sunlight heats molten salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit in that shimmering tower; then the salt gets stored in a giant insulated tank and can be tapped to make steam to run a turbine.
> 
> If this plant and several similar facilities under construction, or soon to be, prove reliable, the technology is poised to take off. Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels can displace fossil fuels during the day, and wind turbines can do the same as long as it's windy. But molten salt towers may be able to meet the challenge of electricity on demand, and push more older, dirtier fossil-fuel plants into retirement.


----------



## ekim68

Australia lifesaving drone makes first rescue



> Sydney (AFP) - A pair of Australian swimmers on Thursday became the first people to be rescued in the ocean by a drone when the aerial lifesaver dropped a safety device to distressed teens caught in rough seas.
> 
> Australia is leading the use of the technology in surf lifesaving, with dozens of drones being trialled on beaches around the country.


----------



## ekim68

Philippines Trying To Shut Down Popular News Site For Reporting On President Duterte



> The Philippines has a "free speech" amendment in their Constitution not unlike the American First Amendment. In the Philippines, it's actually their 4th amendment:
> 
> From Filipinos I've spoken to, they seem rightfully proud of this right to free speech. And they should be. But these things only matter if they're actually respected. And there's growing evidence that, under President Duterte, there's little respect for such things. A few days ago, the news broke that the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission was pulling the license of Rappler, a popular Filipino news source started by Maria Ressa.


----------



## ekim68

Top Bug Hunters Make 2.7 Times More Money Than an Average Software Engineer



> A survey of 1,700 bug bounty hunters registered on the HackerOne platform reveals that top white-hat hackers make on average 2.7 times more money than the average salary of a software engineer in the same country.
> 
> The reported numbers are different for each country and may depend on a bug bunter's ability to find bugs, but the survey's results highlight the rising popularity of bug hunting as a sustainable profession, especially in less developed countries, where it can help talented programmers live a financially care-free life.


----------



## ekim68

Norway to make all short-haul flights electric by 2040



> All short-haul flights in Norway will be entirely electric by 2040, in plans made by the nation's public operator of air transport.
> 
> State-owned Avinor, which operates most of Norway's civil airports, is aiming to be the "first in the world" to switch to electric air transport, according to its chief executive Dag Falk-Petersen.


----------



## ekim68

Ajit Pai's FCC Can't Admit Broadband Competition is a Problem



> While the FCC is fortunately backing away from a plan that would have weakened the standard definition of broadband, the agency under Ajit Pai still can't seem to acknowledge the lack of competition in the broadband sector. Or the impact this limited competition has in encouraging higher prices, net neutrality violations, privacy violations, or what's widely agreed to be some of the _worst customer service of any industry in America_.


----------



## ekim68

New antifungal provides hope in fight against superbugs



> Microscopic yeast have been wreaking havoc in hospitals around the world -- creeping into catheters, ventilator tubes, and IV lines -- and causing deadly invasive infection. One culprit species, _Candida auris_, is resistant to many antifungals, meaning once a person is infected, there are limited treatment options. But in a recent _Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy_ study, researchers confirmed a new drug compound kills drug-resistant _C. auris_, both in the laboratory and in a mouse model that mimics human infection.


----------



## ekim68

Old Money catching up to New Money.....


Ferrari will make an electric supercar (and an SUV)



> Ferrari will build a battery-electric supercar in a bid to challenge Tesla for a piece of the high-end, eco-conscious luxury market. CEO Sergio Marchionne, who also heads Fiat Chrysler, said that the Italian racecar company would also make a Ferrari SUV - after previously dismissing the idea as ridiculous.
> 
> Speaking at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Marchionne didn't offer any specifics on the electric Ferrari, but indicated the company would release it before the Tesla Roadster hits the road in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Tractor beam breakthrough could lead to levitating humans




> Tractor beams have made the jump from science fiction to reality





> in recent years, but only for levitating very small objects. A new breakthrough could lead to futuristic, far out new uses for the technology and open the door to levitating much larger objects, including humans.
> 
> Engineers from the University of Bristol have been able to trap (essentially levitate) objects using an acoustic tractor beam that is larger than the wavelengths of sound used by the device.


----------



## ekim68

Google's $20 million race to the moon will end with no winner - and Google is OK with that



> More than ten years after it was announced - and extended over and over - the Google-sponsored race to win $20 million by landing on the moon will end with no winners.
> 
> The four teams racing to win the Google Lunar Xprize, which requires a company to land a spacecraft on the moon by March 31, are either short of money or unable to launch this year, three people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
> 
> Meanwhile, Google - which extended the deadline from 2014 to 2015 and then eventually to 2018 - is not willing to push out the date further.


----------



## ekim68

Australia will meet its 2020 renewable energy target: regulator



> Australia will meet its 2020 renewable energy target, the Clean Energy Regulator says, with solar power's emergence continuing to shine brightly.
> 
> The CER has previously said that to meet the 2020 target of 33,000 gigawatt hours of extra renewable energy, about 6000 megawatts of large-scale generation capacity would need to be announced and built between 2016 and 2019.
> 
> CER chairman David Parker said on Tuesday 6532 megawatts of new large-scale generation had been "firmly announced" since 2016, meaning investment had reached a level "sufficient to meet the 2020 target".


----------



## ekim68

More Than 750 American Communities Have Built Their Own Internet Networks




> A new map shows that more communities than ever are building their own broadband networks to end big telecom's monopoly.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/china-has-already-gene-edited-86-people-with-crispr-1822297524']China Has Already Gene-Edited 86 People With CRISPR[/URL]



> In the U.S., the first planned clinical trials of CRISPR gene editing in people are about to kick off. China, meanwhile, has been racing ahead, having already used the gene-altering tool to change the DNA of dozens of people in several clinical trials.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. Drops Out of the Top 10 in Innovation Ranking



> Score another one for Seoul while Silicon Valley slides.
> 
> The U.S. dropped out of the top 10 in the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index for the first time in the six years the gauge has been compiled. South Korea and Sweden retained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings.
> 
> The index scores countries using seven criteria, including research and development spending and concentration of high-tech public companies.


----------



## ekim68

Alstom testing automated freight train in the Netherlands



> French train engineering giant Alstom is to test automated freight trains in the Netherlands this year.
> 
> The automated train prototype can travel for about 100km (60 miles) without driver intervention.
> 
> Automation will free the train driver to focus on supervising the train's progress.
> 
> The test's purpose is to provide a live demonstration that the train and the signal system can communicate effectively to drive the train.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://theintercept.com/2018/01/24/nsa-core-values-honesty-deleted/']NSA Deletes "Honesty" and "Openness" From Core Values[/URL]




> The National Security Agency





> maintains a page on its website that outlines its mission statement. But earlier this month, the agency made a discreet change: It removed "honesty" as its top priority.
> 
> Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four "core values" listed on NSA.gov, alongside "respect for the law," "integrity," and "transparency." The agency vowed on the site to "be truthful with each other."


----------



## ekim68

Apple will soon let you turn off its iPhone-slowing software



> Following an uproar from customers, Apple said Wednesday it's adding a feature to an upcoming iOS update that will let them turn off software that slows down older iPhones.


----------



## ekim68

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 - 2 January 2018



> The death of Moore's law is no surprise, because the semiconductor industry has told contradictory stories for years. While it created new process nodes like clockwork, the capital requirements to develop those new devices climbed nearly exponentially.
> 
> The laws of physics were to blame: they created a money pit into which Intel and the other companies threw tens of billions of dollars, with little to show for it.
> 
> Physics was a tough enough opponent, but now computer science itself has joined the fight thanks to the Meltdown and Spectre design flaws first revealed here in _The Register_.


----------



## ekim68

Self-driving shuttle buses hit the streets of Stockholm



> Telecommunications company Ericsson has partnered with local Swedish public transportation and technology providers to conduct a six-month trial of two electric self-driving shuttle buses on public Stockholm roads. The goal is to test how the autonomous vehicles perform under real-word conditions for an extended period alongside cars, cyclists and pedestrians.
> 
> The fully-electric buses can carry 11 passengers (free of charge) at speeds of up to 24 km/h (15 mph) in non-ideal weather conditions. Their autonomous driving capabilities are supplied by Ericsson's open API Connected Urban Transport (CUT) platform, which allows the buses to communicate with sensor-enabled bus stops, traffic lights and road-signs.


----------



## ekim68

The tricks propagandists use to beat science




> A model of the way opinions spread reveals how propagandists use the scientific process against itself to secretly influence policy makers.


----------



## ekim68

A 'marine motorhome for microbes': Oceanic plastic trash conveys disease to coral reefs



> When plastic debris meets coral, the authors say, the likelihood of disease increases from 4 to 89 percent -- a 20-fold change. The scientists estimate that about 11.1 billion plastic items are entangled on reefs across the Asia-Pacific region, and that this will likely increase 40 percent over the next seven years.
> 
> Coral are tiny animals with living tissue that cling to and build upon one another to form "apartments," or reefs. Bacterial pathogens ride aboard the plastics, disturbing delicate coral tissues and their microbiome.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix Executives Say 'Bright' Success Proves Film Critics Are 'Disconnected From Mass Appeal'



> When David Ayer and Will Smith's Netflix tentpole "Bright" became available to stream on December 22, it was met with some of the most hostile reviews of 2017. IndieWire's own David Ehrlich gave the film an F rating, calling the fantasy-realism film "miserable" and "the worst film of the year," and the film currently has a 26% on Rotten Tomatoes. But the abysmal reviews couldn't stop "Bright" from becoming a humongous hit on Netflix and earning a sequel.
> 
> At the end of last year, a report from Nielsen Ratings revealed that 11 million Netflix users streamed "Bright" during its first three days of release, which put it just under "Stranger Things" territory. While Netflix executives Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings would not disclose the specific amount of "Bright" viewers during an investors conference call this week, they did confirm that "Bright" is one of the biggest original offerings they've ever produced, including film and television series.


----------



## ekim68

Montana to FCC: You can't stop us from protecting net neutrality



> The Montana governor's office has a message for the Federal Communications Commission and Internet service providers: the state can't be stopped from protecting net neutrality, and ISPs that don't like it don't have to do business with state agencies.


----------



## ekim68

Here's who owns everything in Big Media today



> The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies - studios - made stuff - TV shows and movies - and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.
> 
> Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it's making its own stuff, too, and it's selling it directly to consumers. That's one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. And new distributors like Verizon and AT&T are getting in on the action. AT&T, for instance, wants to merge with Time Warner.


----------



## ekim68

President Tong and His Disappearing Islands



> Anote Tong is the President of Kiribati, a country of some hundred thousand citizens, which is disappearing under the sea. Kiribati (pronounced keer-ree-bahss) is made up of thirty-two atolls and a raised coral island that straddle the equator in the middle of the Pacific, and reach barely six and a half feet above sea level.


----------



## ekim68

In just two hours, Amazon erased $30 billion in market value for healthcare's biggest companies



> Amazon has disrupted fashion, books, furniture, food, cloud-based storage services, and much else besides. Now, it's coming for one of the biggest, most complex industries in the US: healthcare.
> 
> Today (Jan. 30), Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan announced a vague but market-moving plan to launch an independent company that will offer healthcare services to the companies' employees at a lower cost. The venture, which will be managed by executives from the firms, will be run more like a non-profit, than a for-profit entity.


----------



## ekim68

New York rolls out 'master plan' to develop 2.4 GW of offshore wind



> The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority issued a "master plan" for developing the state's offshore wind energy industry on Monday that lays out a "comprehensive roadmap" to establish 2,400 MW of offshore wind energy by 2030. The plan will lead to the procurement of at least 800 MW over the next two years, with solicitations in 2018 and 2019.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla pushes even more states to upend auto dealer-friendly laws



> Tesla is now pressing ahead with lobbying efforts that would allow it to expand its direct dealerships in two more states: Nebraska and Wisconsin.
> 
> For now, more than 20 states already allow the California automaker to sell its own vehicles, while others have set up a system that at least partially bans manufacturers from direct sales and effectively protects auto dealers. Those states include Texas, Michigan, West Virginia, and Utah, among others. Last year, court rulings and changes in the law in Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, and other states have paved the way for Tesla to sell directly to the public.


----------



## ekim68

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017



> At the end of Q4 2017 Backblaze was monitoring 91,305 hard drives used to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives which were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (read why after the chart). This leaves us with 91,243 hard drives. The table below is for the period of Q4 2017.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Expands Sales of Solar Gear at Home Depot



> Tesla Inc. is planning a major expansion of its solar division at Home Depot Inc., embarking on a critical test of the mainstream appeal of its renewable-energy products.


----------



## ekim68

An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa



> Cape Town is headed for unknown territory. After years of drought, the city of 4 million on the Western Cape of South Africa is facing an unprecedented disaster: Unless a major rainstorm occurs, officials are predicting that on or around April 12 the city's water supply will run dry. After that, most residents will have to stand in line at designated areas to get their rations of water.


----------



## ekim68

Another Day, Another Flimsy Report Claiming TV Cord Cutting Won't Save You Money



> Once a month like clockwork, somebody in the tech press proudly decides to inform their readers that you can't save any money by cutting the traditional TV cord and going with cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. The logic in these reports almost always goes something like this: "Once I got done signing up for every darn streaming video service under the sun, I found that I wasn't really saving much money over traditional cable."
> 
> Writers leaning into this lazy hot take almost always tend to forget a few things.
> 
> One, the same broadcasters dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming video rates, so in some ways pricing will be lateral. Two, adding a dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting, which is about customization and flexibility. Three, if writers actually stopped and talked to real consumers (like in the cord cutting subreddit), they'd be told (repeatedly) how customers routinely save money each month by breaking free of the traditional, bloated cable TV bundle.


----------



## ekim68

The Fed drops the hammer on Wells Fargo



> The Fed handed down unprecedented punishment late Friday for what it called the bank's "widespread consumer abuses," including its notorious creation of millions of fake customer accounts.
> 
> Wells Fargo won't be allowed to get any bigger than it was at the end of last year -- $2 trillion in assets -- until the Fed is satisfied that it has cleaned up its act.
> 
> Under pressure from the Fed, the bank agreed to remove three people from the board of directors by April and a fourth by the end of the year.
> 
> It is the first time the Federal Reserve has imposed a cap on the entire assets of a financial institution, according to a Fed official.
> 
> "We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank," outgoing Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a statement. Friday was her last day on the job.


----------



## ekim68

WHATIS Going to Happen With WHOIS?




> A new European data privacy law and official internet policy are about to conflict with each other.


----------



## ekim68

How to tell if you have fake Twitter followers (and how to remove them)



> Social networks have expanded popularity contests beyond the schoolyard, where users vie to become the next Instagram celebrity or at least have enough followers to be considered an "influencer."
> 
> But, unlike the schoolyard, anyone can buy popularity on social networks. Richard Roeper, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, was suspended on Tuesday for buying 25,000 followers after a New York Times investigation revealed the practice was widespread.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla To Construct Virtual Solar Power Plant Using 50,000 Homes In South Australia



> But Musk and his audacity have caused the scales to fall from the eyes of more people Down Under. Now, Tesla and the government of South Australia have announced a stunning new project that could change how electricity is generated not only in Australia but in every country in the world. They plan to install rooftop solar system on *50,000 homes* in the next 4 years and link them them together with grid storage facilities to create the largest virtual solar power plant in history.
> 
> And here's the kicker: _*The rooftop solar systems will be free. *_
> 
> The cost of the project will be recouped over time by selling the electricity generated to those who consume it. "We will use people's homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefiting with significant savings in their energy bills," says South Australia's premier Jay Weatherill. "More renewable energy means cheaper power for all South Australians."


----------



## ekim68

Government set to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year, an 84 percent jump from last year



> Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to a documents released Wednesday. It's the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.


----------



## ekim68

Drones could soon deliver medical supplies in NC



> Drones could soon be ferrying blood and other medical supplies to hospitals and clinics in North Carolina if the N.C. Department of Transportation's bid to be part of a federal test program is approved.
> 
> NCDOT is leading a team of private companies that proposes to set up a network of distribution centers that would use unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to make medical deliveries in North Carolina. The drone delivery companies, including Matternet and Zipline, operate overseas but not in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

You probably won't own a self-driving car, but you'll ride in them a lot



> The autonomous car revolution is coming-and in the near future, you'll most likely ride in one if it is part of a fleet of cars operated by a company. Already, Uber offers trips in self-driving cars throughout Pittsburgh and Phoenix, and Lyft has teamed up with firms like drive.ai and nuTonomy to focus on autonomous vehicles. Meanwhile, Fiat Chrysler recently announced it would provide "thousands" of minivans to Waymo as part of a "driverless ride-hailing service." Cruise, an automation company acquired by GM, has even revealed a next-gen car that lacks a steering wheel and pedals-a vehicle also intended to be part of a ride-hailing fleet.


----------



## ekim68

Reviving the Independence of Cyberspace



> In a bizarre twist of facts, the FCC has claimed this week that its annual report proves the repeal of Net Neutrality has made the Internet better for all of us. The report is an exercise in contradictions, claiming that "advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans," and quoting the phrase "in a reasonable and timely fashion".


----------



## ekim68

Amazon to take on UPS, FedEx via "Shipping with Amazon"



> Amazon's plans to take on UPS and FedEx are reportedly coming to fruition. According to a report by _The Wall Street Journal_, the online retailer's new shipping service, named "Shipping with Amazon" (SWA), will roll out in Los Angeles in the coming weeks. With SWA, Amazon will pick up packages from businesses and ship them to customers, relying almost entirely on Amazon's shipping infrastructure.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. transportation agency calls March 1 'summit' on autonomous cars



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Auto manufacturers, technology companies, road safety advocates and policy makers will attend a March 1 conference over potential government actions that could speed the rollout of autonomous cars, the U.S. Transportation Department said on Friday.


----------



## ekim68

AI-based system designed to spot poachers



> Poachers typically hunt at night, which is why drone-mounted infrared cameras are being used to spot them. The problem is, since both the poachers and the animals emit heat, it can be difficult to tell which is which in the videos. Scientists from the University of Southern California are making the job easier, using artificial intelligence.


----------



## ekim68

New desalination membrane produces both drinking water and lithium



> Seawater is a complex cocktail of useful minerals, but it's hard to separate out the specific ones we need. Now, a team of scientists from Australia and the US has developed a new water desalination technique that can not only make seawater fresh enough to drink, but recover lithium ions for use in batteries.
> 
> The key to the process is metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which boast the largest internal surface area of any known material. Unfolded, a single gram of the material could theoretically cover a football field, and it's this intricate internal structure that makes MOFs perfect for capturing, storing and releasing molecules. Recent research into the material could see MOFs put to work as carbon emission sponges, high-precision chemical sensors, and urban water filters.


----------



## ekim68

California launches investigation following stunning admission by Aetna medical director



> (CNN)California's insurance commissioner has launched an investigation into Aetna after learning a former medical director for the insurer admitted under oath he never looked at patients' records when deciding whether to approve or deny care.
> 
> California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones expressed outrage after CNN showed him a transcript of the testimony and said his office is looking into how widespread the practice is within Aetna.
> "If the health insurer is making decisions to deny coverage without a physician actually ever reviewing medical records, that's of significant concern to me as insurance commissioner in California -- and potentially a violation of law," he said.


----------



## ekim68

Unknown Language Discovered in Malaysia



> Researchers have cataloged close to 7,000 distinct human languages on Earth, per Linguistic Society of America's latest count. That may seem like a pretty exhaustive list, but it hasn't stopped anthropologists and linguists from continuing to encounter new languages, like one recently discovered in a village in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula.


----------



## ekim68

Consumers prefer security over convenience for the first time ever, IBM Security report finds



> Mobile and web users are aware of the data breaches happening around them, and are now prioritizing strong security and privacy--especially when it comes to their financial accounts.


----------



## ekim68

New antibiotic family discovered in dirt



> US scientists have discovered a new family of antibiotics in soil samples.
> 
> The natural compounds could be used to combat hard-to-treat infections, the team at Rockefeller University hopes.
> 
> Tests show the compounds, called malacidins, annihilate several bacterial diseases that have become resistant to most existing antibiotics, including the superbug MRSA.
> 
> Experts say the work, published in Nature Microbiology, offers fresh hope in the antibiotics arms race.


----------



## ekim68

These Citizen-Regulators In Arkansas Defied Monsanto. Now They're Under Attack



> In Arkansas, there is a kind of David vs. Goliath battle underway over a weedkiller.
> 
> On one side, there is the giant Monsanto Company. On the other, a committee of 18 people, mostly farmers and small-business owners, that regulates the use of pesticides in the state. It has banned Monsanto's latest way of killing weeds during the growing season.
> 
> Terry Fuller is on that committee. He never intended to pick a fight with a billion-dollar company. "I didn't feel like I was leading the charge," he says. "I felt like I was just trying to do my duty."


----------



## ekim68

Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'



> Scientists listening out for broadcasts by extra-terrestrials are struggling to get the computer hardware they need, thanks to the crypto-currency mining craze, a radio-astronomer has said.
> 
> Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers want to expand operations at two observatories.
> 
> However, they have found that key computer chips are in short supply.
> 
> "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer.


----------



## ekim68

Playbook: U.S. averages a school shooting every 2.5 days in 2018



> Good Thursday morning. EVERYTOWN, the gun-control group backed by Michael Bloomberg, says this is the 18th school shooting of 2018. We are seven weeks into the year. That means there's a school shooting every 2.5 days. There have been 30 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40531163/study-even-apple-and-google-engineers-cant-really-afford-to-live-near-their-offices']Study: Even Apple and Google engineers can't really afford to live near their offices[/URL]



> That's according to the Y Combinator-backed real-estate startup Open Listings, which looked at median home sales prices near the headquarters (meaning within a 20-minute commute) of some of the Bay Area's biggest and best-known tech companies. Using public salary data from Paysa, Open Listings then looked at how many software engineers from those companies could actually afford to buy a house close to their office.


----------



## ekim68

Urging Peace Talks, Open Letter From Taliban Asks American People to Recognize Total Failure of 16-Year War



> "Make your president and the war-mongering congressmen and Pentagon officials ... adopt a rational policy towards Afghanistan," the letter states.


----------



## ekim68

Hedge-Fund Mediocrity Is the Best Magic Trick



> Hedge funds have accumulated $3 trillion, with a substantial portion of it coming from public pensions. That these funds don't deliver outperformance is almost beside the point. What they are selling is an inflated estimate of expected returns. This serves a crucial purpose for elected officials, letting them lower the annual contributions states and municipalities must make to the pension plans for government employees.
> 
> It is a dodge that everyone goes along with. When the bill comes due in a few decades, this will cost taxpayers a bundle.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 Tracker



> Tesla has accomplished something no other automaker can claim: It's made a relatively affordable electric car, the Model 3, that hundreds of thousands of people are lining up to buy. The only problem is that Elon Musk and company can't produce enough of them.
> 
> Sluggish output since the Model 3 launch in July 2017 has frustrated fans and confounded Wall Street. That's why Bloomberg built its own tool to estimate the number of Model 3s rolling out of the factory in Fremont, California. This projection relies on Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs), unique strings of digits displayed on every new car sold in the U.S.
> 
> Our best estimate is that Tesla has manufactured 7,167 Model 3s so far, and is now building approximately 1,052 a week. Those figures, and the charts below, represent Bloomberg's latest estimates and will automatically update to reflect changes in the data.


----------



## ekim68

AI is helping seismologists detect earthquakes they'd otherwise miss




> Using the same tools we use for voice detection, scientists are uncovering tiny earthquakes hidden in the data


----------



## ekim68

New scanning technique reveals secrets behind great paintings



> Researchers in the US have used a new scanning technique to discover a painting underneath one of Pablo Picasso's great works of art, the Crouching Woman (La Misereuse Accroupie).
> 
> Underneath the oil painting is a landscape of Barcelona which, it turns out, Picasso used as the basis of his masterpiece.
> 
> The new x-ray fluorescence system is cheaper than alternative art scanning systems - and it is portable, making it available to any gallery that wants it.


----------



## ekim68

High levels of microplastics found in Northwest Atlantic fish



> A new study sheds light on the magnitude of microplastic pollution in our oceans. The study, published today in open-access journal _Frontiers in Marine Science_, found microplastics in the stomachs of nearly three out of every four mesopelagic fish caught in the Northwest Atlantic-one of the highest levels globally. These findings are worrying, as the affected fish could spread microplastics throughout the ocean. The fish are also prey for fish eaten by humans, meaning that microplastics could indirectly contaminate our food supply through the transfer of associated microplastic toxins.


----------



## ekim68

Russia Attacked U.S. Troops in Syria



> If you've been listening just to the Kremlin and the Pentagon, you probably didn't know that Russia attacked American forces and their allies in Syria last week, suffering heavy casualties.
> 
> Yes, all sides admit that there was an incident at a U.S. base in Deir Ezzor. And that elements of the Syrian regime and Shiite militias participated in the assault. The Pentagon and Kremlin both acknowledge that Russian "mercenaries" participated, too. But the line for now is that those contractors had gone rogue, and Moscow didn't know anything about it.


----------



## ekim68

All in the genes: Food fit for a warming world



> New research out of the UK's John Innes Centre suggests that it may be possible to engineer cauliflower, broccoli, rapeseed, and other crops, so they're better suited to farming in a world beset by climate change.
> 
> The key is in the gene that influences how these plants release their seeds. By tweaking this gene's figurative thermostat, this seed dispersal could be made to happen at higher temperatures, increasing crop yields in warming climes.


----------



## ekim68

Google is making it easier for 911 to find you in an emergency



> In a test, it was able to provide 911 operators with more accurate caller locations.


----------



## ekim68

How does Chinese tech stack up against American tech?



> AMERICANS, and friends of America, often reassure themselves about its relative decline in the following way. Even if the roads, airports and schools continue to slide, it will retain its lead in the most sophisticated fields for decades. They include defence, elite universities, and, in the business world, technology. Uncle Sam may have ceded the top spot to China in exports in 2007, and manufacturing in 2011, and be on track to lose its lead in absolute GDP by about 2030. But Silicon Valley, the argument goes, is still where the best ideas, smartest money and hungriest entrepreneurs combine with a bang nowhere else can match.
> 
> Or is it?


----------



## ekim68

MIT's thermal resonator generates electricity from the air's daily temperature cycle



> Previous work has applied the thermoelectric effect to clothing, paint and cooking pots, and these materials may eventually be built into factories and power plants to recycle waste heat. However, in all of these applications the temperature difference needs to be quite significant. The new technique taps into more gradual fluctuations over longer periods of time, allowing it to work with the natural changes in temperature throughout the day. This is called the pyroelectric effect.


----------



## ekim68

What Stands Between Bezos, Buffett, and Dimon and a Health-Care Fix



> The trio will have to take on drugmakers, PBMs, insurers, and pharmacy chains to bring down the high price of medicines.


----------



## ekim68

Dallas official asks NRA to consider another city for annual convention



> One of Dallas' top leaders has urged the National Rifle Association on Monday to find another city to host its annual convention, taking a stand against gun violence in the wake of last week's deadly mass shooting in Florida.
> 
> Dwaine Caraway, mayor pro tem of Dallas, said that the NRA, the nation's largest gun lobby, would be met with "marches and demonstrations" if it went ahead with plans to host the three-day meeting scheduled for May 4-6.


----------



## ekim68

World's first hyperloop? Indian route promises Mumbai to Pune in 25 minutes



> The agreement between Virgin Hyperloop One and the Indian government, lays the groundwork for building a hyperloop system within seven years.


----------



## ekim68

Stem cells help patch up brain damage in stroke victims



> Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a new stem-cell-based treatment for strokes. When tested in animal models, the technique was found to reduce brain damage and help the brain heal itself faster, and the results have been promising enough that human clinical trials may follow as soon as next year.


----------



## ekim68

More Than Half Of U.S. States Now Pushing Their Own Net Neutrality Rules



> Large ISP lobbyists, the FCC and agency head Ajit Pai are going to be rather busy for the foreseeable future. In the wake of the agency's extremely unpopular net neutrality repeal, consumer groups note that 26 states (27 including a new effort in Kansas) have now taken action to protect net neutrality themselves -- with more efforts on the way.


----------



## ekim68

Tech companies should stop pretending AI won't destroy jobs



> I took an Uber to an artificial-intelligence conference at MIT one recent morning, and the driver asked me how long it would take for autonomous vehicles to take away his job. I told him it would happen in about 15 to 20 years. He breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, I'll be retired by then," he said.
> 
> Good thing we weren't in China. If a driver there had asked, I would have had to tell him he'd lose his job in about 10 years-maybe 15 if he was lucky.


----------



## ekim68

Poland's central bank is reportedly funding a YouTube 'smear campaign' against cryptocurrencies



> A bizarre battle is emerging in the world of cryptocurrencies after Poland's central bank was accused of hiring YouTubers to "start a smear campaign" against cryptocurrencies in the country.


----------



## ekim68

Dossier: The leaders in self-driving cars



> When it comes to self-driving car manufacturers, people are quick to name companies like Tesla, Apple, and Waymo as the leaders in the space. But this perception doesn't match up to the reality of who is making the greatest strides developing and deploying autonomous driving technologies, according to a recent study from Navigant Research.
> 
> The research firm rated manufacturers based on 10 criteria: Vision; go-to market strategy; partners; production strategy; technology; sales, marketing, and distribution; product capability; product quality and reliability; product portfolio; and staying power.
> 
> Notably, Tesla, Uber, and Apple are missing from the top 10 list.


----------



## ekim68

Cybercrime drains $600 billion a year from the global economy, says report



> According to McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, nearly one percent of global GDP is lost to cybercrime each year.


----------



## ekim68

UPS plans electric vehicle fleet with Workhorse, touts cost efficiencies



> UPS on Thursday announced that it will deploy 50 custom-built electric delivery vans in 2019 as the shipping giant aims to reduce its fleet of gasoline-powered vehicles. The effort is in partnership with truck maker Workhorse Group and will initially target delivery routes in and around cities.


----------



## ekim68

China's great leap forward in science



> Chinese investment is paying off with serious advances in biotech, computing and space. Are they edging ahead of the west?


----------



## ekim68

Safety tech in cars can cut backup crashes by 78 percent, study finds



> New technology in cars is significantly cutting the number of backup crashes, according to a new report. Rear automatic braking, an option in just 5 percent of new vehicles, is linked to a 62 percent drop in reported backup accidents in cars with that equipment. Combining automatic braking with rearview cameras and sensors can reportedly cut reverse crashes by 78 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Bot-Driven Credential Stuffing Hits New Heights



> More than 40% of global log-in attempts are malicious thanks to bot-driven credential stuffing attacks, according to the latest report from Akamai.
> 
> The cloud delivery provider's latest _State of the Internet/Security_ report for Q4 2017 comprised analysis from over 7.3 trillion bot requests per month.


----------



## ekim68

How a fight over _Star Wars_ download codes could reshape copyright law



> A federal judge in California has rejected Disney's effort to stop Redbox from reselling download codes of popular Disney titles like _Frozen_, _Beauty and the Beast_, and the latest _Star Wars_ movies.
> 
> Judge Dean Pregerson's Tuesday ruling invoked the little-used doctrine of copyright misuse, which holds that a copyright holder loses the right to enforce a copyright if the copyright is being abused. Pregerson faulted Disney for tying digital download codes to physical ownership of discs, a practice that he argued ran afoul of copyright's first sale doctrine, which guarantees customers the right to resell used DVDs.
> 
> If the ruling were upheld on appeal, it would have sweeping implications. It could potentially force Hollywood studios to stop bundling digital download codes with physical DVDs and force video game companies to rethink their own practices.


----------



## ekim68

Is the Armed Teacher 'Debate' America's Lowest, Stupidest Media Moment?



> Teachers are already overburdened with unrealistic expectations-now they're supposed to be sharpshooters?


----------



## ekim68

Tesla will supply free charging stations to office parking lots



> Tesla is expanding its charging infrastructure into a new area: office parking lots. A new "workplace charging" program unveiled today offers businesses free Tesla wall connectors and will also cover installation, provided they meet certain qualifications set forth by the California carmaker. Tesla won't cover the cost of operating the charging stations, and the company says there could be other permitting, construction, zoning, or labor costs.


----------



## ekim68

These Women Are The Only Reason Some People In Mexico City Get Any Water



> In some places, taps have been dry for over a year. People bathe their children with bottled water. A group of women has taken over water distribution from the city authorities. The future feared by millions of people across the world has already arrived in Mexico City.


----------



## ekim68

Future Computers Will Process and Remember Info at the Same Time, Functioning More Like Real Brains



> By combining the capabilities of a transistor with a memory resistor, researchers have created the memtransistor, which functions like a neuron. This device could help to improve computing, making it more brain-like.


----------



## ekim68

Apple to suspend iTunes Store support for "obsolete" first-gen Apple TV




> Security changes will also affect Windows XP and Vista machines running iTunes.


----------



## ekim68

Bacterial bloom in world's driest desert raises hopes for life on Mars



> If the prospects of life on Mars were a pendulum, it's just swung back toward "favorable." An international team of researchers led by Washington State University planetary scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch has found that the most Mars-like, apparently lifeless spot on the face of the Earth isn't so lifeless after all. Areas of the hyperarid Atacama Desert once thought lacking even microbes is showing blooms of specialized bacteria after rainfall, providing hope that similar dormant colonies may exist on the Red Planet.


----------



## ekim68

Moon to get first mobile phone network



> BARCELONA (Reuters) - The moon will get its first mobile phone network next year, enabling high-definition streaming from the lunar landscape back to earth, part of a project to back the first privately funded moon mission.


----------



## ekim68

Hyundai unveils electrified Kona compact SUV with 292-mile range



> Hyundai is forging ahead with its push into the EV arena, following a fully-electrified Ioniq lineup and electric bus with an emission-free version of last year's Kona compact SUV. The Kona Electric wears a slightly different face to its fossil fuel-powered forefather, along with a cabin that has been reimagined in line with its electric powertrain.


----------



## ekim68

After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat. Utilities are freaking out.



> The US electricity sector is in a period of unprecedented change and turmoil. Renewable energy prices are falling like crazy. Natural gas production continues its extraordinary surge. Coal, the golden child of the current administration, is headed down the tubes.
> 
> In all that bedlam, it's easy to lose sight of an equally important (if less sexy) trend: Demand for electricity is stagnant.


----------



## ekim68

The Alt-right is recruiting depressed people




> Alt-right figures are targeting vulnerable communities with videos and, unfortunately, it seems to be working.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40537222/washington-just-passed-the-countrys-toughest-net-neutrality-legislation']Washington just passed the country's toughest net neutrality legislation[/URL]



> Just days after the Trump administration finalized its repeal of national net neutrality regulations, Washington State has passed sweeping legislation to regulate internet access for its residents. The bill cleared the state senate on a 35-to-14 vote, with bipartisan support. It had already blown through the house of representatives by 93-to-5 on February 9, and governor Jay Inslee is on record as ready to sign it.


----------



## ekim68

Mobile app helps first responders quickly and safely assess rail accidents



> Rail accidents can be disastrous for anyone on board or in direct path of the train. If it's a freight train carrying hazardous materials, the impact can be much more far reaching. A mobile app, called AskRail, which draws on big data, helps firefighters and other first responders stay safe, save lives, and protect communities in the event of such accidents.


----------



## ekim68

Google spinoff Waymo's 360-degree video: See what it's like to be a self-driving car



> Waymo releases video to assure people its autonomous-vehicle technology is safe.


----------



## ekim68

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2018




> Dueling neural networks. Artificial embryos. AI in the cloud. Welcome to our annual list of the 10 technology advances we think will shape the way we work and live now and for years to come.


----------



## ekim68

Diabetes is actually five separate diseases, research suggests



> Diabetes - or uncontrolled blood sugar levels - is normally split into type 1 and type 2.
> 
> But researchers in Sweden and Finland think the more complicated picture they have uncovered will usher in an era of personalised medicine for diabetes.
> 
> Experts said the study was a herald of the future of diabetes care but changes to treatment would not be immediate.
> 
> Diabetes affects about one in 11 adults worldwide and increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and limb amputation.


----------



## ekim68

Uber moves into healthcare with dedicated patient transport service



> Technology has the potential to revolutionize healthcare accessibility, but there are gaps that telepresence robots, smartphone diagnostics and self-driving clinics won't be able to fill. Uber is looking to make some headway in the area with a new service aimed at helping patients get to and from a medical professional when they need to.
> 
> Announced today, Uber Health aims to put a dent in the amount of doctor's appointments missed in the US each year due to transportation issues, which Uber says amounts to a whopping 3.6 million.


----------



## ekim68

A new, huge review of gun research has bad news for the NRA



> For decades, the federal government, with the support of the National Rifle Association, has made it very difficult to answer a question at the heart of American public health and safety: Does gun control work?
> 
> The answer is hugely important given that guns killed nearly 39,000 Americans in 2016 alone. But after research on gun violence in the 1990s found that firearms do not - contrary to NRA talking points - make people safer, the group backed a federal funding freeze on gun policy research.
> 
> But studies have gone on - just without federal funding. And on Friday, a nonpartisan think tank, the RAND Corporation, released the results so far of its Gun Policy in America initiative, a two-year dive into the research on gun violence and the laws trying to curtail it.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota announces new company dedicated to self-driving vehicles



> March 2 (UPI) -- Toyota on Friday announced it's forming a new research company devoted to developing software for autonomous-driving vehicles.
> 
> The new company, Toyota Research Institute - Advanced Development, will address in-house manufacturing of software for self-driving cars, a Toyota statement said.
> 
> The company will be joined by Japanese vehicle component companies Aisin Seiki and Denso in developing the software. The companies recently signed a memorandum of understanding, to lead to formal contracts and the choice of a location in Tokyo for its facilities.


----------



## ekim68

Desktop PC shipments dip below 100m/year



> Desktop PC shipments dipped below 100 million in 2017 and there's worse to come across the personal computing device market according to analyst firm IDC.


----------



## ekim68

How People Talk Now Holds Clues about Human Migration Centuries Ago



> Researchers are analyzing dialects and historical records to unravel the formation of a Creole language.


----------



## ekim68

North Korea's Kim Jong-un meets South Korean envoys



> North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has hosted a dinner for senior South Korean delegates - the first time officials from Seoul have met the young leader since he took office in 2011.
> 
> The South Korean president's office confirmed the meeting shortly after the delegates' arrival on Monday.
> 
> The 10-member team is in Pyongyang for talks partly aimed at restarting dialogue between the North and the US.
> 
> Relations between the Koreas have warmed following last month's Olympics.


----------



## ekim68

Google Unveils 72-Qubit Quantum Computer With Low Error Rates



> Google announced a 72-qubit universal quantum computer that promises the same low error rates the company saw in its first 9-qubit quantum computer. Google believes that this quantum computer, called Bristlecone, will be able to bring us to an age of quantum supremacy.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous cars could peep around corners via bouncing laser



> Autonomous cars gather up tons of data about the world around them, but even the best computer vision systems can't see through brick and mortar. But by carefully monitoring the reflected light of a laser bouncing off a nearby surface, they might be able to see around corners - that's the idea behind recently published research from Stanford engineers.


----------



## ekim68

New world record DDoS attack hits 1.7Tbps days after landmark GitHub outage



> Memcached denial-of-service attacks are getting bigger by the day, according to new analysis.


----------



## ekim68

Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration



> Extreme weather due to climate change displaced more than a million people from their homes last year. It could soon reshape the nation.


----------



## ekim68

[url=https://newatlas.com/tesla-semi-first-load/53721/ ]Tesla Semi takes off with its first load[/URL]



> Tesla made quite a statement when it finally unveiled its all-electric long hauler last year, listing some truly impressive numbers in terms of range and acceleration. The might of the Tesla Semi's is now being put to the test, with a production model rolling out of the Gigafactory with a load onboard for the very first time.
> 
> When announcing the Tesla Semi back in November, Elon Musk claimed the truck would be able to accelerate to 97 km/h (60 mph) in five seconds flat when empty, putting it in the realm of some sports cars. When fully loaded to its capacity of 80,000 lb (36,288 kg), it would still only take 20 seconds.


----------



## ekim68

Cable's Top Lobbyist Again Calls For Hyper Regulation Of Silicon Valley



> For years telecom monopolies have downplayed the lack of competition in the broadband sector, and the chain reaction of problems this creates for everybody (from privacy infractions to net neutrality violations). At the same time, large ISP lobbyists (and the regulators, politicians and policy flacks paid to love them) have insisted that it's _Silicon Valley companies the public really need to worry about_. As a result, ISPs like Comcast and AT&T routinely insist that we need new regulations governing companies like Google and Facebook, but entrenched natural monopolies should be allowed to do pretty much _whatever they'd like_.


----------



## ekim68

Inside the Chinese lab that plans to rewire the world with AI




> Alibaba is investing huge sums in AI research and resources-and it is building tools to challenge Google and Amazon.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo self-driving trucks to start hauling cargo next week



> Waymo has clocked up millions of self-driving miles since starting Google's autonomous vehicle project in 2009, celebrating 5 million of them by recently releasing a 360-degree video to demonstrate how its cars see the world around them. Now the company is shifting gear by moving into cargo hauling.
> 
> After road-testing its self-driving trucks in California and Arizona over the past 12 months, Waymo's fleet of autonomous big rigs is due to start hauling cargo to Google's data centers in Atlanta, Georgia, from next week.


----------



## ekim68

Tech Tent: The woes of the world wide web



> Next Monday the web celebrates its 29th birthday. It was in 1989 that Berners-Lee, then a computer scientist at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, came up with a proposal for an information sharing system which his boss described as "vague but exciting".
> 
> Both he and other web pioneers were hugely optimistic about its potential to foster collaboration and an open exchange of views. "Humanity once connected by technology would do wonderful things," he says.
> 
> He cites Wikipedia as one example of where that dream has been realised - but says the rise of social media platforms, where bullying and abuse are commonplace, has made him change his view.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk shares updated pedestrian-first Boring Co. Hyperloop transit plan



> Elon Musk has shifted his pans for The Boring Company: While it will still focus on digging tunnels to provide a network of underground tubes suitable for use by high-speed Hyperloop pods, the plan now is to use that Hyperloop to transport pedestrians and cyclists first, and then only later to work on moving cars around underground to bypass traffic.


----------



## ekim68

EPA's Science Advisory Board Has Not Met in 6 Months



> The U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board has not met in at least six months, and some of its members say it's being sidelined to avoid getting in the way of agency Administrator Scott Pruitt's anti-regulatory agenda.


----------



## ekim68

China's Anti-Pollution Initiative Produces Stellar Results



> It's no secret that Chinese cities have some of the worst air pollution on the planet. Many citizens of Chinese metropolises are forced to wear masks when they go outside, and Chinese life expectancy has suffered as a result. This crisis prompted the Chinese government to declare a "war against pollution" in 2014, and according to recent data, the country appears to be winning.
> 
> Over the past four years, pollution in China's major cities has decreased by an average of 32 percent, with some cities seeing an even bigger drop, according to professor Michael Greenstone of the Energy Policy Institute. This decline comes after several aggressive policies implemented by the Chinese government, including prohibiting the building of new coal plants, forcing existing plants to reduce their emissions, lowering the amount of automobile traffic, and closing down some steel mills and coal mines. The result has been a dramatic reduction in fine particulates in the atmosphere, which is the primary source of air pollution.


----------



## ekim68

VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock




> Volkswagen AG





> secured 20 billion euros ($25 billion) in battery supplies to underpin an aggressive push into electric cars in the coming years, ramping up pressure on Tesla Inc. as it struggles with production issues for the mainstream Model 3.
> 
> The world's largest carmaker will equip 16 factories to produce electric vehicles by the end of 2022, compared with three currently, Volkswagen said Tuesday in Berlin. The German manufacturer's plans to build as many as 3 million of the cars a year by 2025 is backstopped by deals with suppliers including Samsung SDI Co., LG Chem Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. for batteries in Europe and China.


----------



## ekim68

UN: Facebook has turned into a beast in Myanmar



> UN investigators have said the use of Facebook played a "determining role" in stirring up hatred against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
> 
> One of the team probing allegations of genocide in Myanmar said Facebook had "turned into a beast."
> 
> About 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since Myanmar's military launched an operation in August against "insurgents" in Rakhine state.


----------



## ekim68

Kelp forests are vital to marine biodiversity, just as Darwin predicted



> March 14 (UPI) -- Kelp forests are vital to a diversity of marine species, new research shows, just as Charles Darwin predicted during his initial visit to the Galapagos Islands.
> 
> During Darwin's 1835 research expedition, the famed naturalist surmised that the kelp forests ringing the islands were just as ecologically valuable as forests on land, if not more so.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft announces breakthrough in Chinese-to-English machine translation



> A team of Microsoft  researchers announced on Wednesday they've created the first machine translation system that's capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person. The company says it's tested the system repeatedly on a sample of around 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result to a person's translation in the process - and even hiring outside bilingual language consultants to further verify the machine's accuracy.


----------



## ekim68

Congress Quashed Research Into Gun Violence. Since Then, 600,000 People Have Been Shot.



> Guns in the home protect families.
> 
> For decades, that has been an essential part of the National Rifle Association's mantra in defending firearms ownership, repeated at congressional hearings, in advertisements and on T-shirts.
> 
> Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who once headed research on firearm violence at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wondered if there was any evidence backing the N.R.A.'s assertion.
> 
> "So we looked at the question, does having a gun at home protect your family or not?" Dr. Rosenberg recalled.
> 
> He was amazed by the answer. The landmark study in 1993 showed that bringing a gun into the home puts everyone at much greater risk.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's latest venture? A drive-in restaurant -- maybe even with carhops



> Having created an electric-car "Supercharger" network around the country, Tesla is creating a filling station of a different sort.
> 
> While Tesla CEO Elon Musk may be known as a visionary for dreaming of rockets to Mars or tunneling under cities, his latest idea is downright retro.
> 
> Tesla is planning to open a drive-in-style restaurant -- a concept straight out of the sock-hop 1950s -- next to a charging station in Santa Monica, Calif. The city confirms the proposal on its website where Tesla has filed for the application.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft wants to force Windows 10 Mail users to use Edge for email links



> Microsoft is testing a new change to its future version of Windows 10 which will probably annoy anyone using the operating system. The software giant revealed today that "we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge." The change means if you have Chrome or Firefox set as your default browser in Windows 10, Microsoft will simply ignore that and force you into Edge when you click a link within the Mail app.


----------



## ekim68

[url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-credit/china-to-bar-people-with-bad-social-credit-from-planes-trains-idUSKCN1GS10S]China to bar people with bad 'social credit' from planes, trains[/URL]



> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.
> 
> People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission's website on Friday.


----------



## ekim68

Once Written Off for Dead, the Aral Sea Is Now Full of Life




> Thanks to large-scale restoration efforts, the North Aral Sea has seen a resurgence of fish-a boon to the communities that rely on it.


----------



## ekim68

British billionaire to tackle Tesla for title of world's biggest battery



> In November last year, Tesla completed construction of the world's biggest battery in South Australia. But now, just a few months later, another contender is looking to swoop in and steal the crown from Elon Musk and co. Simec Zen Energy and British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta are planning to build an even larger storage battery in the same Australian state.
> 
> The new battery system is set to be built in Port Augusta, storing energy harvested by a solar farm currently under development at the Whyalla Steelworks. When it's completed, the new system is set to boast an installed capacity of 140 MWh and be capable of on output of up to 120 MW, compared to Tesla's 129 MWh/100 MW system at Jamestown.


----------



## ekim68

Two months of daily _GTA_ causes "no significant changes" in behavior



> A new, longer-term study of video game play from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Germany's University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf recently published in _Molecular Psychiatry_ found that adults showed "no significant changes" on a wide variety of behavioral measures after two straight months of daily violent game play.


----------



## ekim68

Water shortages could affect 5bn people by 2050, UN report warns



> More than 5 billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050 due to climate change, increased demand and polluted supplies, according to a UN report on the state of the world's water.
> 
> The comprehensive annual study warns of conflict and civilisational threats unless actions are taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs.


----------



## ekim68

A future colorfully lit by mystifying physics of paint-on semiconductors



> It defies conventional wisdom about semiconductors. It's baffling that it even works. It eludes physics models that try to explain it. This newly tested class of light-emitting semiconductors is so easy to produce from solution that it could be painted onto surfaces to light up our future in myriad colors shining from affordable lasers, LEDs, and even window glass.


----------



## ekim68

There are still 100,000 pay phones in America



> In 1999, you could still plunk a coin into one at 2 million phone booths in the United States. Only 5% of those are left today. About a fifth of America's 100,000 remaining pay phones are in New York, according to the FCC.


----------



## ekim68

The Cable Industry Is Quietly Securing A Massive Monopoly Over American Broadband



> Cable providers like Comcast and Charter continue to quietly secure a growing monopoly over American broadband. A new report by Leichtman Research notes that the nation's biggest cable companies added a whopping *83%* of all net broadband subscribers last quarter.


----------



## ekim68

Machine learning spots treasure trove of elusive viruses



> Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover nearly 6,000 previously unknown species of virus. The work, presented on 15 March at a meeting organized by the US Department of Energy (DOE), illustrates an emerging tool for exploring the enormous, largely unknown diversity of viruses on Earth.
> 
> Although viruses influence everything from human health to the degradation of trash, they are hard to study. Scientists cannot grow most viruses in the lab, and attempts to identify their genetic sequences are often thwarted because their genomes are tiny and evolve fast.


----------



## ekim68

As Storms Get Stronger, Building Codes Are Getting Weaker



> The showdown in the Florida statehouse last year had all the drama of a knock-down political brawl: Powerful industries clashing. Warnings of death and destruction. And a surprise last-minute vote, delivering a sweeping reform bill to the governor's desk.
> 
> The battle wasn't about gun control, immigration or healthcare, but about making it easier to ignore national guidelines on building codes. To the surprise of the insurers, engineers and safety advocates who opposed the change, the home builders won -- in a state that gets hit by more hurricanes than any other.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40547212/people-were-asked-to-name-women-tech-leaders-they-said-alexa-and-siri']People were asked to name women tech leaders. They said "Alexa" and "Siri"[/URL]



> The tech industry has a persistent problem with gender inequality, particularly in its leadership ranks, and a new study from LivePerson underscores just how depressingly persistent it truly is. When the company asked a representative sample of 1,000 American consumers whether they could name a famous woman leader in tech, 91.7% of respondents drew a complete blank, while only 8.3% said they could.
> 
> But wait, it gets worse: *Of those 8.3% who said they could name a famous woman tech leader, only 4% actually could*-and a quarter of those respondents named "Siri" or "Alexa." Now, granted, this represents only about 10 people in the survey group, but that's 10 people for whom the most famous woman in tech is a virtual assistant.


----------



## ekim68

France Puts the U.S. to Shame with Its Proposed New Legislation Defending Women



> A new bill being considered by the French parliament makes a bold move to fight sexual harassment, hitting men where it hurts the most-in their wallets.
> 
> Marlène Schiappa, the French gender equality minister (a government position dedicated to combating sexism), told the press on Wednesday that under this law, sexual harassers caught on the street would be subject to pay fines on the spot. The fines would range from 90-750 euros ($110-$920), and could be higher for repeat offenders or severe violations.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Shows Signs of a Model 3 Surge



> It's been a rough quarter for the rollout of Tesla's Model 3. There were faulty robots at the Nevada battery factory and an idled production line in California. Reservation holders from San Diego to Brooklyn, New York, saw their delivery times pushed back. What should have felt like a cascade of electric cars flooding American streets seemed more like a trickle.
> 
> Now, with less than two weeks left in the quarter, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is looking to make up for lost time. "Just got back from Gigafactory," he said on Twitter before dawn Thursday. "Will be at our Fremont factory in the morning. Tesla team is going all out."
> 
> Those efforts appear to be paying off.


----------



## ekim68

Geoengineering polar glaciers to slow sea-level rise



> Targeted geoengineering to preserve continental ice sheets deserves serious research and investment, argues an international team of researchers. Without intervention, by 2100 most large coastal cities will face sea levels that are more than three feet higher than they are currently.


----------



## ekim68

CDs, vinyl are outselling digital downloads for the first time since 2011



> Digital downloads had a short run as the top-selling format in the music industry. It took until 2011, a decade after the original iPod came out, for their sales surpass those of CDs and vinyl records, and they were overtaken by music streaming services just a few years later.
> 
> Now, digital downloads are once again being outsold by CDs and vinyl, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.


----------



## ekim68

Web's creator expresses sympathy for Facebook's 'devastated' Mark Zuckerberg




> Tim Berners-Lee also essentially tells Zuck to buck up: 'You can fix it'


----------



## ekim68

Norway Aims for Electric Planes to Help Slow Climate Change




> Norway





> -home to the world's highest per capita number of all-electric cars-is also planning to go emission-free in the friendly skies.
> 
> The Scandinavian country aims to be the first in the world to switch to electric air transport.
> 
> State-owned Avinor, which operates most of the country's airports, plans to adopt battery-powered planes in the coming years to help slow climate change, Reuters reported.
> 
> "In my mind, there's no doubt that by 2040 Norway will be operating totally electric" on short-haul flights, Dag Falk-Pedersen, head of Avinor, said at an aviation conference in Oslo.


----------



## ekim68

Nissan gives old EV batteries new life to power Japanese cities



> Nissan has announced a project to recycle old electric vehicle (EV) batteries for smart lighting solutions in cities.
> 
> Last week, the Yokohama, Japan-based automaker said that the new project, titled " The Reborn Light," will breathe new life into old EV batteries in order to provide residents of Namie, Japan, with public lighting.
> 
> In a statement, Nissan said that old batteries from the Nissan Leaf electric car, coupled with solar panels, will power the new streetlights.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk says Boring Company will sell 'Lego-like' kits of excavated rock



> Elon Musk has sold millions of dollars of branded hats and flamethrowers, and now, he says his Boring Company will sell "interlocking bricks" made from the rock that its tunnel-creating machines excavate from the ground. In other words, think Lego, he says, except giant, heavy, and made of earth.


----------



## ekim68

Study: wind and solar can power most of the United States



> This study considered only wind and solar. If other sources, such as hydroelectricity, biofuels, or even nuclear power were added, it would be relatively straightforward to reach 100% clean energy. Furthermore, people are learning to use energy more wisely, either by using more efficient products or purchasing electricity during off-peak hours. These behavioral changes can also help us reach a 100% clean energy target.
> 
> The point is, the use of clean energy to power an entire country (or a group of countries) is achievable. It's no longer viable to say "we can't."


----------



## RT

not sure if this belongs here ( or anywhere)... maybe not a sign of times, but people do odd things these days.
This guy got tattooed enough to make himself the opposite, of what he was,,,appearance wise.
I'm old fashioned and just don't "get it...", so maybe it is a sign of the times in that respect. But to each his own,  be as weird as you want 
( I was once called "a nice guy...weird as hell, but a nice guy." 
I rest on my laurels :

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/m...oking-like-a-negative-version-of-himself.html


----------



## RT

Gosh, I used to eat these creatures...
But this makes sense, no great mystery, it's just presented in a dramatic way to boost circulation, I figure.
But if I said to you...
"Sometimes, they bite people, and steal their Doritos."
wouldn't you click that?


----------



## ekim68

Not trying to get Esoteric, but should we eat our friends?


----------



## RT

uh, I heard once about something 'r 'nother about that...question of survival...
fortunately we don't seem to be in that situation, nor any where near that circumstance ...
yet....
Having said that, don't watch the movie _Soylent Green_ ...
because you already know how it ends up...


----------



## ekim68

Like It or Not, Snowmaking Is The Future



> Snowmaking, as everybody knows, is Plan B. We'd all rather ski on natural, God-given powder that falls from stormy clouds. The real stuff is always going to be better than the fake stuff. But as times move forward, the odds are we'll be skiing more and more of the fake stuff whether we like it or not.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft to ban 'offensive language' from Skype, Xbox, Office and other services




> Microsoft will ban 'offensive language' and 'inappropriate content' from Skype, Xbox, Office and other services on May 1, claiming it has the right to go through your private data to 'investigate.'


----------



## ekim68

Nearly a third of tech workers are ready to #DeleteFacebook



> The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica fiasco has done a great deal of damage to not only Facebook's reputation, but also its finances. In the short term, the social network can afford to take a hit on share prices, but in the longer term there is the trust of users to regain.
> 
> A survey conducted in the wake of the #DeleteFacebook campaign that followed revelations about the data breach and the logging of Android users' calls and texts, found that a surprising number of tech workers were ready to delete their Facebook accounts.


----------



## ekim68

Chevron just agreed in court that humans cause climate change, setting a new legal precedent



> Last week, a federal judge at the US District Court for the Northern District of California held a five-hour tutorial to lay the scientific foundation for two lawsuits against the five biggest oil companies in the world.
> 
> The plaintiffs, the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, brought three world-renowned climate scientists to the tutorial. The defendants - BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and ConocoPhillips - sent one lawyer, from Chevron. And when it was his turn to present, the Chevron attorney agreed that human activity is changing the climate and that it warrants action.


----------



## ekim68

Half of All U.S. Coal Plants Would Lose Money Without Regulation



> Power grids may face "massive" upheaval as more uneconomic plants close, according to the report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The problem is particularly bad in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere in the Southeast, where the distance from major coal mines drives up prices. The study examined the monthly economic performance of every U.S. coal plant in operation since 2012.
> 
> Still, many coal plants manage to shield themselves from economics. About 95 percent of those with operating expenses exceeding revenue operate in regions where regulators set rates, the study found. Instead of allowing market forces to determine their fate, regulators and utilities often keep struggling plants open to ensure stability on their grids.


----------



## ekim68

90 percent of affiliate ads on YouTube and Pinterest aren't disclosed, says study



> A new research paper from Princeton University has found that 90 percent of affiliate posts on YouTube and Pinterest aren't disclosed to users.
> 
> Affiliate links are customized URLs that content publishers can include in their posts. They're essentially ads, and publishers receive money from companies when users click on them. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that content makers identify when they're being paid to post something, but despite that, influencers continue to skirt around disclosures. The FTC has previously sent out letters to influencers reminding them of the requirement to communicate paid relationships with brands to their followers.


----------



## ekim68

Saudi Arabia to House World's Largest Solar Project



> According to the most recent data available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia is the second largest oil producer in the world. It produces 13 percent of the world's oil and gets 60 percent of its own electric energy from petroleum.
> 
> But the desert nation, whose Paris agreement action plan was rated as "critically-insufficient" by Climate Action Tracker in November 2017, is about to go from zero to hero on the green scale.
> 
> On Tuesday, it announced that it would partner with Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank to build the world's largest solar power project, Bloomberg reported.
> 
> Except that "world's largest" doesn't quite cover of size of the project's ambitions.


----------



## ekim68

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin



> Brexit has hit the internet, and not in a good way.
> 
> In an official statement Thursday, the European Commission announced it will cancel all 300,000 domains under the .eu top-level domain that have a UK registrant, following Britain's eventual departure from the European Union.


----------



## ekim68

Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you



> The harvesting of our personal details goes far beyond what many of us could imagine. So I braced myself and had a look.


----------



## ekim68

Judge Rejects Exxon's Attempt to Shut Down Climate Fraud Investigations




> The federal judge called Exxon's claim that its free speech rights were being violated by the state investigations 'a wild stretch of logic.'


----------



## ekim68

Palestinians hold day of mourning after 773 'shot with live ammunition'



> At least 15 killed when Israeli soldiers open fire during mass demonstrations in Gaza.


----------



## ekim68

The Secretive World of Selling Data About You



> You've probably had the experience of receiving mail, paper or electronic, from companies that obviously obtained your name from another company's list of customers. But what if you were to have a medical operation refused, without knowing it was because the hospital obtained a secret report that listed you as unlikely to pay? What if a college covertly turned you or your child down because they suspected you were unlikely to complete four years of payment? What if you didn't get a job, without knowing it was because of a report that listed you as a possible drug addict?
> 
> Those are the claims being made by critics of data brokers, companies which collect personal information on people through both public and private sources-from court records to websites to store sales-and provide it to a wide range of buyers.


----------



## ekim68

Big box stores are dying. What do we do with all the bodies?



> My memory of Toys 'R' Us now consists mostly of big empty boxes. While I don't remember many of the toys I got for Christmas as a child, the image of clumps of wrapping paper and piles of discarded cardboard is forever imprinted in my brain.
> 
> Now, Toys 'R' Us is leaving us with much bigger empty boxes-but these won't be as easy to throw away. On March 15, the company announced that, without a Hail Mary influx of cash, the beloved chain will be closing, leaving its 800-odd American storefronts vacant.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX's Starlink takes a big step forward in delivering internet from the sky



> Elon Musk's rocket-launching service, SpaceX, is planning to launch hundreds of satellites -- Starlink -- to deliver internet around the globe from Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Now, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved its request to create a satellite network to deliver "high-speed, reliable, and affordable broadband service" to consumers in the US and across the world.


----------



## ekim68

Move Over Moore's Law, Make Way for Huang's Law



> An exuberant Jensen Huang, who gave a keynote and popped up on stage during various events at Nvidia's 2018 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) held in San Jose, Calif. last week, repeatedly made the point that due to extreme advances in technology, graphics processing units (GPUs) are governed by a law of their own.
> 
> "There's a new law going on," he says, "a supercharged law."





> Just how fast does GPU technology advance? In his keynote address, Huang pointed out that Nvidia's GPUs today are 25 times faster than five years ago. If they were advancing according to Moore's law, he said, they only would have increased their speed by a factor of 10.


----------



## ekim68

Zipline launches the world's fastest commercial delivery drone



> A couple of years ago, Zipline created a national drone delivery system to ship blood and drugs to remote medical centers in Rwanda. Now it has developed what it claims is the world's swiftest commercial delivery drone, with a top speed of 128 kilometers an hour (a hair shy of 80 miles per hour).


----------



## ekim68

Astronomy and ecology come together in drone designed to tackle poaching problem



> If reductions in habitats due to deforestation and climate change weren't enough, many species around the world are being driven to the brink of extinction from poaching. We've already seen numerous efforts employing drones to help combat this threat, and now the aerial technology has been paired with software and techniques used by astronomers in a system designed to automatically detect and monitor wildlife in hard to reach areas, even at night when most poaching occurs.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft touts breakthrough in making chatbots more conversational



> Microsoft today announced that it has created what it believes is the "first technological breakthrough" toward making conversations with chatbots more like speaking to another person.
> 
> Microsoft says that it has figured out how to make chatbots talk and listen at the same time, allowing them to operate in "full duplex," to use telecommunications jargon. The company says this allows chatbots or assistants to have a flowing conversation with humans, much more akin to how people talk to one another. That stands in contrast to how digital assistants and bots currently work, where only one side can talk at any given time.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Scans the Photos and Links You Send on Messenger




> Facebook Inc.





> scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and reads chats when they're flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company's rules. If it doesn't, it gets blocked or taken down.


----------



## ekim68

Portland Anarchists Want to Fix Your Street's Potholes



> Anarchism: The belief in the eradication of government, growth of a utopian society defined by mutual aid, and, ultimately, a timely schedule for filling potholes.
> 
> Or so it goes in Portland, where locals recently peered out their windows to see random street-improvement workers, one dressed in a black mask wielding what looked like a post-apocalyptic cudgel. The men weren't there for another Trump protest; rather, they were packing asphalt into deep crevices that developed after the Pacific Northwest's brutal winter.
> 
> A small circle of friends created Portland Anarchist Road Care in February as a response to deteriorating road conditions, which they believe make driving and cycling less safe (as well as a financial burden to owners of damaged vehicles).


----------



## ekim68

Researchers boycott Korean university over 'killer robot' AI weapons lab



> Over 50 researchers from 30 countries will be boycotting all contact with South Korea's KAIST university once it opens an artificial intelligence weapons lab.


----------



## ekim68

China Shines Bright as Solar Leads Record Renewables Investment



> In its bid to no longer be seen as the world's worst polluter, China invested $127 billion in renewable energy last year. More than two-thirds of that was for 53 gigawatts of solar energy, enough capacity to power more than 38 million homes.


----------



## ekim68

'The Business of War': Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon



> WASHINGTON - Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
> 
> The letter, which is circulating inside Google and has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, reflects a culture clash between Silicon Valley and the federal government that is likely to intensify as cutting-edge artificial intelligence is increasingly employed for military purposes.


----------



## ekim68

Humans produce new brain cells throughout their lives, say researchers



> Humans continue to produce new neurons in a part of their brain involved in learning, memory and emotion throughout adulthood, scientists have revealed, countering previous theories that production stopped after adolescence. The findings could help in developing treatments for neurological conditions such as dementia.


----------



## ekim68

Automakers Went to Incredible Lengths to Convince the EPA to Roll Back Fuel Standards




> The industry also has fought seat belts, automatic emergency braking, smog rules, and airbags.


----------



## ekim68

China's Belt & Road Global Infrastructure Plan



> While we are creating a potential trade war, China is expanding a global infrastructure to sell its goods everywhere . . .


----------



## ekim68

Colombian government ordered to protect Amazon rainforest in historic legal ruling



> The Colombian government has been ordered to take urgent action to protect the Amazon rainforest by its own supreme court.
> 
> In a historic ruling, the country's most senior judges said the state had not done enough to tackle the destruction of the environment.
> 
> The court recognised the Amazon as an "entity subject of rights" - meaning it has the same legal rights as a human being - and ordered action plans to be drawn up within four months.


----------



## ekim68

"World's first autonomous shipping company" announced in Norway



> Last May we heard about the Yara Birkeland, which is planned to be the world's first all-electric and autonomous container ship. When it enters full autonomous control in 2020, it will likely be under the auspices of the just-announced world's first autonomous shipping company, Massterly.


----------



## ekim68

Bitcoin mining leads to an unexpected GPU gold rush




> Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency miners have created a dearth of mid-range and high-end GPU cards that are selling for twice as much as suggested retail. The reason: miners are setting up server farms with the cards.


----------



## ekim68

Berkeley offers its fastest-growing course - data science - online, for free



> The fastest-growing course in UC Berkeley's history - Foundations of Data Science - is being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus's online education hub, edX.
> 
> Data science is becoming important to more and more people because the world is increasingly data-driven - and not just science and tech but the humanities, business and government.


----------



## ekim68

California proposes new rules for self-driving cars to pick up passengers



> SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's public utility regulator on Friday signaled it would allow self-driving car companies to transport passengers without a backup driver in the vehicle, a step forward for autonomous car developers just as the industry faces heightened scrutiny over safety concerns.


----------



## ekim68

Two-thirds of tweeted links come from bots, report says



> We already know bots have a significant presence on Twitter.
> 
> But a report published Monday by the Pew Research Center suggests automated accounts are more prevalent than we may previously have thought.
> 
> Pew estimates that two-thirds, or about 66 percent, of the links shared on Twitter come from bots rather than people. The research specifically focused on the 2,315 most popular websites and over 1 million tweets sent between July 27 and Sept. 11, 2017.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/04/08/tesla-model-3-dual-motor-planned-july-elon-musk/']Tesla Model 3 with dual motor now planned for July, says Elon Musk[/URL]



> Tesla officially planned to release the Model 3 with dual motor all-wheel-drive in "mid-2018" and we have recently seen several signs that the new version of the vehicle is coming.
> 
> Now CEO Elon Musk linked the release of the new Model 3 powertrain with the automaker achieving a production rate of 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week, which he now expects to hit in July.


----------



## ekim68

World's first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden



> The world's first electrified road that recharges the batteries of cars and trucks driving on it has been opened in Sweden.
> 
> About 2km (1.2 miles) of electric rail has been embedded in a public road near Stockholm, but the government's roads agency has already drafted a national map for future expansion.
> 
> Sweden's target of achieving independence from fossil fuel by 2030 requires a 70% reduction in the transport sector.


----------



## ekim68

Cops Around the Country Can Now Unlock iPhones, Records Show



> FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that law enforcement agencies are "increasingly unable to access" evidence stored on encrypted devices.
> 
> Wray is not telling the whole truth.
> 
> Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials. Many of the documents were obtained by Motherboard using public records requests.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla relied on too many robots to build the Model 3, Elon Musk says



> Elon Musk says Tesla relied on too many robots to build the Model 3, which is partly to blame for the delays in manufacturing the crucial mass-market electric car. In an interview with CBS Good Morning, Musk agreed with Tesla's critics that there was over-reliance on automation and too few human assembly line workers building the Model 3.


----------



## ekim68

Ticks rising




> In a warming world, ticks thrive in more places than ever before, making Lyme disease the first epidemic of climate change


----------



## ekim68

This company wants to build a giant indoor farm next to every major city in the world



> Now a young Silicon Valley startup called Plenty thinks it has cracked the code. It has enormous expansion plans and a bank account full of fresh investor funding, but most excitingly, it is building a 100,000 square foot vertical-farming warehouse in Kent, Washington, just outside of Seattle, your author's home town. That farm is expected to be open and delivering produce locally by midyear, and is designed to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://lifehacker.com/these-1923-copyrighted-works-enter-the-public-domain-in-1825241296']These 1923 Copyrighted Works Enter the Public Domain in 2019[/URL]



> For the first time in twenty years, as the Atlantic points out, a whole year's worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2019.


----------



## ekim68

The iPhone changed our lives. Now Apple needs to tackle addiction



> Tony Fadell helped invent the iPod and was a key member of the team that created the iPhone. Now, he says, Apple needs to tackle the issue of smartphone addiction


----------



## ekim68

North and South Korea Reportedly in Talks to Officially End Korean War



> Technically, North and South Korea are still at war, and have been for more than six decades -- but an "absolutely earth-shaking" new report on Tuesday indicates the conflict may soon be coming to an end.
> 
> Citing an anonymous South Korean diplomatic official, Munhwa Ilbo -- a South Korean daily newspaper -- reported that the neighboring countries are hashing out a statement that could officially bring the war to an end later this month, when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in are set to meet in person for the first time.


----------



## ekim68

Carbon dioxide from ships at sea to be regulated for first time



> Carbon dioxide from ships at sea will be regulated for the first time following a historic agreement reached after two weeks of detailed talks in London.
> 
> Shipping companies will halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 under the plan, brokered by the International Maritime Organization and binding across its 170 member states.
> 
> The agreement will require a revolution among ships, which are overwhelmingly fuelled by heavy oils at present. In future, they will have to not only be more energy-efficient, but also make use of cleaner energy, in the form of batteries supplying electricity, solar and wind electricity generation, and perhaps even a return to sail in some cases, or more controversially to nuclear power, as some warships already use.


----------



## ekim68

Fossil Fuels on Trial: Where the Major Climate Change Lawsuits Stand Today



> A wave of legal challenges that is washing over the oil and gas industry, demanding accountability for climate change, started as a ripple after revelations that ExxonMobil had long recognized the threat fossil fuels pose to the world.
> 
> Over the past few years: Two states have launched fraud investigations into Exxon over climate change. Nine cities and counties, from New York to San Francisco, have sued major fossil fuel companies, seeking compensation for climate change damages. And determined children have filed lawsuits against the federal government and various state governments, claiming the governments have an obligation to safeguard the environment.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/04/17/tesla-model-3-production-goal-6000-units-per-week/']Tesla Model 3 production aims for 6,000 units per week in June after upgrade in May - ~5,000 with margin of error, says Elon Musk[/URL]



> In an email to employees today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk explained that the reason for the Model 3 production shutdown in Fremont and Gigafactory 1 is to prepare to increase production. Substantially.
> 
> Musk explained that Tesla is now shooting to more than double production of 6,000 units per week across all production processes and suppliers in order to achieve 5,000 units per week in June after accounting for a margin of error.


----------



## ekim68

MIT just discovered a way to mass-produce graphene in long rolls



> Scientists used to make graphene-based membranes in small batches in a laboratory. But a new breakthrough at MIT enables researchers to spool out long rolls of high-quality graphene. The continuous manufacturing process can produce five centimeters of high-quality graphene per minute. The longest run was nearly four hours, and it generated around 10 meters of continuous graphene.


----------



## ekim68

10-km Hyperloop planned for Abu Dhabi



> Fresh from showing off the first pieces of its first test track in France, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) has announced plans for a commercial Hyperloop system for the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi. All things going to plan, it will be ready just in time for Expo 2020, a festival of human ingenuity to be hosted by nearby Dubai.


----------



## ekim68

End of the landline: BT aims to move all UK customers to VoIP by 2025



> BT is shutting its traditional telephone network in the UK, according to an email seen by The Register.
> 
> The public switched telephone network (PSTN) closure is part of the company's plans to move in a fibre network direction in terms of its infrastructure.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Want to Replace Pesticides With Bacteria



> Fresh snow coats the sidewalks outside Indigo Ag Inc.'s Boston offices, but inside the temperature is calibrated to mimic spring in the Midwest. Hundreds of almost identical soy seedlings sit beneath high-intensity arc lamps, basking in the artificially sunny 60F weather.
> 
> The plants aren't destined to stay identical for long. "We haven't imposed the stress yet," says Geoffrey von Maltzahn, the company's lanky 37-year-old co-founder. The MIT-trained microbiologist gestures toward photos showing what happens when you apply Indigo's signature product-a coating of carefully chosen microbes-to some seeds but not others before planting, then dial back the water supply: One shows a tall, flourishing stalk; the other, what looks like a tangle of shriveled leaves.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/04/18/tesla-powerwall-powerpack-puerto-rico-blackout-elon-musk/']Tesla Powerwalls and Powerpacks keep the lights on at 662 locations in Puerto Rico during island-wide blackout, says Elon Musk[/URL]



> After Puerto Rico was ravaged by hurricanes last year, most of the island's population lost power for an extended period of time as the grid was badly damaged.
> 
> While power slowly came back online over the last few months, they still have been having issues and today, the entire power grid went down again for virtually everyone on the Puerto Rican Electric Power grid.
> 
> The cause is still unclear and being investigated.
> 
> Only people with energy storage systems were able to keep the lights on, including Tesla Energy customers.


----------



## ekim68

World Debt Hits Record $164 Trillion



> The world's debt load has ballooned to a record $164 trillion, a trend that could make it harder for countries to respond to the next recession and pay off debts if financing conditions tighten, the International Monetary Fund said.
> 
> Global public and private debt swelled to 225 percent of global gross domestic product in 2016, the last year for which the IMF provided figures, the fund said Wednesday in its semi-annual Fiscal Monitor report. The previous peak was in 2009, according to the Washington-based fund.


----------



## ekim68

'Incredible' News as Banking Giant HSBC Ditches New Coal, Tar Sands, and Offshore Arctic Drilling Projects



> In another signal that "the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close," Europe's biggest bank, HSBC, announced Friday that it will no longer fund oil or gas projects in the Arctic, tar sands projects, or most coal projects.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla batteries will live longer than expected, survey finds




> Tesla batteries





> retain over 90 percent of their charging power after 160,000 miles, according to data gathered by a Dutch-Belgium Tesla owners group. According to its survey of over 350 owners, the EVs dropped about 5 percent of their capacity after 50,000 miles, but lose it at a much slower rate after that. If the trend holds, most Tesla vehicles will still have 90 percent capacity after around 300,000 km (185,000 miles), and 80 percent capacity after a whopping 800,000 km (500,000 miles).


----------



## ekim68

Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry



> Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport-and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand.
> 
> The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters-the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.


----------



## ekim68

Dark chocolate consumption reduces stress and inflammation



> New research shows there might be health benefits to eating certain types of dark chocolate. Findings from two studies being presented today at the Experimental Biology 2018 annual meeting in San Diego show that consuming dark chocolate that has a high concentration of cacao (minimally 70% cacao, 30% organic cane sugar) has positive effects on stress levels, inflammation, mood, memory and immunity. While it is well known that cacao is a major source of flavonoids, this is the first time the effect has been studied in human subjects to determine how it can support cognitive, endocrine and cardiovascular health.
> 
> Lee S. Berk, DrPH, associate dean of research affairs, School of Allied Health Professions and a researcher in psychoneuroimmunology and food science from Loma Linda University, served as principal investigator on both studies.


----------



## ekim68

Mosaic turns 25: The beginning of the modern web



> In the beginning, the web, or WEB as it was known then, was a mystery. Like gopher and archie, it was a character-based internet tool interface that only the proud, the few, and the early internet users knew about. Then, everything changed. First, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) made it easy for anyone to get on the net, and then two graduate students, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, created the first popular web browser: Mosaic.


----------



## ekim68

World's fastest EV charger gives drivers 120 miles in 8 minutes



> Swiss company ABB has launched its Terra High Power DC fast charger, which can put out an impressive 350 kilowatts, charging at nearly three times the rate of Tesla's Superchargers. It'll enable super fast car charging - but only once cars are ready to handle it.
> 
> The fast charger could shift electrons in the battery so fast that an average electric car would be able to gain 120 miles (200 km) of range in just 8 minutes. In order for electric cars to be fully accepted as long-range touring vehicles, they'll need these kinds of crazy charge rates and more, considering that fossil fuel-powered cars can be filled up in a matter of a few minutes. Mind you, when you're not doing long distances, EVs can be charged slowly at home for a tiny fraction of what a tank of fuel would cost you.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://earther.com/tabasco-sauce-is-in-a-battle-for-its-very-survival-1825510123']Tabasco Sauce Is in a Battle For Its Very Survival[/URL]



> Even though it's only 152 feet above sea level at its peak, Avery Island is one the highest points in the Gulf Coast. A two hour drive west of New Orleans, it sits atop an enormous salt dome that bulges from the earth, elevating the land above the swamps and bayous that surround it. A generation ago, it was unthinkable that this natural fortress could be overcome by water. But Hurricane Rita's threatening surges were a symptom of an immense shift in the Gulf Coast, the result of decades of harsh land use practices and climate change.
> 
> "The waters are rising," Osborn says.
> 
> Now, the McIlhennys are fighting to save the island to which their family history and business are inextricably linked.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.com/pollution-pods-show-londoners-the-toxic-air-theyre-help-1825533885']'Pollution Pods' Show Londoners the Toxic Air They're Helping Create[/URL]



> Pictures of the air pollution in developing countries have gone viral, and stories about toxic fog have proliferated for years. Yet they can feel unreal and divorced from the everyday experience in Western countries, where huge strides have been made to clean up the air (for wealthy people anyways). A new art exhibition in London transports your lungs to New Delhi, Beijing, and Sao Paolo, in an effort to make it clear just how horrific the air quality is there, and to serve as a reminder that the iPhones, H&M shirts, and other tchotchke we buy are part of a system that is taking years off people's lives.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Cord Cutting Caused by 74% TV Price Hikes Since 2000



> Cord cutting is being caused primarily by a 74% increase in customer cable bills since 2000, according to market analysis by Kagan, S&P Global Market Intelligence. That increase is even adjusted for inflation, and it should be noted that individual earnings have seen a modest decline during that same period, making soaring cable rates untenable for many. This affordability gap is "squeezing penetration rates, particularly among the more economically vulnerable households," the research company added.


----------



## ekim68

Robot-launched weather balloons in Alaska hasten demise of remote stations



> Last Thursday, just before 3 p.m., things began stirring inside the truck-size box that sat among melting piles of snow at the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. Inside, software ran checks on instruments to measure atmospheric temperature, humidity, and pressure; a tray slid into place; and a nozzle began filling a large balloon with gas. Finally, the roof of the box yawned open and a weather balloon took off into the sunny afternoon, instruments dangling. The entire launch was triggered with the touch of a button, 5 kilometers away at an office of the National Weather Service (NWS).
> 
> The flight was smooth, just one of hundreds of twice-daily balloon launches around the world that radio back crucial data for weather forecasts. But most of those balloons are launched by people; the robotic launchers, which are rolling out across Alaska, are proving to be controversial. NWS says the autolaunchers will save money and free up staff to work on more pressing matters. But representatives of the employee union question their reliability, and say they will hasten the end of Alaska's remote weather offices, where forecasting duties and hours have already been slashed. "The autolauncher is just another nail in their coffin," says Kimberly Vaughan, a union steward in Juneau.


----------



## ekim68

For the first time, parents will be able to limit YouTube Kids to human-reviewed channels and recommendations



> To address parents' concerns over inappropriate content on YouTube being seen by children, Google today is announcing an expanded series of parental controls for its YouTube Kids application. The new features will allow parents to lock down the YouTube Kids app so it only displays those channels* that have been reviewed by humans, not just algorithms. And this includes both the content displayed within the app itself, as well as the recommended videos. A later update will allow parents to configure which videos and channels, specifically, can be viewed.


----------



## ekim68

China's National Energy Administration said on Tuesday that in the first quarter of 2018, the country had increased its renewable energy capacity, mostly solar, by 15 gigawatts.



> That's the equivalent of building five of America's largest nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde Generating Station, in just three months.
> 
> The quarterly jump in solar power capacity alone - 9.65 gigawatts - is almost as much as what the US installed in the whole of last year, at 10.6 gigawatts, and represents an increase of 22% compared to the same period last year.


----------



## ekim68

BREAKING: Scientists Have Confirmed a New DNA Structure Inside Human Cells



> For the first time, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure never before seen in living cells.
> 
> The discovery of what's described as a 'twisted knot' of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry than just the double helix structure everybody associates with DNA - and the forms these molecular variants take affect how our biology functions.


----------



## ekim68

Quantum radar to render stealth technologies ineffective



> Stealth technology may not be very stealthy in the future thanks to a US$2.7-million project by the Canadian Department of National Defence to develop a new quantum radar system. The project, led by Jonathan Baugh at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses the phenomenon of quantum entanglement to eliminate heavy background noise, thereby defeating stealth anti-radar technologies to detect incoming aircraft and missiles with much greater accuracy.


----------



## ekim68

The Sherman Anti Trust Laws are rolling over in their Graves...


T-Mobile to Buy Sprint for $26.5 Billion in Bet on Networks



> T-Mobile US Inc. agreed to acquire Sprint Corp. for $26.5 billion in stock, a wager that the carriers can team up to build a next-generation wireless network and get a jump on industry leaders Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/foxconn-will-drain-7-million-gallons-of-water-per-day-f-1825624659']Foxconn Will Drain 7 Million Gallons of Water Per Day From Lake Michigan to Make LCD Screens[/URL]



> This week, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources gave the go-ahead to Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn to siphon off seven million gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan, despite protests from conservation groups.
> 
> The massive diversion of water from the lake will be used to produce LCD screens at the company's planned $10 billion, 20 million square foot manufacturing plant set to be built in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.


----------



## ekim68

Seattle wipes criminal marijuana convictions for hundreds of people



> Officials in Seattle are taking a step to vacate every misdemeanour marijuana conviction in the past few decades in a major step for the city since the state legalised recreational marijuana.
> 
> The city says that the motion to vacate the marijuana convictions would impact more than 500 people.


----------



## ekim68

On This Day 25 Years Ago, the Web Became Public Domain



> Twenty-five years ago today, the World Wide Web announced that it was for everybody. On April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put the web into the public domain a decision that has fundamentally altered the past quarter-century.


----------



## ekim68

Oldest-known spider killed by wasp at age of 43



> April 30 (UPI) -- A team of Australian scientists said they were "really miserable" to discover the world's oldest-known spider was killed by a wasp sting at the age of 43.
> 
> Leanda Mason, lead author of the Curtin University study published in the Pacific Conservation Biology Journal, said the female trapdoor spider, known as Number 16, was 43 years old when it was killed by a wasp sting at its burrow in the wild.


----------



## ekim68

Wow, just noticed that YouTube went to a different Format for me, and I like it...:up:


----------



## ekim68

Facebook launches Clear History feature that should have been there all along



> Clear History will take a few months to build and input from various parties, but Facebook will allow users to clear their data trail--just like you can with your browsers.


----------



## ekim68

Russia Launches Floating Nuclear Power Plant; It's Headed To The Arctic



> A massive floating nuclear power plant is now making its way toward its final destination at an Arctic port, after Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom launched the controversial craft over the weekend. It's the first nuclear power plant of its kind, Russian officials say.


----------



## ekim68

California and States Representing Over 40 Percent of U.S. Car Market Sue to Defend National Clean Car Rules



> SACRAMENTO - Moving to curb toxic air pollution and improve car gas mileage, California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr., California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the California Air Resources Board today announced California is leading an 18-state coalition to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to preserve the nation's single vehicle emission standard.


----------



## ekim68

Palestinians face explosive bullets, dangerous gas bombs



> Demonstrators suffer wounds of 'unusual severity' as Israeli forces introduce deadlier weapons in Gaza protests


----------



## ekim68

The water war that will decide the fate of 1 in 8 Americans



> Lake Mead is the country's biggest reservoir of water. Think of it as the savings account for the entire Southwest. Right now, that savings account is nearly overdrawn.
> 
> For generations, we've been using too much of the Colorado River, the 300-foot-wide ribbon of water that carved the Grand Canyon, supplies Lake Mead, and serves as the main water source for much of the American West.
> 
> The river sustains one in eight Americans - about 40 million people - and millions of acres of farmland. In the next 40 years, the region is expected to add at least 10 million more people, as the region's rainfall becomes more erratic.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.com/in-kenya-a-local-tribe-is-saving-the-elephants-it-once-1825693138']In Kenya, a Local Tribe Is Saving the Elephants It Once Killed[/URL]



> The Samburu, who are nomadic livestock herders, have partnered with their local government since 2016 to raise and release injured and orphaned baby elephants in the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary. They now take care of more than 12 of these little kings and queens, forging a new relationship between humans and animals. It's the first elephant orphanage in Africa that a local community owns and runs.


----------



## ekim68

Chrome on desktop now mutes annoying autoplays by learning from your behavior



> There's little that's more annoying on the web than videos that start playing automatically and with their volume up. Over the course of the last few years, Chrome and other browser vendors have started to combat this, but for the most part, those solutions relied on the user explicitly taking action. Now, following the launch of a similar feature on mobile, Chrome on desktop is also getting much smarter about which sites it'll allow to autoplay and which it'll block - and it'll learn from your behavior to personalize this feature.


----------



## ekim68

'Game changing' graphene concrete is twice as strong and better for the planet



> Add concrete to the list of things graphene can improve. Scientists at the University of Exeter's Center for Graphene Science developed a new technique to incorporate graphene in concrete production with the help of nanoengineering technology - and the resulting material is not only over twice as strong as concretes we have today, but it "drastically reduced the carbon footprint of conventional concrete production methods."


----------



## ekim68

Black teen girl scientists in NASA competition targeted by hackers for their race



> Hackers tried to sway a NASA challenge in order to attack grade school students based on their race, the administration confirmed.
> 
> The challenge from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center encourages students to find "spinoff" technology in their everyday world and involves public voting via social media to signal support.
> 
> However, NASA said on April 29 it had to shut down the voting portion after learning hackers attempted to alter the final vote totals.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube gets 1.8 billion logged-in viewers monthly



> On stage today at Radio City Music Hall, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made a surprising revelation: the service gets 1.8 billion logged-in viewers every month. And that doesn't include people who aren't logged in -- which means the actual number of people watching YouTube is definitely much higher.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://earther.com/beneath-a-melting-glacier-a-peruvian-town-prepares-for-1825713749']Beneath a Melting Glacier, a Peruvian Town Prepares For the Worst[/URL]



> Huaraz, Peru-From a stone hut perched on the edge of the glacial lake Palcacocha, 14,980 feet above sea level, Juan Victor Morales radios down to a dispatcher in the city of Huaraz below. He is all that stands between the city and disaster.
> 
> Today, it's just a routine call, one the wind-chapped lookout makes every two hours during his fifteen day shift. Speaking into the handset of the CB radio, Morales reports the temperature, the amount of precipitation, and the level of the lake, then pauses to listen to the sound of a distant avalanche.
> 
> "Don't worry, that one is far away," he says after the last echo of the avalanche's rumble has faded out. He isn't spooked: After all, there are avalanches here practically every day.


----------



## ekim68

Allianz to stop insuring coal plants, phase out investments



> BERLIN (AP) - Allianz says it will stop insuring coal-fired power plants and coal mines as part of its contribution to combating climate change.
> 
> Europe's biggest insurer says it's also set itself a goal of phasing out investments in coal companies and increasing its use of renewable energy by 2040.


----------



## ekim68

This Woman Is on the Verge of Breaking Down One of the Biggest Gender Barriers in Sports




> Becky Hammon is interviewing to become the first female head coach in the NBA.


----------



## ekim68

126 bases have water contamination linked to cancers and birth defects, Pentagon finds



> The Pentagon has found that the water at or around 126 military installations across the country contains potentially harmful chemicals that have been linked to cancers and birth defects, Military Times recently reported.
> 
> The March report provided to the House Armed Services Committee documented the full scope of the contamination for the very first time. The report indicates that the Department of Defense found 401 active and Base Closure and Realignment installments in the U.S. with at least one contaminated area consisting of perfluorinated compounds.
> 
> In total, 25 Army bases, 50 Air Force bases and 49 Navy or Marine Corps bases have all tested at high levels for the compounds in either the drinking water or ground water sources. The Defense Department also tested an additional 2,668 groundwater wells on-site and in surrounding communities, and found 61 percent that tested above the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recommended levels.


----------



## ekim68

Ticketmaster hopes to speed up event access by scanning your face



> Ticketmaster envisions a future wherein you no longer need either a physical or a digital ticket to get into a venue. Its parent company Live Nation, has announced that the ticket sales giant has teamed up with and invested in a face recognition company called Blink Identity. In its first quarter financial report (PDF), Live Nation has explained that Blink has "cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show."


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Cities Lose Tree Cover Just When They Need It Most



> Scientific evidence that trees and green spaces are crucial to the well-being of people in urban areas has multiplied in recent decades. Conveniently, these findings have emerged just as Americans, already among the most urbanized people in the world, are increasingly choosing to live in cities. The problem-partly as a result of that choice-is that urban tree cover is now steadily declining across the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

After Equifax breach, major firms still rely on same flawed software



> Last year's massive data breach at Equifax should have been a wake-up call for the entire industry.
> 
> Hackers stole 145 million records by exploiting a vulnerability in a widely used open-source web server software that the credit rating giant failed to patch months earlier. Names, addresses, social security numbers, and more were swiped -- leaving Americans at risk of credit fraud and identity theft.
> 
> But a year after the patches were released, some of the world's wealthiest companies are still using, or have since introduced the same flawed software.


----------



## ekim68

Welcome To Partytown, Baghdad



> Fifteen years after the US invasion, and the war against ISIS, the Iraqi capital is alive and buzzing, with bars and restaurants open til the early morning.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Boring Company will sell Lego-like bricks to solve affordable housing crisis



> In 2016, entrepreneur Elon Musk launched the Boring Company with the goal of one day constructing a large urban network of tunnels.
> 
> The company is working on two projects in the Washington, DC region and Los Angeles. It first broke ground on a test site in LA in late 2017.
> 
> In order to bore tunnels, construction crews will need to excavate through rock and soil. In late March, Musk tweeted that instead of disposing that leftover earth, he plans to recycle it into interlocking, Lego-style bricks that can be used to build houses and other structures. He tweeted again about these plans on Monday, saying that the bricks will be used for low-income housing.


----------



## ekim68

In Blow to Monsanto, India's Top Court Upholds Decision That Seeds Cannot Be Patented



> In an another legal blow to Monsanto, India's Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the Delhi High Court's ruling that the seed giant cannot claim patents for Bollgard and Bollgard II, its genetically modified cotton seeds, in the country.


----------



## ekim68

New battery doubles Renault ZOE's driving range to 400 km



> When it premiered in 2012, the production version of the all-electric Renault ZOE offered a driving range of up to 209 km (130 miles) per charge. Well, things have changed since then. Debuting this week at the Paris Motor Show, the latest version of the car nearly doubles that figure, reportedly topping out at 400 km (249 miles).


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/08/apple-location-apps-third-parties/']Apple cracking down on applications that send location data to third-parties[/URL]



> Over the last few days, Apple has seemingly started cracking down on applications that share location data with third-parties. In such cases, Apple has been removing the application in question and informing developers that their app violates two parts of the App Store Review Guidelines…


----------



## ekim68

Americans With No Religion Greatly Outnumber White Evangelicals



> It's relatively well-known that the portion of the U.S. population with no religious affiliation has been steadily increasing recently. And for those paying attention to research, it's also been obvious for a while that conservative evangelicals were beginning to lose "market share" after years of mocking their mainline Protestant cousins of "dying" because of insufficiently rigorous theology and moral strictures.
> 
> But now comes a new set of data from years of polling by ABC News and the Washington _Post_ that puts these trends together in a way that might bust some old preconceptions.


----------



## ekim68

26% of Companies Ignore Security Bugs Because They Don't Have the Time to Fix Them



> A survey compiled last month at the RSA security conference reveals that most companies are still behind with proper security practices, and some of them even intentionally ignore security flaws for various reasons ranging from lack of time to lack of know-how.
> 
> The survey, which compiled answers from 155 security professionals from the companies present at the RSA conference, revealed that only 47% of organizations patch vulnerabilities as soon as they are known.
> 
> Most worrisome is that some companies wait quite some time before applying patches, exposing their IT infrastructure to attacks. More precisely, 16% wait for one month, while 8% said they only apply patches once or twice a year.


----------



## ekim68

McDonald's Billboards Among Targets of London Travel Ad Ban



> Billboards advertising junk food offered by vendors like McDonald's Corp. might be banned from London's Underground rail and bus network under new plans announced by the city's mayor as part of his efforts to tackle rising levels of childhood obesity.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching




> Google's





> YouTube  is the first streaming app that will actually tell users to stop watching. At its Google I/O conference this week, the company introduced a series of new controls for YouTube that will allow users to set limits on their viewing, and then receive reminders telling them to "take a break." The feature is rolling out now in the latest version of YouTube's app, along with others that limit YouTube's ability to send notifications, and soon, one that gives users an overview of their binge behavior so they can make better-informed decisions about their viewing habits.


----------



## ekim68

Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench



> The Mariana Trench-the deepest point in the ocean-extends nearly 36,000 feet down in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. But if you thought the trench could escape the global onslaught of plastics pollution, you would be wrong.
> 
> A recent study revealed that a plastic bag, like the kind given away at grocery stores, is now the deepest known piece of plastic trash, found at a depth of 36,000 feet inside the Mariana Trench. Scientists found it by looking through the Deep-Sea Debris Database, a collection of photos and videos taken from 5,010 dives over the past 30 years that was recently made public.


----------



## ekim68

US blocks United Nations call for independent probe into Gaza deaths



> The United States blocked a United Nations (UN) Security Council statement drafted Monday that called for an independent investigation into the deaths of at least 58 Palestinians along the Israeli-Gaza border.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla tackles Guinness World Record by towing a commercial airliner



> A Boeing Dreamliner taxiing at Melbourne Airport has received a helping hand, with Tesla's brawny Model X towing the airliner across the tarmac as part of a Guinness World Record attempt.
> 
> The vehicle deployed for the stunt was a Model X P100D, which in Tesla speak refers to a 100-kWh battery pack and the D denoting a dual-motor, all-wheel drive. This makes for an on-road towing capacity of 2.5 tons (5,500 lb), but the car went above and beyond that by some margin when it tugged the 130-ton (260,000-lb) aircraft across the tarmac.


----------



## ekim68

https://electrek.co/2018/05/14/tesla-powerpack-project-grid-balancing-europe/
Tesla unveils new large Powerpack project for grid balancing in Europe



> Tesla has unveiled yet another new large Powerpack energy storage project and this time, it's going to be used as a virtual power plant for grid balancing in Europe.
> 
> The new project has been unveiled today in Terhills, Belgium.
> 
> It is made of 140 Powerpacks and a bunch of Tesla inverters for a total power output of 18.2 MW.


----------



## ekim68

Intelligence is correlated with fewer neural connections, not more, study finds



> The smartest people may boast more neurons than those of average intelligence, but their brains have fewer neural connections, new research proves.
> 
> Neuroscientists in Germany recruited 259 participants, both men and women, to take IQ tests and have their brains imaged. Testing provided a measure of each participant's intelligence, while neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging revealed the number of dendrites, or neural connections, in each participant's brain.
> 
> The research revealed a strong correlation between the number of dendrites in a person's cerebral cortex and their intelligence. The smartest participants had fewer neural connections in their cerebral cortex.


----------



## ekim68

We're Getting Way Better at Forecasting Storms, and It's Helping Humanitarian Groups



> In an era of increasingly extreme hurricanes, floods, and drought, the people in charge of preparing for disasters depend on meteorologists to anticipate where the next catastrophe might strike. Here's some good news: Meteorologists are coming through, with unprecedented accuracy.
> 
> In fact, weather forecasting technology has improved so dramatically that humanitarian organizations can now fund disaster relief _before_ disaster hits. It's a revolutionary change that could save countless lives.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk pitches 150 MPH rides in Boring Company tunnels for $1



> Earlier in the evening Musk retweeted an LA Metro tweet that said it's coordinating with The Boring Company on its test and said the two will be "partners" going forward. Much of what Musk discussed about how his concept in-city Loop would work has been answered in concept videos and the company's FAQ, but he specifically said that the plan is for rides that cost a $1, and carry up to 16 passengers through hundreds of tunnels to those small, parking space-size tunnels located throughout a city.


----------



## ekim68

Record-setting electric plane tows glider up into the sky in seconds



> Siemens has just announced that an electric aerobatic plane powered by its latest motor has nabbed two world speed records. The Extra 330LE aircraft is now the fastest e-plane under 1,000 kg, and also - after a few mods - the quickest above 1,000 kg, too. The electric test plane also became the first in the world to tow a glider up into the skies.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393']Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct[/URL]



> Google's unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase "don't be evil." But that's over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.


----------



## ekim68

A floating Pacific island is in the works with its own government, cryptocurrency and 300 houses



> The Floating Island Project plans to create off-shore housing that uses its own currency and operates outside of government regulations.
> 
> The project is a pilot program in partnership with the government of French Polynesia.
> 
> A long-term vision for the project is hundreds of new countries floating on the ocean.


----------



## ekim68

UN votes to send war crimes investigators to Gaza



> The United Nations' top human rights body has voted to send a team of international war crimes investigators to probe the deadly shootings of Gaza protesters by Israeli forces.
> 
> A resolution calling on the UN Human Rights Council to"urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry" was backed on Friday by 29 members.
> 
> Two members - the United States and Australia - voted against and 14 abstained.


----------



## ekim68

Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over D.C., Md., Va.



> The technology can be as small as a suitcase, placed anywhere at any time, and it's used to track cell phones and intercept calls.
> 
> The News4 I-Team found dozens of potential spy devices while driving around Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia.
> 
> "While you might not be a target yourself, you may live next to someone who is. You could still get caught up," said Aaron Turner, a leading mobile security expert.
> 
> The device, sometimes referred to by the brand name StingRay, is designed to mimic a cell tower and can trick your phone into connecting to it instead.


----------



## ekim68

Nearly Everyone In The U.S. And Canada Just Had Their Private Cell Phone Location Data Exposed



> A company by the name of LocationSmart isn't having a particularly good month.
> 
> The company recently received all the wrong kind of attention when it was caught up in a privacy scandal involving the nation's wireless carriers and our biggest prison phone monopoly. Like countless other companies and governments, LocationSmart buys your wireless location data from cell carriers. It then sells access to that data via a portal that can provide real-time access to a user's location via a tailored graphical interface using just the target's phone number.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/05/20/tesla-unveils-faster-and-more-powerful-model-3-dual-motor-awd-and-performance-versions/']Tesla unveils faster and more powerful Model 3 dual motor AWD and Performance versions[/URL]



> Tesla finally released the specs and opened the orders for the long-awaited Model 3 dual motor all-wheel-drive and performance versions.


----------



## ekim68

Estonia Will Roll Out Free Public Transit Nationwide



> It feels like the free public transit plans are coming like buses: You wait ages for one, then several come at once.
> 
> Yesterday, I wrote about how Paris is looking into the possibility of abolishing fares on its metros and buses, an effort that, if it went forward, would make the city and its environs the world's largest free transit zone. But, as an alert reader pointed out, there's an arguably bigger cost-free travel scheme in the works, and it's far more concrete: On July 1, the entire country of Estonia will create the largest 24/7 free public transit zone in the world, one that will stretch across its entire territory. That will make it feasibly possible (if complicated) to travel by bus from one end of this 1.3 million-strong Baltic nation to the other without paying a cent.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix's DVD Rental Business Is Still Profitable




> Netflix





> might be focusing on its streaming business, but the produce that made its name is still alive-and apparently well.
> 
> The company's DVD.com DVD rental business has 3 million subscribers and generated a whopping $56 million in profit on just $99 million in revenue during the first quarter, CNBC is reporting. That staggering profit margin aside, Netflix's business has a wide selection of 100,000 DVDs, which easily overshadows the 5,600 streaming titles available on Netflix, according to the report.


----------



## ekim68

European lawmakers asked Mark Zuckerberg why they shouldn't break up Facebook



> European Parliament members asked Mark Zuckerberg today whether Facebook was a monopoly that potentially needed breaking up, echoing concerns voiced in the United States. In a conference with Zuckerberg, German MEP Manfred Weber asked whether the Facebook CEO could name a single European alternative to his "empire," which includes apps like WhatsApp and Instagram in addition to Facebook. "I think it's time to discuss breaking up Facebook's monopoly, because it's already too much power in only one hand," said Weber. "So I ask you simply, and that is my final question: can you convince me not to do so?"


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: FBI Seizes Control of Russian Botnet



> FBI agents armed with a court order have seized control of a key server in the Kremlin's global botnet of 500,000 hacked routers, The Daily Beast has learned. The move positions the bureau to build a comprehensive list of victims of the attack, and short-circuits Moscow's ability to reinfect its targets.


----------



## ekim68

Ocean Cleanup Project tests the waters with its first rollout in the Pacific



> The Ocean Cleanup project has been busy knocking up its first barriers since moving into an old naval base earlier this year, and now it's in the process of seeing how the first pieces of the puzzle stand up in the Pacific Ocean.
> 
> The team got to work at its new assembly plant in San Francisco in February, with the objective of building a 600-meter-long (2,000 ft) screen that would make use of the ocean's natural currents to collect plastic waste.


----------



## ekim68

The Tesla Semi electric truck exceeds the hype



> The much-awaited reveal of the Tesla Semi electric truck took place in Hawthorne, California, in typical Elon Musk style. Speculation prior to the presentation was substantially exceeded with its claimed range well beyond the 300 miles (500 km) expected and acceleration figures that place the unladen tractor unit in sports car territory.
> 
> After the two Tesla 18-wheel Semis swung into position, Elon Musk stepped out of the high-roof model to begin his presentation. The first statistic presented was the Semi's acceleration to 60 mph (97km/h) from standstill which, he said it does in 5.0 seconds when empty. That is sports car territory. Perhaps even more impressive was the claim of reaching 60 mph fully laden to the maximum permissible total of 80,000 lb (36,288 kg) in 20 seconds. Also remarkable is the claim that the Semi can maintain 65 mph (105 km/h) fully laden up a 5 percent grade.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Exclusive: FBI Seizes Control of Russian Botnet


More on this..


DoJ Cripples VPNFilter Botnet, But Doesn't Slay It



> The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it has disrupted the VPNFilter botnet revealed by Cisco's Talos Intelligence Group. After obtaining permission from Pennsylvania courts, the FBI seized a domain used by the botnet's command-and-control infrastructure, effectively crippling its ability to act on infected devices. Yet the Justice Department was careful to note that VPNFilter has been crippled, not slain outright.


----------



## ekim68

Noblesville, Indiana, school shooting is at least the 21st of 2018



> Exactly a week after a suspect killed 10 at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, tragedy struck again.
> 
> An adult and a teenager were injured at Noblesville West Middle School in central Indiana on Friday morning.
> 
> Few Americans would disagree shootings like the one Friday have become too common. But as politicians and law enforcement officials scramble for answers, the shootings and bodies continue to pile up.
> 
> The Indiana shooting was at least the 21st incident of 2018 in which someone was injured with a firearm on the campus of a U.S. school.


----------



## ekim68

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/23/upstarts-emerge-to-chase-teslas-lead-in-electric-vehicles/



> A slew of well-funded new entrants backed by massive amounts of capital are chasing Tesla's lead in an effort to power the next generation of the electric vehicle industry.
> 
> Electric vehicle startups have raised more than $2 billion in the U.S. over the first months of 2018 alone, a huge increase over the $650 million raised in 2017, according to data from PitchBook. And the investment trends point to more competition for Tesla from established car companies and upstart manufacturers alike in the next few years.


----------



## ekim68

Wireless Carrier Abuse Of Location Data Makes The Facebook, Cambridge Scandal Look Like Amateur Hour



> As we've noted a few times now, however bad the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was, the nation's broadband providers have routinely been engaged in much worse behavior for decades. Yes, the Cambridge and Facebook scandal was bad (especially Facebook threatening to sue news outlets that exposed it), but the behavior they were engaging in is the *norm*, not the exception. And watching people quit Facebook while still using a stock cellphone (which lets carriers track your every online whim and offline movement) was arguably comedic.


----------



## ekim68

Technology that changed us: The 1970s, from Pong to Apollo



> In this 50-year retrospective, we're not just looking at technology year by year, we're looking at technologies that had an impact on us, paved the way for the future, and changed us, in ways good and bad.


----------



## ekim68

Companies are using California homes as batteries to power the grid



> Every new home in California is going solar by 2020. If solar-energy companies have their way, those homes also will come with batteries.
> 
> Companies like Tesla and SunRun are starting to bid on utility contracts that would allow them to string together dozens or hundreds of systems that act as an enormous reserve to balance the flow of electricity on the grid. Doing so would accelerate the grid's transformation from 20th century hub-and-spoke architecture to a transmission network moving electricity among thousands or millions of customers who generate and store their own power. "It's less like broadcast and more like the internet," says Haresh Kamath at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).


----------



## ekim68

Fiat Chrysler warns 5.3M owners: Don't use the cruise



> Fiat Chrysler is recalling more than 5.3 million vehicles in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere because in rare but terrifying circumstances, drivers may not be able to turn off the cruise control.
> 
> The company is warning owners not to use cruise control until the cars, SUVs and trucks can be fixed with a software update.


----------



## ekim68

The people living in the hottest places on the planet are the least likely to have air conditioners



> In 2016, roughly 10% of the planet's energy use went towards air conditioning. Figures vary wildly from country to country, though, and some of the hottest regions on Earth use the least A/C-for now.
> 
> A new report from the International Energy Agency says that's about to change. By 2050, the intergovernmental agency predicts, global energy use from A/Cs will triple, reaching a level equivalent to China's total electricity demand today.


----------



## ekim68

EU Commission plans ban on plastic waste



> Plastic utensils, straws, coffee stirrers and cotton swabs may soon be a lot harder to come by in Europe. The EU Commission presented a draft directive to ban the single-use products in the fight against plastic waste.


----------



## ekim68

India's Hotstar draws over 10 million concurrent viewers, sets new global record



> An Indian on-demand streaming service, with fewer than 400 employees, has pulled off a milestone that Silicon Valley companies Facebook, Amazon and Google-owned YouTube can only dream about at the moment.
> 
> On several occasions Sunday evening, more than 10 million viewers simultaneously tuned in to Hotstar, the largest on-demand streaming service in India (by various metrics, including and especially, the size of the user base), to watch the deciding match of the 11th edition of Indian Premier League cricket tournament.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.com/this-coastal-megacity-is-running-out-of-water-1821950015']This Coastal Megacity Is Running Out of Water[/URL]



> KARACHI, Pakistan-In Karachi's western neighborhood of Orangi Town, stretches of desiccated, cracked earth run underneath single-story homes, and water sellers on donkey carts ply the streets with plastic jugs. Here, the water does not flow, pipes sit corroded and broken, and residents have learned to live without a basic necessity.


----------



## ekim68

Digital Ambulance Chasers? Law Firms Send Ads To Patients' Phones Inside ERs



> Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors' offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients.
> 
> The potentially creepy part? They're only getting fed the ad because somebody knows they are in an emergency room.


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon prepares for the common defense of climate change



> Four months ago the Pentagon, not for the first time, raised the alarm that climate change must be confronted. The Department of Defense's position has been certain for years. As Secretary James Mattis has stated, "Climate change can be a drive of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention."





> Measure it, it is not difficult. Norfolk Station sits on Chesapeake Bay. In August 2017, Chloe Thompson wrote in USA Today that the headquarters for the Atlantic Fleet, the largest naval base in the world, "already floods 10 times a year." The base was built at the end of World War I. Sea-level since has risen 14.5 inches. Six months earlier, in National Geographic, Laura Parker expanded: Ten times a year the entry road to the base swamps; roads are impassable; one cannot cross the facility from one end to another. Further, "Dockside, floodwaters overtop the concrete piers, shorting power hookups to the mighty ships." Quite simply, "All it takes to cause such disarray these days is a full moon, which triggers exceptionally high tides."


----------



## ekim68

California Senate votes to restore net neutrality



> The California Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would reinstate the net neutrality regulations repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in December.
> 
> The bill, S.B. 822, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), was introduced in March and passed through three committees, all along party-lines. The bill was approved 23-12 and will now head to the state Assembly.
> 
> "Under President Obama, our country was moving in the right direction on guaranteeing an open internet, but the Trump-led FCC pulled the rug out from under the American people by repealing net neutrality protections," Wiener said in a statement last month after the bill passed its final committee vote.


----------



## ekim68

Magnax prepares to manufacture radically high-powered, compact axial flux electric motor



> After nearly a decade in development, Belgian startup Magnax claims it has developed an ultra-high power, lightweight, compact axial flux electric motor with performance figures that blow away everything in the conventional radial flux world. Crucially, it says it's worked out how to manufacture them too.





> Magnax claims it makes a peak power no less than 15 kW/kg, with the ability to produce sustained power at around 7.5 kW/kg. To bring that back to the motorcycle example, if you built a Magnax motor that weighed as much as the BMW superbike's engine, you'd have yourself a 603-horse powertrain that could produce bursts of up to 1206 horsepower for short periods before overheating and needing to take it easy for a bit.


----------



## ekim68

Chile to Become First Country in the Americas to Ban Plastic Bags



> Chile is set to become the first country in the Americas to ban plastic bags to help protect the environment and especially the ocean.
> 
> Congress unanimously approved the measure on Wednesday. The bill was initially designed to outlaw plastic bags in Patagonia, but was later extended nationwide.
> 
> President Sebastian Piñera celebrated the news.
> 
> "We have taken a fundamental step to take better care of Chile and the planet. Today we are more prepared to leave a better planet to our children, grandchildren and the generations to come," he tweeted Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

GRANT LEWIS: The seven deadly trade lies that Brexiteers tell us



> Brexiteers like to tell us all that they are free traders. But, as with just about everything else in the echo chamber they've built for themselves, the claim fails to stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.


----------



## ekim68

US vetoes UN measure to protect Palestinians



> Measure called on UN chief to report on ways for ensuring 'safety, protection and well-being' of Palestinian civilians


----------



## ekim68

The Fighting Has Begun Over Who Owns Land Drowned by Climate Change



> America's coastal cities are preparing for legal battles over real estate that slips into the ocean.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.com/in-a-single-generation-alaskas-landscapes-have-transfo-1826430995']In a Single Generation, Alaska's Landscapes Have Transformed [/URL]




> As we continue to burn fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, an insidious transformation is taking place under our noses. Remote ecosystems in our planet's far north are changing at a scale that's hard to imagine.
> 
> A new study published in _Global Change Biology_ is making that imagination part a bit easier. It estimates that 67,000 square miles of land-13 percent of the state of Alaska-has experienced "directional change" over the past 32 years, becoming greener, browner, wetter, or drier as permafrost thaws, glaciers retreat, treelines move north, and wildfires ravage landscapes.


----------



## ekim68

The First Climate Refugees in the U.S.?



> The small island of Tangier sits 12 miles off the coast of Virginia. It's a peaceful, salt-of-the-earth kind of place, with only 600 full-time residents, most of whom have known their neighbors-commercial crabbers, watermen, schoolteachers, parishioners-for generations. Shortly, however, that may all come to an end.
> 
> As soon as 25 years from now, Tangier is expected to disappear into the sea. The people who live there, along with the residents of similar coastal towns and islands threatened by sea-level rise, may become among the first U.S. climate refugees.


----------



## ekim68

Japan looks to launch driverless car system in Tokyo by 2020



> TOKYO (Reuters) - A self-driving car service could be on Tokyo's public roads in time for the 2020 Olympics as Japan looks to drive investment in new technology to drive economic growth, according to a government strategic review announced on Monday.
> 
> The strategy, presented at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also includes plans to allow the development of virtual power plants by the fiscal year ending March 2022.


----------



## ekim68

The world set a new record for renewable power in 2017, but emissions are still rising



> In 2017, the world deployed an ever-expanding amount of solar and wind power, setting a new record for renewable-power capacity added to the grid. In fact, the money spent on renewable installations was more than twice the sum spent on nuclear and fossil-fuel power, according to the annual Global Status Report published by renewables policy group REN21.


----------



## ekim68

China increasingly challenges American dominance of science



> Like many ambitious young scientists, José Pastor-Pareja came to the United States to supercharge his career. At Yale University, he worked in cutting-edge laboratories, collaborated with experts in his field and published in prestigious journals.
> 
> But the allure of America soon began to wear off. The Spanish geneticist struggled to renew his visa and was even detained for two hours of questioning at a New York City airport after he returned from a trip abroad. In 2012, he made the surprising decision to leave his Ivy League research position and move to China.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence



> Facebook has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China's government, the social media company said on Tuesday.
> 
> The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.


----------



## ekim68

Majority of Americans Believe It Is Essential That the U.S. Remain a Global Leader in Space



> Sixty years after the founding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), most Americans believe the United States should be at the forefront of global leadership in space exploration. Majorities say the International Space Station has been a good investment for the country and that, on balance, NASA is still vital to the future of U.S. space exploration even as private space companies emerge as increasingly important players.
> 
> Roughly seven-in-ten Americans (72%) say it is essential for the U.S. to continue to be a world leader in space exploration, and eight-in-ten (80%) say the space station has been a good investment for the country, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted March 27-April 9, 2018.


----------



## ekim68

Daimler unveils heavy-duty eCascadia and medium-duty eM2 electric trucks



> Daimler Trucks is establishing a global organization for electric mobility called the E-Mobility Group. To kick that off, the company announced that its division in the United States, Freightliner, will be adding two new electric commercial trucks to its offerings: the Freightliner eCascadia and the eM2 106.


----------



## ekim68

The Pentagon admitted it will never know how many civilians it has killed fighting ISIS



> The United States is four years into its war against ISIS - and it has no idea how many civilians it's killed to date.
> 
> We know this because the Defense Department admitted it.


----------



## ekim68

Wells Fargo not alone: OCC finds sales abuses at other banks



> Federal regulators have quietly ended a review of large and midsize banks' sales practices that found several systemic issues - and hundreds of problems at individual institutions - and have no plans to make the results public.
> 
> The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency began a broad examination of more than 40 banks after it was revealed that employees at Wells Fargo employees had opened millions of fake accounts in an effort to meet aggressive sales goals.


----------



## ekim68

This technology could fundamentally change our relationship to electricity




> An "operating system" for power could double the efficiency of the grid.


----------



## ekim68

New battery doubles Renault ZOE's driving range to 400 km



> When it premiered in 2012, the production version of the all-electric Renault ZOE offered a driving range of up to 209 km (130 miles) per charge. Well, things have changed since then. Debuting this week at the Paris Motor Show, the latest version of the car nearly doubles that figure, reportedly topping out at 400 km (249 miles).
> 
> The secret to the ZOE's increased range lies in its new Z.E. 40 battery pack.


----------



## ekim68

Yahoo Messenger Now Joins the List of Discarded Chat Programs



> Yahoo announced today that its Yahoo Messenger chat program is being discontinued on Juy 17th 2018. They are now directing users towards their Squirrel chat app that is currently in beta.
> 
> Like many of its counterparts such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and Microsoft Messenger, Yahoo Messenger was commonly used to talk to friends while at work, coordinate evening plans, or meet new people in chat rooms. With the rise of text messaging and mobile communication apps, early web based and desktop chat programs were pushed aside for the ease of using a mobile phone to communicate.


----------



## ekim68

Adam Putnam's office stopped reviewing concealed weapons background checks for a year because it couldn't log in



> For more than a year, the state of Florida failed to review national background checks on tens of thousands of applications for concealed weapons permits, potentially allowing drug addicts or people with a mental illness to carry firearms in public.





> The employee in charge of the background checks could not log into the system, the investigator learned. The problem went unresolved until discovered by another worker in March 2017 - meaning that for more than a year applications got approved without the required background check.


----------



## ekim68

Pope warns energy bosses of global destruction without fuel shift



> VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis warned that climate change risked destroying humanity on Saturday and called on energy leaders to help the world to convert to clean fuels to avert catastrophe.
> 
> "Civilization requires energy but energy use must not destroy civilization," the pope told top oil company executives at the end of a two-day conference in the Vatican.
> 
> Climate change was a challenge of "epochal proportions", he said, adding that the world needed an energy mix that combated pollution, eliminated poverty and promoted social justice.
> 
> The conference, held behind closed doors at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, brought together oil executives, investors and Vatican experts who, like the pope, back scientific opinion that climate change is caused by human activity.


----------



## ekim68

Poll shows deep divisions between Israelis and American Jews



> JERUSALEM (AP) - An opinion poll published Sunday shows deep divisions between Israelis and American Jews, particularly in relation to President Donald Trump, highlighting the growing rift between the world's two largest Jewish communities.
> 
> The survey of the American Jewish Committee showed 77 percent of Israelis approved of the president's handling of U.S.-Israel relations, while only 34 percent of American Jews did. Fifty-seven percent of U.S. Jews disapproved, while only 10 percent of Israelis did.


----------



## ekim68

Crisis on the High Plains: The Loss of America's Largest Aquifer - the Ogallala



> The Ogallala Aquifer supports an astounding one-sixth of the world's grain produce, and it has long been an essential component of American agriculture. The High Plains region-where the aquifer lies-relies on the aquifer for residential and industrial uses, but the aquifer's water is used primarily for agricultural irrigation. The agricultural demands for Ogallala water in the region are immense, with the aquifer ultimately being responsible for thirty percent of all irrigation in the United States. The Ogallala Aquifer has long been unable to keep up with these agricultural demands, as the aquifer recharges far slower than water is withdrawn.


----------



## ekim68

A True Sign of the Times...


[URL='https://gizmodo.com/two-quantum-computing-bills-are-coming-to-congress-1826674761']Two Quantum Computing Bills Are Coming to Congress [/URL]



> Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. If this field of quantum information is the new space race, the US doesn't want to fall behind.
> 
> After all, China has funded a National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences, set to open in 2020, and has launched a satellite meant to test long-distance quantum secure information. Two new bills, one of which is still a draft, are meant to establish the US as a leader in the field.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://wallstreetonparade.com/2018/06/wall-streets-misallocation-of-capital-is-worse-today-than-the-dot-com-era/']Wall Street's Misallocation of Capital Is Worse Today than the Dot.com Era[/URL]



> Short memories are going to once again doom millions of stock market investors who are getting their advice from Wall Street's minions of deeply conflicted analysts and brokers. This is a good time to reflect on the fact that when the dot.com bubble went bust from 2000 to 2002 it wiped 78 percent of the value off the Nasdaq stock index.


----------



## ekim68

Silicon-perovskite solar cell cracks new efficiency record



> Silicon has long been the go-to material for solar cell technology, and for good reason: It's inexpensive, it's stable and it's efficient. Unfortunately in that last regard silicon is fast approaching its theoretical limit, but pairing it up with other materials could help break through that ceiling. Now, researchers at EPFL and CSEM have developed a new technique for combining silicon and perovskite solar cells, and reported an efficiency of 25.2 percent - a record for that combination.


----------



## ekim68

Sweden Tries to Halt Its March to Total Cashlessness



> The lawmakers said there needs to be "reasonable access to those services in all of Sweden," and that 99 percent of Swedes should have a maximum distance of 25 kilometers (16 miles) to the nearest cash withdrawal. The requirement doesn't state how banks should offer those services, and lenders can choose whether to use a third party, machines or over-the-counter services.
> 
> 
> The move is a response to Sweden's rapid transformation as it becomes one of the most cashless societies in the world.


----------



## ekim68

America's best friends ready to take on climate … without Trump



> At the G7 summit in Canada this past weekend, nearly all the leaders of the world's richest and most powerful countries were united behind a bold proclamation: There can be no global economic progress without climate action. Take it or leave it.
> 
> And then Trump left.
> 
> It now looks like that move could help usher the United States out of the world's premier economic alliance. The remaining six countries, call them the "G6," have put climate action ahead of maintaining normal relations with the United States - an unthinkable development not very long ago. That's huge.
> 
> This is something greens have been demanding for years: climate change at the core of global geopolitics. Now it's here.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/40584708/78-indigenous-languages-are-being-saved-by-optical-scanning-tech']78 indigenous languages are being saved by optical scanning tech[/URL]



> Like in countless science-fiction stories, researchers at UC Berkeley are using futuristic technology to save a piece of the past. *Project IRENE is using cutting-edge optical scan technology to transfer and digitally restore recordings of indigenous languages*, many of which no longer have living speakers, _Hyperallergic_ first reported.
> 
> The recordings were gathered between 1900 and 1938 when UC anthropologists asked native speakers of 78 indigenous languages of California to record their songs, histories, prayers, and vocabulary on wax cylinders. Many of those cylinders are housed at Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and they are in a state of disrepair, degraded and broken. It's a frustrating state of affairs, as many of the languages recorded on the cylinders have fallen out of use or are no longer spoken at all.
> 
> The "Documenting Endangered Languages" initiative, which has support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is hoping to save this important history.


----------



## ekim68

China start-up readies capacity for 150,000 electric cars per year



> FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Future Mobility Corporation (FMC), the Chinese parent company behind electric car start-up Byton, has placed an order for a paint shop capable of handling 150,000 cars per year, German supplier Duerr said on Wednesday.
> 
> China's Byton, a newcomer headed by the former head of BMW's i8 program, has already released plans for a premium electric SUV vehicle, the latest in a series of China-backed electric autonomous prototypes.


----------



## ekim68

Chicago picks The Boring Company for high-speed link to airport



> Rush hour gridlock in downtown Chicago could be set to ease thanks to an underground express transportation system that will ferry passengers to the city's O'Hare Airport. The City of Chicago has just selected Elon Musk's Boring Company to design, build, pay for, operate and maintain the Express Loop, which will see electric pods carry up to 16 people to or from the airport in as little as 12 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft takes aim at Amazon with push for checkout-free retail



> SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) is working on technology that would eliminate cashiers and checkout lines from stores, in a nascent challenge to Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) automated grocery shop, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
> 
> The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is developing systems that track what shoppers add to their carts, the people say. Microsoft has shown sample technology to retailers from around the world and has had talks with Walmart Inc (WMT.N) about a potential collaboration, three of the people said.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung Plans to Use 100% Renewable Energy by 2020



> Samsung announced plans Thursday to transition to entirely renewable energy in its offices, factories, and operational facilities in the United States, China, and Europe by 2020. The company has also joined the World Wildlife Fund's Renewable Energy Buyers' Principles and the Rocky Mountain Institute's Business Renewables Center.
> 
> In its home in Korea, Samsung plans to install 42,000 meters of solar panels at its headquarters, and will continue to add approximately 21,000 meters of solar arrays and geothermal power generation facilities beginning in 2019 at its satellite campuses in Pyeongtaek and Hwaseong. Together, that would position Samsung to create enough electricity from solar to power the equivalent of 115,000 four-person Korean households for a year, the company said.


----------



## ekim68

Nuclear Power Won't Survive Without A Government Handout




> Once upon a time





> , if you were an American who didn't like nuclear energy, you had to stage sit-ins and marches and chain yourself to various inanimate objects in hopes of closing the nation's nuclear power plants. Today … all you have to do is sit back and wait.
> 
> There are 99 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States today. Collectively, they're responsible for producing about 20 percent of the electricity we use each year. But those reactors are, to put it delicately, _of a certain age_. The average age of a nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years old (compared with 24 years old for a natural gas power plant). Some are shutting down. New ones aren't being built. And the ones still operational can't compete with other sources of power on price. Just last week, several outlets reported on a leaked memo detailing a proposed Trump administration plan directing electric utilities to buy more from nuclear generators and coal plants in an effort to prop up the two struggling industries. The proposal is likely to butt up against political and legal opposition, even from within the electrical industry, in part because it would involve invoking Cold War-era emergency powers that constitute an unprecedented level of federal intervention in electricity markets. But without some type of public assistance, the nuclear industry is likely headed toward oblivion.


----------



## ekim68

Push to end Daylight Saving Time in California moves forward



> Could Daylight Saving Time become a thing of the past?
> 
> A plan to eliminate Daylight Saving Time in California is moving forward. The measure to end the time change in California has come up before, but this is the furthest it's ever advanced.
> 
> Assembly Bill 807 would eliminate Daylight Saving Time in the Golden State altogether. It was approved by the State Senate Wednesday. Now it'll head to the governor.


----------



## ekim68

Banks take on Sessions over legalized pot



> The nation's banks are taking on Attorney General Jeff Sessions over pot with a big lobbying push to loosen federal restrictions on the surging legalized marijuana industry.


----------



## ekim68

New maritime electric speed world record set by Jaguar Vector Racing



> Jaguar Vector Racing has given electric propulsion on the water a big boost by breaking the British and world electric speed records for a battery-powered boat. On June 15, the Jaguar Vector Racing V20E piloted by Jaguar Vector co-founder and technical director Peter Dredge made an average speed of 88.61 mph (142.6 km/h) over two legs of the 1-km (0.62-mi) course on Coniston Water in northern England, smashing the previous record of 76.8 mph (123.6 km/h) set in 2008.


----------



## ekim68

Norway tests tiny electric plane, sees passenger flights by 2025



> OSLO (Reuters) - Norway tested a two-seater electric plane on Monday and predicted a start to passenger flights by 2025 if new aviation technologies match a green shift that has made Norwegians the world's top buyers of electric cars.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile stop sharing real-time cell phone location data



> A senator has strongly criticized three of the US' largest cell carriers that have not promised to stop selling their customers' real-time location data to third party companies.
> 
> Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) welcomed Verizon's move to end its agreements with data aggregators, including LocationSmart, which sold location data to a prison tech company that claimed to be able to track any cell phone in the US "within seconds."
> 
> But the senator rebuked AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint for continuing the practice.


----------



## ekim68

China Won't Solve the World's Plastics Problem Any More



> For a long time, China has been a dumping ground for the world's problematic plastics. In the 1990s, Chinese markets saw that discarded plastic could be profitably recreated into exportable bits and bobs-and it was less expensive for international cities to send their waste to China than to deal with it themselves. China got cheap plastic and the exporting countries go rid of their trash.
> 
> But in November 2017, China said _enough_. The country closed its doors to contaminated plastic, leaving the exports to be absorbed by neighboring countries like Vietnam, South Korea, and Thailand. And without the infrastructure to absorb all the waste that China is rejecting, the plastics are piling up. Between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of trash-straws, bags, water bottles-will have nowhere to go, according to a paper published in _Science Advances_ on Wednesday.


----------



## RT

Report finds industrial chemicals more toxic than previously thought.

I somehow think this won't stop me from using teflon pans nor eating fast food...still, it's not good news...


----------



## ekim68

Submarine cables could be repurposed as earthquake detectors



> EARTH is observed as never before. Satellites track typhoons, monitor volcanic-ash plumes and catalogue the changing ways in which human beings use the land. The sort of high-quality imagery that, a couple of decades ago, was the preserve of spies in rich and powerful countries is now freely available to users of Google Maps.
> 
> But despite its name, most of Earth is covered in water, and it is much harder to monitor what goes on beneath the waves. In a paper just published in _Science_, Giuseppe Marra, of Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), proposes to shine a little light into the oceans by co-opting infrastructure built for an entirely different purpose. Dr Marra and his colleagues hope to use the planet's 1m-kilometre network of undersea fibre-optic cables, which carry the internet from continent to continent (see map), as a giant submarine sensor.


----------



## ekim68

Report: World trending to hit 50% renewables, 11% coal by 2050



> Bloomberg New Energy Finance released a new report this week that estimates how electricity generation will change out to 2050. The clean energy analysis firm estimates that in a mere 33 years, the world will generate almost 50 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, and coal will make up just 11 percent of the total electricity mix.


----------



## ekim68

Seven U.S. cities to power municipal operations with renewables



> Chicago, which has committed to power its 900 municipal buildings with 100 percent renewable electricity by 2025, has joined a seven-city collaboration to request price estimates for renewable electricity. The collaboration, led by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, also includes Los Angeles, Houston, Portland, OR, Orlando, FL, and Evanston, IL.
> 
> The cities expect to issue a single request for information (RFI) to renewable developers later this summer. Mayor Walsh, who co-chairs the Climate Mayors network of more than 400 cities, has invited other cities to join in the RFI by submitting their "energy demand data." Boston "continues to have ongoing conversations with cities that are highly interested in joining the initiative," said Lauren Zingarelli of the mayor's press office.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change May Spark Global 'Fish Wars'



> Atlantic mackerel, a fatty schooling fish, for years has been caught by fleets in parts of Europe and sold around the world-where it gets pickled, grilled, smoked, and fried. It is among the United Kingdom's key exports.
> 
> But a decade ago, warming temperatures began driving this popular fish north, into seas controlled by Iceland. Almost overnight, this seafood gold began shredding relations between some of the world's most stable governments. It led to unsustainable fishing, trade embargoes, and boat blockades. It even helped convince Iceland to drop its bid to join the EU. And that was among friendly nations.
> 
> Welcome to the climate-change food threat you may not have considered.


----------



## ekim68

U.N. report: With 40M in poverty, U.S. most unequal developed nation



> June 22 (UPI) -- A study for the U.N. Human Rights Council has concluded 40 million people in the United States live in poverty -- and more than half of those live in "extreme" or "absolute" poverty.
> 
> The 20-page report by Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, says U.S. policies benefit the rich and exacerbate poverty.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen's electric I.D. R blows the field away in Pikes Peak qualifying



> The power of electric motoring is on rude display at Pikes Peak again this year, with Volkswagen's 680-hp (507-kW) I.D. R setting a blistering qualifying time, 11 seconds clear of any other competitor, with reigning champion Romaine Dumas at the wheel. Dumas qualified in 3:16:083 minutes, 11.049 seconds ahead of second-placed Simone Faggioli in his gasoline-powered Norma M20 SF PKP, and the remaining 62 cars in the field.


----------



## ekim68

Electronic skin lets any prosthesis feel touch and pain



> Researchers have developed an "e-dermis" or electronic skin that could be applied to a prosthetic hand to give the wearer a sense of touch. By using electronic sensors that mimic the nerve endings in the body, the skin can convey both the senses of touch and of pain.
> 
> The skin is made of a combination of fabric and rubber, into which the electronic sensors are embedded. The technology isn't invasive, but relays sensation through the wearer's skin using a method known as TENS, or transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation - a process that needs hours of mapping of the subject's nerve endings.


----------



## ekim68

Tiny X-ray beam reveals hidden photographs from the 19th century



> June 22 (UPI) -- Scientists have successfully recovered images from some of the earliest daguerreotypes, the silver plates used for one of the earliest forms of photography.
> 
> To the naked eye, the portraits of a man and woman are unrecognizable. The daguerreotypes, taken as early as 1850, are too degraded by tarnish and wear. But researchers used rapid-scanning micro-X-ray fluorescence to see past the deterioration and recover the early images.


----------



## ekim68

The World's Smallest Computer Can Fit on the Tip of a Grain of Rice



> In a compelling act of nerd rivalry, engineers at the University of Michigan have created the world's smallest computer-again.
> 
> The University held the record for the smallest computer after it created its 2x2x4mm Michigan Micro Mote in 2014. The Micro Mote (or M3) is fully functional and able to retain its programming and data even when it loses power. But then IBM debuted an even tinier "computer" in February, a 1mm x 1mm chip with "several hundred thousand" transistors.
> 
> Engineers at the University of Michigan were not about to be one-upped, and quickly created an even _ smaller_ computer, so small it could fit on the tip of a grain of rice:


----------



## ekim68

Ah Capitalism... ! 


Warner Bros. crackdown puts Dark Mark over Potter festivals



> PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Warner Bros. is cracking down on local Harry Potter fan festivals around the country, saying it's necessary to halt unauthorized commercial activity. Fans, however, liken the move to Dementors sucking the joy out of homegrown fun, while festival directors say they'll transfigure the events into generic celebrations of magic.


----------



## ekim68

How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested - and Utterly Failed




> From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving. But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.


----------



## ekim68

Erdogan's rise as an authoritarian strong man is a key lesson to America about how Trump could move the US in a similar direction



> Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, began his legitimate political career at the turn of this century with a push for more political pluralism in a Turkey that had long been dominated by an elite, secular military.
> 
> Now that he has won another term, Erdogan's rise as an authoritarian strong man is a key lesson to America about how Trump could move the US in a similar direction. Trump's antics on racism and immigration have distracted the American public from the massive numbers of federal judgeships Mitch McConnell is allowing Trump to fill with far right ideologues, after having blocked or run the clock out on Obama appointees.


----------



## ekim68

Google Earth's new tool lets you measure the distance and area of anything on the map



> Google Earth is getting a new Measure tool today that will let you - you guessed it - measure the distance and area of things on the map.
> 
> With the tool, users can measure the distance between two points or the surface area of a selected chunk of the map. (Now you can finally find out how far your house is from the North Pole.) Users aren't limited to simple squares, either. The Measure tool will let you select the borders of an area so it's easier to measure irregularly shaped objects like parks, buildings, or even states and countries.


----------



## ekim68

A six-figure salary is considered 'low income' in San Francisco, and the threshold is rising



> The Bay Area is so expensive, earning $117,400 a year qualifies you as "low income" in some counties.


----------



## ekim68

Mumbai bans plastic bags and bottles



> Mumbai has the become the largest Indian city to ban single-use plastics, with residents caught using plastic bags, cups or bottles to face penalties of up to 25,000 rupees (£276) and three months in jail from Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Your Brain on Reading (Why Your Brain Needs You to Read Every Day)



> Reading puts your brain to work.
> 
> Reading is to the mind what exercise is to your body.
> 
> It gives us freedom to roam the expanse of space, time, history, and offer a deeper view of ideas, concepts, emotions, and body of knowledge.


----------



## ekim68

Market Crashes are Bad for Your Health



> Falling stock prices seem to precipitate a broad range of physical and psychological problems. 1 Studies have found a strong correlation between market volatility and health. The number of hospital admissions increases; heart attacks rise. Anxiety, panic disorder and major depression increases significantly; suicides increase substantially. To take an extreme example, during the 1987 Black Monday crash when U.S. markets tumbled almost 23 percent in one day, California's hospital admissions spiked more than 5 percent.


----------



## ekim68

NSA Extends Its Streak Of Surveillance Violations To Fourteen Years With Its Latest Announcement



> There isn't a surveillance program or authority the NSA hasn't abused and yet it's still humming along, hoovering up data and communications while mostly useless Congress folks pretend to be in the oversight business.


----------



## ekim68

Engineers Develop Electric Car Battery That Can Heat Itself During Winter



> Engineers at Penn State have created a battery that can overcome one of the major hurdles electric cars face: the weather. They have a designed a new battery that can self-heat, allowing for rapid charging regardless of the outside cold.





> Batteries have both positive and negative terminals. The scientists placed thin nickel foil with one end attached to the negative terminal and the other end creating a third terminal. When a temperature sensor attached to a battery detects that the battery is below room temperature, it then sends electrons flowing through the nickel foil. This heats the battery up until it's above room temperature again.


----------



## ekim68

Facial recognition to be deployed by police across London, sparking human rights concerns



> Millions of people face the prospect of being scanned by police facial recognition technology that has sparked human rights concerns.
> 
> The controversial software, which officers use to identify suspects, has been found to be "staggeringly inaccurate", while campaigners have branded its use a violation of privacy.
> 
> But Britain's largest police force is set to expand a trial across six locations in London over the coming months.


----------



## ekim68

Climate models fail to account for CO2's impact on life, scientists say



> June 29 (UPI) -- Increasingly, climate scientists are calling for climate models to focus more on CO2 levels and less on temperature.
> 
> In a new study, researchers from the University of Exeter contend warming could slow even as a rise in CO2 accelerates. Not only do current models mostly ignore this reality, study authors suggest they also fail to account for CO2's myriad impacts on biology -- on life.
> 
> Because current models use too narrow a range to describe future CO2 concentration, predictions tend to ignore the gas' impact on plants and animals.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/06/29/byd-new-battery-factory-largest-in-the-world/']BYD opens new battery factory, claims it will be 'largest in the world'



> BYD, China's largest EV manufacturer, is seeing demand for its electric vehicles increase and wants to secure more battery supply to respond to the demand.
> 
> The automaker is now opening a new battery factory and it claims the plant will be the "largest in the world."


[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

Nevada traffic deaths dropped 10 percent in first year of recreational marijuana



> RENO, Nev. (News 4 & Fox 11) - Traffic deaths in Nevada dropped over 10 percent in the first year of recreational marijuana, according to data provided by the Nevada Department of Public Safety.


----------



## ekim68

CDs at Best Buy are going the way of the dodo



> Best Buy has stopped selling CDs at its stores as of Sunday, CBS Pittsburgh reports. The arrest of CD sales will happen nationwide.
> 
> Due to digital streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and others, CD sales have been falling in recent years. Best Buy's CD sales have recently only brought in about $40 million annually.
> 
> Interestingly, though, Best Buy will continue to sell vinyl records for the next two years. Vinyl has seen a resurgence lately, with vinyl album sales last year at a 27-year-high, according to Billboard.


----------



## ekim68

Cashier-less: The Microsoft-Walmart talks explained



> A possible collaboration between the tech giant and the brick-and-mortar king is a shot across Amazon's bow and the surest sign yet that cashiers are being phased out of retail


----------



## ekim68

Going for a song: Electric taxi service lets passengers pay with a tuneful ditty



> Festival goers in Finland will be able to get around in an i3 electric taxi using song as fare payment. The Singalong Shuttle will operate at the Ruisrock festival between July 6 and 8, and is the brainchild of clean energy firm Fortum.


----------



## ekim68

500 Intel drones to replace fireworks above Travis Air Force Base for Fourth of July



> The Fourth of July will be a little different tomorrow at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Instead of fireworks, 500 Intel  Shooting Star drones will take to the sky to perform an aerial routine in honor of the holiday and the base's 75th anniversary.
> 
> These are the same drones that preformed at Disney World, the Super Bowl and the Olympics.


----------



## ekim68

China's first Level 4 self-driving shuttle enters volume production



> Baidu, Google's rival search engine in China, has announced that the hundredth Apolong self-driving mini bus has just rolled off the production line, making it the first fully autonomous electric bus to reach volume production. The self-driving shuttle is expected to operate as a last mile transport solution in Chinese cities before launching globally in 2019.


----------



## ekim68

Happy 10th Birthday, Apple App Store!



> People sometimes forget that when the first-ever iPhone launched in 2007, there was no App Store. Believe it or not, Apple's smartphone was limited to the apps with which it came -- hardly "smart." In fact, Steve Jobs famously didn't want third-party apps on the iPhone at all -- the man was a genius, but not always. Ultimately, the App Store was added in 2008 despite Jobs' initial push against it. This move changed the computer industry forever.
> 
> This month, the Apple App Store reaches an impressive milestone -- a 10th Birthday. This day is important for three groups -- Apple (of course), but more importantly, consumers and developers. Apple has made billions of dollars from the App Store, but third party developers have as well -- the company has literally transformed some devs into millionaires. Consumers have benefited from high-quality applications too. You may not remember, but before the iPhone came along, mobile apps were absolute garbage.


----------



## ekim68

Japan-Korea Tunnel could generate billions in revenue, analyst says



> July 6 (UPI) -- An undersea tunnel connecting Japan to South Korea could bring massive economic benefits, according to a Japanese analyst.
> 
> Toshiyasu Noda, a professor in the department of law at Seinan Gakuin University, said a tunnel that connects to Japan's southern island of Kyushu could bring annual operating profits for logistics to about $2 billion, the Nagasaki Shimbun reported Friday.


----------



## ekim68

UN report urges nations to take better care of world's forests



> July 6 (UPI) -- A United Nations agricultural report Friday urges world governments to better manage shrinking forests, end deforestation and restore those that have been degraded.
> 
> The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's State of the World's Forests report said in addition to shade, absorption of carbon dioxide, animal habitation and lumber, forests provide about 20 percent of rural household income in developing countries.


----------



## ekim68

Finland is pressuring the EU to kill daylight-saving time



> Finland followed central European countries' example and adopted the daylight-saving time scheme in 1981. Now, almost four decades later, the Finns have had enough.
> 
> For a country located so far north, daylight-saving time doesn't actually save that much daylight. At the same time, many argue that the changing of the clocks comes with adverse health effects.


----------



## ekim68

UK Proposes Equipping Every New Home for Electric-Car Charging



> The U.K. has discussed ending sales of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2040, which means the country will need a lot of electric-car charging stations. So officials are proposing a requirement that all new homes be equipped for charging, reports _Bloomberg_. The proposal was part of Road to Zero, a report on climate-change related policies released Monday.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/nearly-1000-paintings-drawings-vincent-van-gogh-now-digitized-put-online-view-download-collection.html']Nearly 1,000 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Now Digitized and Put Online:[/URL]



> Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. In his early paintings of peasant homes and fields, his figures' muscular shoulders and hands interact with sturdy walls and gnarled trees. Later country scenes-whether curling and delicate, like _Wheatfield with a Reaper, _or heavy and ominous, like _Wheatfield with Crows _(both below)-give us the sense of the landscape as a single living entity, pulsating, writhing, blazing in brilliant yellows, reds, greens, and blues.


----------



## ekim68

UK prime minister seeks to stem Cabinet exodus over Brexit



> LONDON (AP) - British Prime Minister Theresa May insisted Tuesday that her plan to retain close ties with the European Union "absolutely keeps faith" with voters' decision to leave the bloc, as she tried to restore government unity after the resignations of two top ministers over Brexit.
> 
> May has spent the past few days fighting for her political life as first Brexit Secretary David Davis and then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson quit, saying May's plans for future relations with the European Union did not live up to their idea of Brexit. On Tuesday, two more lawmakers followed them out the door.


----------



## ekim68

The "Big Bang" of Alzheimer's: Breakthrough study uncovers genesis of the disease



> Impressive new research led by scientists at UT Southwestern, has discovered the earliest point in a neurodegenerative process that is thought to lead to dementia. The researchers describe the discovery as like finding the "Big Bang" of Alzheimer's disease, and it's hoped the work leads to new treatments and ways to detect the disease before major symptoms take hold.


----------



## ekim68

Visualizing The World's 20 Largest Tech Giants

(Chart of the Week.)


----------



## ekim68

Software beats animal tests at predicting toxicity of chemicals



> Machine-learning software trained on masses of chemical-safety data is so good at predicting some kinds of toxicity that it now rivals - and sometimes outperforms - expensive animal studies, researchers report.


----------



## ekim68

SkyGuardian drone completes historic transatlantic flight



> A General Atomics Aeronautical Systems SkyGuardian drone made history today by becoming the first Medium-altitude, Long-endurance (MALE) Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) to complete a transatlantic flight. At 6:51 pm BST, the unmanned aircraft touched down at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, England after a flight of 3,760 nm (4,327 mi, 6,963 km) from Grand Forks, North Dakota that took 24 hours and two minutes.


----------



## ekim68

First 3D colour X-ray of a human using CERN technology



> What if, instead of a black and white X-ray picture, a doctor of a cancer patient had access to colour images identifying the tissues being scanned? This colour X-ray imaging technique could produce clearer and more accurate pictures and help doctors give their patients more accurate diagnoses.
> 
> This is now a reality, thanks to a New-Zealand company that scanned, for the first time, a human body using a breakthrough colour medical scanner based on the Medipix3 technology developed at CERN. Father and son scientists Professors Phil and Anthony Butler from Canterbury and Otago Universities spent a decade building and refining their product.


----------



## ekim68

Renewable Energy Around the World



> Achieving 100% renewable energy is possible and plausible for the United States of America.
> 
> Many other developed nations have almost completely incorporated renewable energy into their economies and have been able to power their entire countries for substantial amounts of time solely on these methods. Others are moving in that direction and achieving small steps - a day, a month, an industry, solely relying on renewable energy.
> 
> Here are some renewable energy leaders leaders around the world:


----------



## ekim68

Alaska's last 2 Blockbuster stores are closing, leaving just one in the U.S.



> The two remaining Blockbuster stores in Alaska are set to close, marking the end of an era in what has long been one of the video rental business's last strongholds.
> 
> The stores, one on DeBarr Road in Anchorage and the other in Fairbanks, will close Monday for rental business, a post on the Facebook page for Blockbuster in Alaska said Thursday afternoon. They will reopen at noon Tuesday for an inventory sales that will run through July and August.
> 
> The closures leave just one store standing in the U.S., in Bend, Oregon.


----------



## ekim68

India now has the 'world's strongest' net neutrality rules




> India has just adopted tough new rules guaranteeing an open and fair internet for nearly half a billion people.


----------



## ekim68

Australian experiment wipes out over 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes



> (CNN)In an experiment with global implications, Australian scientists have successfully wiped out more than 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes in trial locations across north Queensland.
> 
> The experiment, conducted by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and James Cook University (JCU), targeted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and Zika.
> In JCU laboratories, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. Then, last summer, they released over three million of them in three towns on the Cassowary Coast.


----------



## ekim68

Why do some in the tech community support universal basic income? They're 'terrified' about the future.




> So says Annie Lowrey, the author of a new book called "Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World."


----------



## ekim68

California's carbon emissions are back to '90s levels. It can be done, people!



> California's carbon emissions are back to where they were when Macaulay Culkin was battling burglars and MC Hammer first told us we couldn't touch this.
> 
> The California Air Resources Board said Wednesday that the state had hit its goal of bringing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels four years ahead of schedule. The drop came thanks to a boom in renewables and improving efficiency.


----------



## ekim68

A College In China Apparently Tried To Reject A Student Because His Dad Was On A Government Blacklist



> People in China are criticizing the college, saying that it was unfairly punishing a high school student over his father's actions.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/antarctic-exploration-vessel-which-should-be-named-boat-1827605609']Antarctic Exploration Vessel Which Should Be Named Boaty McBoatface But Tragically Isn't Launches[/URL]



> The RSS Sir David Attenborough-the polar exploration vessel that, in April 2016, participants in an internet poll overwhelmingly voted to christen Boaty McBoatface-launched on Saturday, with defensive research officials still defending their decision to override the results of the vote.
> 
> Per the Guardian, British Antarctic Survey director Jane Francis addressed the controversy directly as the 423-foot (129-meter), 11,000-ton boat's hull slid into the water from the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, where its construction will continue. She said that Attenborough, a famous naturalist whose voice has narrated world-famous documentaries like the BBC's _Life_ and _Planet Earth _series, was a more fitting name for the ship:


----------



## ekim68

Whoa... 


TMC Dumont sits 36-inch hubless rims either side of a roaring aircraft engine



> Impractical? Sure! Vulgar? Most certainly. Unique? In every sense. This staggering custom motorcycle uses the biggest pair of hubless wheels we've ever seen, as well as placing the rider astride a snarling, 300-horsepower Rolls-Royce aircraft engine. Live in fear - of corners, if nothing else.


----------



## ekim68

Study suggests buried Internet infrastructure at risk as sea levels rise



> MONTREAL -- Thousands of miles of buried fiber optic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon.
> 
> The study, presented here today (July 16, 2018) at a meeting of internet network researchers, portrays critical communications infrastructure that could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years, according to the study's senior author, Paul Barford, a UW-Madison professor of computer science.


----------



## ekim68

Hackers account for 90% of login attempts at online retailers



> Selling stolen personal data is a big business for hackers: Somewhere on the dark web, your e-mail address and a few passwords are probably for sale (hopefully, old ones). Cyber criminals buy troves of this information to try to login to websites where they can grab something valuable like cash, airline points, or merchandise like expensive cheese. Yes, cheese.
> 
> Online retailers are hit the most by these attacks, according to a report by cyber security firm Shape Security. Hackers use programs to apply stolen data in a flood of login attempts, called "credential stuffing." These days, more than 90% of e-commerce sites' global login traffic comes from these attacks. The airline and consumer banking industries are also under siege, with about 60% of login attempts coming from criminals.


----------



## ekim68

DeepMind, Elon Musk and others pledge not to make autonomous AI weapons



> Today during the Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Future of Life Institute announced that more than 2,400 individuals and 160 companies and organizations have signed a pledge, declaring that they will "neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of lethal autonomous weapons." The signatories, representing 90 countries, also call on governments to pass laws against such weapons. Google DeepMind and the Xprize Foundation are among the groups who've signed on while Elon Musk and DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman have made the pledge as well.


----------



## ekim68

Fossil Fuel Industries Outspend Clean Energy Advocates On Climate Lobbying By 10 To 1



> Fossil fuel producers, airlines and electrical utilities outspent environmental groups and the renewable energy industry 10 to 1 on lobbying related to climate change legislation between 2000 and 2016, according to a new analysis released Wednesday.
> 
> The research, which will be published Thursday in the journal Climate Change, suggests that, at a time when the majority of Americans understand global warming and support government action to deal with it, industry lobbying still has far greater influence in Washington.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo's autonomous vehicles are driving 25,000 miles every day



> Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has driven 8 million miles on public roads using its autonomous vehicles.
> 
> Waymo CEO John Krafcik shared the company's milestone Friday while on stage with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval at the National Governors Association conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The figure is notable when compared to where Waymo was less than a year ago. In November, the company announced it had reached 4 million miles, meaning the company has been able to double the number of autonomous miles driven on public roads in just eight months.


----------



## ekim68

Liquid metal feeds Stanford's new high-voltage flow battery




> Flow batteries





> have the potential to help store energy on a large scale, and might be particularly useful to back up renewable energy sources, but there are a few issues still to overcome. Engineers at Stanford have developed a new type of flow battery that might be scalable, safe, efficient and inexpensive, using a metal mixture that remains liquid at room temperature.
> 
> In a flow battery, the cathode and anode are in fluid form and are kept in external tanks, to be pumped into the main cell of the battery when needed. There, the two liquids are separated by a membrane that selectively allows them to exchange electrons to either charge or discharge the energy.


----------



## ekim68

Who owns the moon? A space lawyer answers



> Most likely, this is the best-known picture of a flag ever taken: Buzz Aldrin standing next to the first U.S. flag planted on the Moon. For those who knew their world history, it also rang some alarm bells. Only less than a century ago, back on Earth, planting a national flag in another part of the world still amounted to claiming that territory for the fatherland. Did the Stars and Stripes on the moon signify the establishment of an American colony?
> 
> When people hear for the first time that I am a lawyer practicing and teaching something called "space law," the question they ask most frequently, often with a big smile or a twinkle in the eye, is: "So tell me, who owns the moon?"


----------



## ekim68

New way to recycle lithium-ion batteries could be a lifeline for electric cars and the environment



> The promise of a global electric-vehicle transformation has a looming problem.
> 
> The cathodes in the lithium-ion batteries typically used in electric vehicles are made of metal oxides that contain cobalt, a metal found in finite supplies and concentrated in one of the globe's more precarious countries.
> 
> But an assistant professor at UC San Diego says he has developed a way to recycle used cathodes from spent lithium-ion batteries and restore to perform as well as they did when new.


----------



## ekim68

Some Colleges Cautiously Embrace Wikipedia



> LiAnna Davis remembers when people didn't want to talk to her at academic conferences:
> 
> "I had this woman one time who held her folder up over her head and was like, 'Don't let my department chair see me talking to you guys, but I'm so glad you're here.'"
> 
> Davis works for Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that was once considered anathema to the academic mission. She's director of programs for its higher-education-focused nonprofit arm, Wiki Education.
> 
> Academics have traditionally distrusted Wikipedia, citing the inaccuracies that arise from its communally edited design and lamenting students' tendency to sometimes plagiarize assignments from it.
> 
> Now, Davis said, higher education and Wikipedia don't seem like such strange bedfellows. At conferences these days, "everyone's like, 'Oh, Wikipedia, of course you guys are here.'"


----------



## ekim68

Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing



> Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.


----------



## ekim68

Visualizing the Best and Worst Paid Jobs in the Tech Sector



> Most people think getting into the upper middle class is straightforward: go to school, study technology, and get a job somewhere in the tech sector. But is it really that simple?


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://deadspin.com/polish-daredevil-becomes-first-person-to-ski-down-from-1827831917']Polish Daredevil Becomes First Person To Ski Down From The Summit Of K2[/URL]



> K2 is perhaps the most dangerous mountain in the world. One in every four people who makes an attempt to summit it dies, and nobody has ever climbed it in winter. Only 300 or so people have ever even reached the peak of K2, and its relatively northern location makes it a particularly unpredictable mountain to tame.
> 
> And someone just skied down from the summit for the first time in history. Polish adventurer Andrzej Bargiel first tried to make the historic descent last year, only to pull up because of falling rocks and the possibility of causing an avalanche. This time, he made it all the way from the summit to base camp.


----------



## ekim68

Mobile photography set for major quality bump with Sony's 48-megapixel sensor



> Smartphone camera sensors and lenses have to operate in a very tight space, but they continue to close the gap on full-size digital cameras year after year. Sony's new IMX586 sensor boasts a 48-megapixel resolution, the highest yet for a mobile sensor, and should be coming to a phone near you soon.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop test pod sets speed record



> A competition helping to drive development of the futuristic hyperloop transport system has been won by engineering students from Munich.
> 
> The hyperloop idea involves passengers in pods travelling at very high speeds down sealed tunnels.
> 
> The team's pod hit 457km/h (290mph) on a 1.2km (0.75 mile) test track.


----------



## ekim68

Ford plans to spend $4 billion on autonomous vehicles by 2023



> Ford Motor plans to spend $4 billion through 2023 in a newly created LLC dedicated to building out an autonomous vehicles business.


----------



## ekim68

US airlines change Taiwan reference on websites ahead of Chinese deadline



> The three biggest U.S. airlines changed how they refer to self-ruled Taiwan on their websites to avoid Chinese penalties ahead of a Wednesday deadline - revisions Beijing described as "positive developments."


----------



## ekim68

Harvard's new organic flow battery uses a long-lived recipe of Biblical proportions



> Storing renewable energy is just as important as generating it, and flow batteries might be one of the most promising ways to do that. While there are plenty of hurdles to jump over in perfecting the tech, a team of Harvard engineers has been making strides over the past few years with organic flow batteries, and has now tested a new molecule that makes for the longest-lasting, high-performance organic flow battery so far.
> 
> Flow batteries are built with two liquid electrolytes that are stored in external tanks and piped into the cell as needed. During charging and discharging, they pass electrons back and forth through a membrane in the cell, and their storage capacity and power output can be tweaked by changing the size of the tanks and membrane, respectively.


----------



## ekim68

NY threatens to kick Charter out of the state after broadband failures




> NY: Charter lied about failure to meet merger commitment, faces loss of license.


----------



## ekim68

Google cars self-drive to Walmart supermarket in trial



> Google's sister-company Waymo has announced a trial in which its self-driving cars will ferry shoppers to and from a nearby Walmart store to pick up their groceries.
> 
> For now, the pilot is being restricted to 400-plus members of its early rider programme in Phoenix, Arizona.


----------



## ekim68

After hurricane, Puerto Rico switches on to renewable energy



> A small number of buildings in Puerto Rico now rely on solar power after hurricane Maria left much of the island in the dark. Industry officials and environmentalists are closely watching the experiment to determine the possibilities of a larger-scale switch to off-grid power.


----------



## 2twenty2

> At least two Canadian malls are using facial recognition technology to track shoppers' ages and genders without telling
> 'From a civil liberties perspective, from a privacy perspective … it's a huge concern' - privacy advocate


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-malls-1.4760964


----------



## ekim68

2twenty2 said:


> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-malls-1.4760964


Marketing has gotten a strong grip on the Internet right now and it's finding all the ways to get to you..


----------



## ekim68

No Shirt, No Swipe, No Service




> Cash is a miracle. So why are more businesses refusing it?


----------



## ekim68

Massachusetts proposes net neutrality law to call out bad ISPs



> Massachusetts plans to protect net neutrality by naming and shaming internet service providers that don't adhere to open internet principles.
> 
> Lawmakers in the state Senate have proposed a bill (S2160) that would create an "internet service provider registry" to track whether broadband and wireless providers adhere to policies that keep the internet open and neutral. That includes ensuring that content isn't blocked and that access to sites and services aren't slowed down or throttled. ISPs that keep consumer data private and meet net neutrality guidelines can get a "Massachusetts Net Neutrality and Consumer Privacy Seal" of approval.


----------



## ekim68

Cord Cutting Accelerates Faster Than Expected, As Cable Still Refuses To Compete On Price



> As we just got done noting, roughly 5.4 million Americans are expected to cut the TV cord this year, thanks largely to the rise in cheaper, more flexible streaming TV alternatives. And while some traditional cable TV providers have responded to this challenge by competing on price and offering their own cheaper streaming alternatives (AT&T's DirecTV Now, Dish's Sling TV), most of the cable and broadcast sector continues to double down on the very things causing this shift in the first place. Like a refusal to invest in customer service, an obsession with mindless merger mania, and seemingly endless price hikes.


----------



## ekim68

The Growing Challenge of Living and Working on a Sweltering Planet



> The Northern Hemisphere's summer is showing how far along the planet is with human-caused climate disruption, as record high temperatures are shattered and sweltering heat waves kill dozens of people.
> 
> Globally, June was Earth's fifth-warmest ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information.
> 
> The same NOAA data also showed that the only warmer June months on record were those from the previous four years.
> 
> As the planet continues to warm, it is becoming clear that the heat it is bringing along with it the challenge of how to live and work safely.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 Outselling Small And Midsize Luxury Cars In U.S. In July



> In the second quarter of 2018, Tesla produced just over 53,000 vehicles, doubling its output compared to the same quarter last year. For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) exceeded combined Model S and X production (24,761) with deliveries to customers totaling 40,740 for the quarter. The ramp up in Model 3 production is enabling it to outsell small and midsize luxury car sales in the U.S., according to some number crunching by CleanTechnica's Zachary Shahan.


----------



## ekim68

The world's largest solar farm rises in the remote Egyptian desert



> The government's aim is that by 2025 Egypt will get 42% of its electricity from renewable sources.
> 
> The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
> 
> The U.S. government is backing a local program to train hundreds of technical school students in solar and wind energy.


----------



## ekim68

UPS brings on the thunder for upcoming electric delivery trucks



> Package mover UPS is partnering with Thor Trucks - the LA startup which launched a Tesla Semi rival in December 2017 - to build and test an electric class 6 delivery truck. If all goes well, more medium-duty electric delivery vans from Thor could be added to the global logistics company's existing zero-emissions fleet.


----------



## ekim68

Commodore's Beloved Amiga Is Being Revitalized With Updated Retro Hardware



> Although it has been over three decades since the first Commodore Amigas were originally released, a fan base for the beloved systems is still going strong. Of course, the Amiga install base is a small fraction of what it was during the machine's heyday, but the community supporting the Amiga is still vibrant and very much alive. In fact, the Amiga community - and many other retro-computing communities for that matter -- seems to be more active now that it has been in years, and a number of exciting new hardware projects have cropped up or hit major milestones in recent weeks.


----------



## ekim68

New York State Votes To Kick Charter Out Of The State For Poor Service, Failing To Meet Merger Conditions



> In an unprecedented move, the New York State Public Service Commission has voted 4-0 to kick Charter out of the state. According to the announcement (pdf) by the PSC, Charter has been given sixty days to file a plan with the PSC that will "ensure an orderly transition to a successor provider," including offloading the Time Warner Cable territories acquired in the merger. The PSC also notes the vote was only taken after more than a year of trying to get Charter to adhere to some pretty modest broadband build-out requirements affixed to the deal:


----------



## ekim68

Toshiba's new fast-charging battery could triple the range of electric vehicles



> A key focus of electric vehicle (EV) makers is maximizing the range users can get from each charge, and for that reason new battery technologies are poised to play a huge part in driving their adoption. Toshiba has developed a new fast-charging battery it claims could allow EVs to travel three times as far as they do now, and then be fully recharged again in a matter of minutes.
> 
> Toshiba's SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery) has been around in various forms since 2007, with its chief claim to fame an ability to charge to 90 percent of capacity in just five minutes. It also boasts a life-span of 10 years and high levels of safety, and has found its way into a number of notable EVs, including Mitsubishi's i MiEV and Honda's Fit EV.


----------



## ekim68

A sign of those times... 


[URL='http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/leonardo-da-vincis-list-circa-1490.html']Leonardo Da Vinci's To Do List (Circa 1490)[/URL]



> Most people's to-do lists are, almost by definition, pretty dull, filled with those quotidian little tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laundry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local market.
> 
> Leonardo Da Vinci was, however, no ordinary person. And his to-do lists were anything but dull.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90209339/the-island-of-samoa-is-going-100-renewable-with-teslas-help']The island of Samoa is going 100% renewable-with Tesla's help[/URL]



> In seven years, the island nation of Samoa plans to run on 100% renewable electricity. Over the last year, the local utility has worked with Tesla to install a key piece of that plan-battery storage, and also a software system that can control Samoa's entire electricity supply.
> 
> In the past, like many islands, the country ran mostly on imported, expensive, and polluting diesel power. As recently as 2012, the country brought in 95 million liters of diesel. Spurred by the cost and the threat of climate change-Samoa is at particular risk from sea level rise and new outbreaks of climate-related diseases-the country has been ramping up the use of renewables, with five large solar plants, a wind farm, and hydropower plants.


----------



## ekim68

High Speed Internet Is Causing Widespread Sleep Deprivation, Study Finds



> Sleep deprivation is an increasing problem in many developed countries, which can result in impaired cognition and a number of serious individual and societal consequences. Lack of sleep has been linked to billions of dollars in lost revenue, up to one sixth of all traffic accidents in the US, and increased risk of chronic disease. The reason for this chronic sleep shortage is due to a combination of factors. Longer work hours, stress, and interpersonal relationships have all been blamed for the widespread insomnia. Now a new study claims that high speed internet access is at least partly at fault.


----------



## ekim68

FCC sides with Google Fiber over Comcast with new pro-competition rule



> The Federal Communications Commission today approved new rules that could let Google Fiber and other new Internet service providers gain faster access to utility poles.
> 
> The FCC's One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) rules will let companies attach wires to utility poles without waiting for the other users of the pole to move their own wires. Google Fiber says its deployment has stalled in multiple cities because Comcast and AT&T take a long time to get poles ready for new attachers. One Touch Make Ready rules let new attachers make all of the necessary wire adjustments themselves.


----------



## ekim68

New Starbucks partnership with Microsoft allows customers to pay for Frappuccinos with bitcoin




> Starbucks





> is jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
> 
> The Seattle-based coffee giant is working with Microsoft and a leading global exchange on a new digital platform that will allow consumers to use bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at Starbucks.
> 
> Starbucks along with Intercontinental Exchange, Microsoft and BCG, among others, is working to launch a new company called Bakkt that will enable consumers and institutions to buy, sell, store and spend cryptocurrencies on the global network by November. The platform with convert bitcoin and other cryptocoins into U.S. dollars that can be used to buy a Cold Foam Cascara Cold Brew, Matcha Lemonade or anything else at Starbucks.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Recycling Companies Face Upheaval from China Scrap Ban



> U.S. companies that collect waste for recycling are weighing higher prices and other changes to their operations since China upended the industry when it stopped accepting much of the scrap material Americans have been shipping there for decade.
> 
> The top two solid waste services companies in the U.S., Waste Management Inc. and Republic Services Inc., both recently pulled back profit projections in their recycling divisions based on China's new policies, which have created a glut in scrap markets and sent global prices for scrap material plummeting.


----------



## ekim68

The Underrated Healing Power of a Healthy Relationship




> Two new books teach us how caring friends and family can correct the trajectories of troubled youth.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/08/05/2046237/traders-are-talking-up-cryptocurrencies-then-dumping-them-costing-others-millions']Traders Are Talking Up Cryptocurrencies, Then Dumping Them, Costing Others Millions[/URL]



> Dozens of trading groups are manipulating the price of cryptocurrencies on some of the largest online exchanges, generating at least $825 million in trading activity over the past six months -- and hundreds of millions in losses for those caught on the wrong side, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. From a report:


*  *


----------



## ekim68

A good read...


Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium



> Millions of publications-not to mention spy documents-can be read on microfilm machines. But people still see these devices as outmoded and unappealing. An Object Lesson.


----------



## ekim68

Duo Security researchers' Twitter 'bot or not' study unearths crypto botnet



> A team of researchers at Duo Security has unearthed a sophisticated botnet operating on Twitter  - and being used to spread a cryptocurrency scam.
> 
> The botnet was discovered during the course of a wider research project to create and publish a methodology for identifying Twitter account automation - to help support further research into bots and how they operate.


----------



## ekim68

Cramming Software With Thousands of Fake Bugs Could Make It More Secure



> It sounds like a joke, but the idea actually makes sense: More bugs, not less, could theoretically make a system safer. Carefully scatter non-exploitable decoy bugs in software, and attackers will waste time and resources on trying to exploit them. The hope is that attackers will get bored, overwhelmed, or run out of time and patience before finding an actual vulnerability.
> 
> Computer science researchers at NYU suggested this strategy in a study published August 2, and call these fake-vulnerabilities "chaff bugs."


----------



## ekim68

Feeling the Heat of High-Frequency Trading



> It's high summer here in North America, and for a lot of us, this one has been a scorcher. Media reports have been filled with coverage of heat wave after heat wave, with temperature records falling like dominoes.
> 
> But as they say, it's not the heat, it's the humidity, and that was painfully true in the first week of July as a slug of tropical air settled into the northeast United States. With dewpoints well into the 70s (25°C plus) and air temperatures pushing the century-mark (38°C), people suffered and systems from transportation to the electrical grid strained under the load. But as punishing as such soupy conditions are for people, there are other effects that are less well known but of critical importance to financial markets, where increased humidity can lead to billion-dollar losses for markets. Welcome to the weird world of high-frequency trading.


----------



## ekim68

Europe's heatwave is forcing nuclear power plants to shut down



> Nuclear power is one of the world's biggest sources of carbon-free electricity. But it has an Achilles' heel: it needs lots of water to operate.
> 
> That's bad news right now. Europe's heatwave-which led to wildfires in Greece and Sweden, droughts in central and northern parts, and made the normally green UK look brown from space-is forcing nuclear plants to shut down or curtail the amount of power they produce. French utility EDF shut four reactors at three power plants on Saturday, Swedish utility Vattenfall shut one of two reactors at a power plant earlier last week, and nuclear plants in Finland, Germany, and Switzerland have cut back the amount of power they produce.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon lied about 4G coverage-and it could hurt rural America, group says



> Verizon "grossly overstated" its 4G LTE coverage in government filings, potentially preventing smaller carriers from obtaining funding needed to expand coverage in underserved rural areas, a trade group says.
> 
> The Federal Communications Commission last year required Verizon and other carriers to file maps and data indicating their current 4G LTE coverage. The information will help the FCC determine where to distribute up to $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund money over the next 10 years. The funds are set aside for "primarily rural areas that lack unsubsidized 4G," the FCC says.
> 
> If Verizon provided the FCC with inaccurate data, the company's rural competitors might not be able to get that government funding.


----------



## ekim68

Engineers teach a drone to herd birds away from airports autonomously



> Engineers at Caltech have developed a new control algorithm that enables a single drone to herd an entire flock of birds away from the airspace of an airport. The algorithm is presented in a study in _IEEE Transactions on Robotics_.


----------



## ekim68

$500 million Hyperloop development facility set for southern Spain



> Spain is set to receive a shiny new facility for the development of next-gen transport, with Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop One reaching an agreement with local authorities to open a research center in the region of Andalusia, in the country's south.
> 
> The agreement was signed by the company's CEO Rob Lloyd and the head of Andalusia infrastructure agency, and will see a new US$500 million development center built in the village of Bobadilla.
> 
> Virgin Hyperloop One hopes to tap into the existing talent pool in the Andalusia region, which it says is home to 9,000 transport and logistics companies and 20,000 employees in R&D, along with a large aerospace community. It plans to hire between 200 and 300 professionals for its new facility.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus' solar-powered Zephyr smashes flight duration record on maiden outing



> Airbus' Zephyr program has claimed another record, with a production model unmanned solar-powered aircraft touching down after more than 25 days in the air. That voyage is the longest unmanned flight ever made, and was achieved on this particular vehicle's maiden voyage, no less.


----------



## ekim68

Baltimore Set To Ban Privatization of Water System



> The law will make the city the first in the United States to protect its residents from the high costs that come with a privately-owned water utility.


----------



## ekim68

People Still Don't Like Their Cable Companies, CR's Latest Telecom Survey Finds



> Unhappy with your pay-TV company? You're not alone. Dissatisfaction with the perceived value of pay-TV service was once again high among the 176,000 members who participated in Consumer Reports' latest telecommunications survey.
> 
> When we asked for feedback on their experiences with pay TV, home internet, home telephone service, and bundled plans, they shared their displeasure.
> 
> In fact, most of the larger cable companies-Optimum (Cablevision), Comcast, and Spectrum (Charter, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks)-earned low scores in multiple categories, settling into the bottom half of the 25 providers in CR's new telecom service ratings.


----------



## ekim68

A small team of student AI coders beats Google's machine-learning code



> Students from Fast.ai, a small organization that runs free machine-learning courses online, just created an AI algorithm that outperforms code from Google's researchers, according to an important benchmark.
> 
> Fast.ai's success is important because it sometimes seems as if only those with huge resources can do advanced AI research.


----------



## ekim68

Chemists discover how blue light speeds blindness



> Blue light from digital devices and the sun transforms vital molecules in the eye's retina into cell killers, according to optical chemistry research at The University of Toledo.
> 
> The process outlined in the study, which was recently published in the journal _Scientific Reports_, leads to age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the United States.
> 
> "We are being exposed to blue light continuously, and the eye's cornea and lens cannot block or reflect it," Dr. Ajith Karunarathne, assistant professor in the UT Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said. "It's no secret that blue light harms our vision by damaging the eye's retina. Our experiments explain how this happens, and we hope this leads to therapies that slow macular degeneration, such as a new kind of eye drop."


----------



## ekim68

Engineers Say 'No Thanks' to Silicon Valley Recruiters, Citing Ethical Concerns




> Some engineers are turning down tech recruiters by citing concerns about corporate values


----------



## ekim68

Ford makes EksoVest exoskeletons available to employees worldwide after successful US trials



> The vest retains its specifications from the pilot model tested since last year, fitting workers from 5 ft to 6 ft 4 in tall (152 to 193 cm). It is unpowered and uses spring assistance to provide between 5 and 15 lb (2.2 and 6.8 kg) of lift support per arm.





> The object of the exoskeleton is to reduce fatigue and injury to workers that undertake continuous repetitive tasks involving reaching up with power tools while working on the underside of cars. One of the pilot EksoVest operators, Nick Gotts, was immediately converted to the benefits of the device saying, "Any job that's overhead, I wouldn't work without it."


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. Navy Is Having a Hell of a Time Dismantling the USS Enterprise



> Six years after decommissioning USS _Enterprise_, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy is still figuring out how to safely dismantle the ship. The General Accounting Office estimates the cost of taking apart the vessel and sending the reactors to a nuclear waste storage facility at up to $1.5 billion, or about one-eighth the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier.


----------



## ekim68

Electric scooters are going worldwide



> Despite regulatory hurdles on a city-by-city basis, electric scooter companies and their respective services are continuing to make their way to markets all over the world. Earlier this week, for example, Lime announced its entrance into Madrid, launching hundreds of electric scooters in the Spanish capital. About a week before that, competitor Bird launched in Paris and laid out its intentioned to bring electric scooters to Tel Aviv.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter says InfoWars hasn't 'violated our rules.' It looks like that's not the case



> "It's worth noting that at least some of the content Alex Jones published on other platforms (e.g., Facebook and YouTube) that led to them taking enforcement against him would have also violated our policies had he posted it on Twitter," Harvey wrote. "Had he done so, we would have taken action against him as well."
> 
> But a CNN review of Jones' accounts show that all of the videos that initially led the other tech companies to take action against Jones were in fact posted to Twitter by Jones or InfoWars. All were still live on Twitter as of the time this article was published. CNN noted this in a request for comment from Twitter on Wednesday morning, before Harvey's email was made public. The company declined to comment at the time.


----------



## ekim68

Mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery



> It's nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces. A new MIT study shows how and why it can be done.


----------



## steppenwolf

why?who cares

grasp it in middle


----------



## ekim68

Government Misunderstands Ride Hailing Apps



> The New York City Council has floated a bill to cap for one year the number of Uber and Lyft licensed cars allowed in the city. The effort springs from a deeply misguided and flawed understanding of markets, technology, venture capital and local politics.
> 
> A few words on this topic might offer some insight. If Council members were to better understand the history of New York's horrible taxi service - and the Council's own role in creating this mess - they might see why attempts to thwart market forces will only make things worse.


----------



## ekim68

Hospital Blood Delivery By Drone



> One of the world's first drone delivery services is all the way in rural Rwanda, where 27 year-old Abdoul Salam Nizeyimana earns a living by launching and retrieving self-flying planes. Nizeyimana was drawn to not only the technology of his employer Zipline but also its mission: to deliver blood to remote hospitals, helping doctors save their patients' lives.


----------



## ekim68

There were nearly 1,300 more threats made at U.S. schools this past year, report finds



> Violent incidents in schools increased 113 percent during the past school year, a new study finds.
> 
> Schools saw 279 violent incidents during the 2017-18 school year, up from 131 the previous year, according to a study by the Educator's School Safety Network, a national non-profit school safety organization.


----------



## ekim68

The Boring Company pitches high-speed tunnel out to Dodger Stadium



> The Boring Company was conceived as a solution to LA's traffic woes, and the first people to benefit from its forward-thinking tunnel networks may be the city's sports fans. The company today announced a proposed transport link between the LA Metro and Dodger Stadium, which would greatly reduce the travel time on match day and throw extra momentum behind the other projects in its pipeline.


----------



## ekim68

The World Economic Forum warns that AI may destabilize the financial system



> Artificial intelligence will reshape the world of finance over the next decade or so by automating investing and other services-but it could also introduce troubling systematic weaknesses and risks, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF).


----------



## ekim68

Fracking is destroying U.S. water supply, warns shocking new study



> "After more than a decade of fracking operation, we now have more years of data to draw upon from multiple verifiable sources," said Vengosh. The researchers looked at data on water used - and oil, gas, and wastewater produced - for over 12,000 wells from 2011 to 2016.


----------



## ekim68

Global warming can make extreme weather worse. Now scientists can say by how much.



> When the heat waves, droughts, wildfires and deluges come - as they seem to with increasing regularity these days - the question inevitably arises: Did climate change play a role?
> 
> The answer scientists gave for years was that greenhouse gases created by humans likely contributed to extreme weather, but it was hard to definitively tie the warming atmosphere to any single episode.
> 
> But that cautious approach, repeated in thousands of news reports for more than a decade, has been changing in recent months. Now, scientists say that they will increasingly be able to link extreme weather events to human-caused global warming and to make such determinations quickly, sometimes within days.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/08/17/rolls-royce-new-battery-system-electric-ship-boat/']Rolls-Royce launches new battery system to electrify ships[/URL]



> Ground transport is currently leading the transition to electric propulsion, but maritime transport is now starting to see its share of electrification and Rolls-Royce wants in.
> 
> The British power system company is launching a new battery system to electrify ships.


----------



## ekim68

EU considers 60-minute deadline for social networks to remove terrorist content



> No longer the carrot, now the stick: the European Commission is considering imposing an hour-long deadline for social networks to remove terrorist and extremist content after voluntary measures appear to have failed.
> 
> As reported by the Financial Times on Sunday, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as smaller businesses, are all within the EU's sights.


----------



## ekim68

Antenna sales are rising, in another sign of churn in TV watching



> The lowly, unsightly TV antenna, consigned to garages or forgotten altogether when people switched to cable and satellite services for TV, is rising again.
> 
> Once known as "rabbit ears" because of their shape, antennas pull in actual broadcast signals to TVs, something that was once everyday knowledge but got lost as people for more than a generation came to rely on cable and satellite providers.
> 
> In the Twin Cities and much of Minnesota, antenna users can receive 10 to 60 TV channels, often in high-definition quality, over the air at no expense. Local antenna installers say business has been rising about 20 percent to 25 percent annually for several years.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Disrupts APT28 Hacking Campaign Aimed at US Midterm Elections



> Microsoft revealed last night that it successfully disrupted a hacking campaign associated with the Russian military intelligence service GRU.
> 
> The group is known in infosec industry circles as APT28, Fancy Bear, or Strontium, and has been previously linked to cyber-espionage campaigns aimed at numerous governments around the world, including to the hack of the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election.


----------



## ekim68

Google, Apple and 13 other companies that no longer require employees to have a college degree



> The economy continues to be a friendly place for job seekers today, and not just for the ultra-educated - economists are predicting ever-improving prospects for workers without a degree as well.
> 
> Recently, job-search site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Companies like Google, Apple, IBM and EY are all in this group.


----------



## ekim68

Fire dept. rejects Verizon's "customer support mistake" excuse for throttling



> A fire department whose data was throttled by Verizon Wireless while it was fighting California's largest-ever wildfire has rejected Verizon's claim that the throttling was just a customer service error and "has nothing to do with net neutrality." The throttling "has everything to do with net neutrality," a Santa Clara County official said.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese internet users surge to 802 million in test of government's ability to manage world's biggest online community



> While two in five Chinese are still offline, the country's internet population has grown big enough to open huge market opportunities for hi-tech companies, and provide the government with better access to keep watch over its citizens, according to an analyst.


----------



## Volstein

ekim68 said:


> Facebook Scans the Photos and Links You Send on Messenger


Is it real?? How can they check all the information we send to each other? Is it legal?
I've already heard about some Facebook things that I didn't like and that is too much already. It's time to download another encrypted messenger.


----------



## ekim68

Pilot plant demonstrates low-cost conversion of CO2 into fuel



> Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is one of the most pressing concerns facing the world today. Cutting back the amount of CO2 that's newly pumped into the air is vital, but it might not be enough - we need to suck out some that's already up there. Direct air capture (DAC) systems have been discussed as a possibility for decades but it was, until recently, deemed too expensive to be practical. After running a pilot plant for three years, Canadian company Carbon Engineering (CE) has broken down the costs of a DAC system and shown it can be done much more cost-effectively than previously thought.


----------



## ekim68

Crowdsourcing the hunt for software bugs is a booming business-and a risky one




> Freelance cybersleuths can help companies find flaws in their code. But the bug hunters could fall afoul of anti-hacking laws.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.theguardian.com/environment/energy'] 
 Europe to ban halogen lightbulbs[/URL]




> After nearly 60 years of brightening our homes and streets, halogen lightbulbs will finally be banned across Europe on 1 September.
> 
> The lights will dim gradually for halogen. Remaining stocks may still be sold, and capsules, linear and low voltage incandescents used in oven lights will be exempted. But a continent-wide switchover to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is underway that will slash emissions and energy bills, according to industry, campaigners and experts.
> 
> LEDs consume one-fifth of the energy of halogen bulbs and their phase-out will prevent more than 15m tonnes of carbon emissions a year, an amount equal to Portugal's annual electricity usage.


[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

Happy Birthday, Linux!



> This is the day on which, back in 1991, a young Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds sat at his desk to let the folks on comp.os.minix newsgroup know about the "hobby" OS he was working on.


----------



## ekim68

New technology sucks water out of thin air



> Collecting water from the air is nothing new. Fog nets-typically constructed using a sheet of plastic mesh hung between a pair of poles-are often used in arid areas to capture water vapor. The vapor condenses into a liquid on the mesh and is then drawn down into a collection receptacle. Boom: drinkable water. That said, the amount of drinkable water that a fog net can yield doesn't amount to much and, as its name suggests, if it's not a foggy day, there's not likely to be much, if any, water collected at all.
> 
> Happily, for people living in areas that are dryer than a popcorn fart, a team from the University of Akron have devised a way to spin nanoscale fibers that will provide a huge upgrade over the conventional fog nets in use today.


----------



## ekim68

Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear



> Sea level rise may seem like a far-off threat, but a growing number of new studies, including one out Thursday, shows that real estate markets have already started responding to increased flooding risks by reducing prices of vulnerable homes.


----------



## ekim68

HAV shares first images of planned luxury airship cabin



> Last October, British aerospace firm Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) announced that it was developing a luxury-tourism-oriented version of its otherwise-industrial Airlander 10 airship. This Wednesday, at the Farnborough International Airshow, the company revealed what the interior of that aircraft's cabin will look like.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota to invest $500 million in Uber for self-driving cars



> (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) will invest $500 million in Uber to jointly work on developing self-driving cars, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday, a bid by both companies to catch up to rivals in the hotly competitive autonomous driving businesses.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise




> A climate change-fueled switch away from fossil fuels means the worldwide economy will fundamentally need to change.


----------



## ekim68

One year after Harvey, Houston awaits the next flood



> Thanks to its location on the Gulf coast and the high humidity that comes with it, Houston has always been prone to heavy rains. In most cases they have been just an annoyance.
> 
> Climate change is making the freaky outlier storms worse - and less predictable. Storms dumping 20-plus inches of rain are six times more likely than they were in the late 20th century, according to the National Academy of Sciences. On top of that, development has replaced wetlands and prairies with concrete, so stormwater goes into homes rather than sinking into the ground. According to the local nonprofit Katy Prairie Conservancy, Houston has lost 70 percent of its wetlands since 1992.


----------



## ekim68

Report Earnings Daily



> Want to end corporate short-termism and all the heavy breathing that comes with quarterly earnings reporting? Then report results daily.
> 
> The excessive focus on stock price - and stock-option bonuses and compensation in the executive suite - is thought of as a driver of share buybacks and decreased capital spending, especially in research and development.


----------



## ekim68

Conservationists give assisted migration a second look




> The West's climate is changing too quickly for some species to keep up. Should people intervene?


----------



## ekim68

Go figure! Amazon proving to be solid partner to retailers



> The common (and increasingly simplistic) Amazon storyline goes like this: Amazon is killing physical retail as shopping goes digital. The reality is way more nuanced. Amazon is increasingly a partner to the brick-and-mortar crowd and is often involved in win-win deals.
> 
> What? That's impossible.
> 
> Believe it. Here are a few recent mentions from retailers on their earnings conference calls. These comments have been made following strong same-store sales and results generally better than expected. Simply put, retail isn't dead. It's on fire, and Amazon, in some cases, is even boosting foot traffic.


----------



## ekim68

Here's How Much Time You'll Waste Commuting in Your Lifetime (by City)



> Commuting is the most stressful part of the day for many people. It's like a recurring nightmare - day after day, week after week, year after year spent sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, stuck behind the wheel instead of spending time with family and friends doing the things you love.


----------



## ekim68

California Moves to Require 100% Clean Electricity by 2045



> California lawmakers approved a measure mandating that all electricity come from wind, solar and other clean-energy sources by 2045, marking the state's biggest step yet in the fight against global warming.


----------



## ekim68

That Time Telco Lobbyists Sent Me All Their Talking Points About Trying To Shift The Blame To Internet Companies



> One thing that's clear, however, is that the big telcos *really* want to play up the recent attacks on social media companies ("edge providers," as they like to say), and throughout the document there are statements about taking advantage of the current political attacks on those companies. For example, in the "Privacy" section, the talking points for Salter appear to be for him to try to pivot to making it about Facebook and Google as quickly as possible, saying they are the bigger risks:


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft to business partners: If you want to work with us, offer paid family leave



> Technology giants in the United States offer some of the country's most generous employee benefits, but the workers who mow the lawns or serve lunch in the company cafeteria - jobs that are often staffed by outside firms - tend to get far smaller packages.
> 
> Microsoft announced a new policy Thursday that it hopes will shrink that gap, pledging it will ink contracts only with service providers who give their employees 12 weeks of paid family leave.


----------



## ekim68

https://www.axios.com/california-pe...nts-dc962265-c9bb-4b00-ae97-50427f6bc936.html
People cause most California autonomous vehicle accidents[/URL]



> A year since Axios first examined the data, there are now 55 companies with self-driving car testing permits in California and 54 new accidents, based on filings of incident reports in the state. But one thing has remained constant: Humans continue to be the cause of most accidents.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='http://www.hml.queensu.ca/blog/magicscroll']An iPad That Fits Your Pocket: Introducing a Roll-up Tablet With Flexible Screen Real Estate[/URL]



> BARCELONA - A Queen's University research team has taken a page from history, rolled it up and created the MagicScroll - a rollable touch-screen tablet designed to capture the seamless flexible screen real estate of ancient scrolls in a modern-day device. Led by bendable-screen pioneer Dr. Roel Vertegaal, this new technology is set to push the boundaries of flexible device technology into brand new territory.


----------



## ekim68

Ocean Cleanup system completed and ready to be towed out to sea



> Following more than five years of development, the moment of truth is fast arriving for the Ocean Cleanup Project. Team members added the finishing touches to their very first trash-catching system over the weekend, with less than a week to go until it is towed out towards the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.


----------



## ekim68

Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves



> Aggressive, shameless, obsessive and optimistic, the tech billionaire Vinod Khosla is willing to litigate the California coast for the rest of his life.


----------



## ekim68

Premera Blue Cross accused of destroying evidence in data breach lawsuit



> The plaintiffs of a class-action lawsuit against health insurance provider Premera Blue Cross are accusing the organization of "willfully destroying" evidence that was crucial for establishing accurate details in a security breach incident.


----------



## ekim68

Hard Lessons (Thanks, Amazon) Breathe New Life Into Retail Stores



> Malls are being hollowed out. Shops are closing by the thousands. Retailers are going bankrupt.
> 
> But it may be too early to declare the death of retail. Americans have started shopping more - in stores.
> 
> From the garden section at Walmart to the diamond counters at Tiffany & Company, old-school retailers are experiencing some of their best sales growth in years.


----------



## ekim68

Berry Farmers Break Free From Big Agriculture



> For the first time, Ramon Torres maintains control over his livelihood. He chooses what to farm and how to farm it, free from pesticides that harm workers, under working conditions he helps set.
> 
> The 22 acres of juicy strawberries and blueberries he farms belong to him and three others under Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad ("Land and Liberty Cooperative"), a farm co-op founded in 2013 to meet consumer demand for berries farmed under nonexploitative conditions and worker demand for a fair paycheck and safe working conditions. The co-op prides itself on organic farming and livable wages for its workers.
> 
> When Torres worked at Sakuma Brothers berry farms in Skagit County, Washington, several years ago, he and his fellow farmworkers endured low wages, unpaid breaks, and exposure to pesticides.


----------



## ekim68

Khan al-Ahmar: Israel's top court approves demolition of Palestinian village



> Israel's High Court of Justice has rejected petitions filed by residents of the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar, paving the way for the eviction of the community and demolition of the entire village, which can now be carried out any time after 12 September.


----------



## ekim68

Hospitals are fed up with drug companies, so they're starting their own



> A group of major American hospitals, battered by price spikes on old drugs and long-lasting shortages of critical medicines, has launched a mission-driven, not-for-profit generic drug company, Civica Rx, to take some control over the drug supply.
> 
> Backed by seven large health systems and three philanthropic groups, the new venture will be led by an industry insider who refuses to draw a salary. The company will focus initially on establishing price transparency and stable supplies for 14 generic drugs used in hospitals, without pressure from shareholders to issue dividends or push a stock price higher.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90232670/quantum-computing-is-almost-ready-for-business-startup-says']Quantum computing is almost ready for business, startup says[/URL]



> Quantum computing-which harnesses the peculiar physics of subatomic scale-long appeared to be a technology of the far future, maybe decades away. But the sci-fi tech is coming to market way sooner than was expected just a few years ago, due to new thinking on how to make use of its still-imperfect capabilities. Along with behemoths like Google and IBM, Berkeley-based company Rigetti is making a bid to grab the market. And it may-at the moment at least-be in the lead.


----------



## ekim68

Physicists control molecule for a millionth of a billionth of a second



> Sept. 7 (UPI) -- Using a microscope and its electrical current, physicists have found a way to manipulate and control a single molecule. The breakthrough happened by accident.
> 
> In the lab, scientists were observing a basic chemical reaction under an electron microscope. Normally, when the current of the microscope is increased, the reaction happens faster.
> 
> This time, it didn't.


----------



## ekim68

After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks, AT&T's Promised Job Growth Magically Evaporates



> Telecom monopolies have a pretty good racket going. They'll consistently demand all manner of tax cuts, subsidies, and other government perks in exchange for broadband networks they only half or partially deploy--or jobs that never materialize. The nation's telcos in particular have received countless billions in taxpayer subsidies to expand their broadband networks, yet time and time again we've shown how they've wiggled out of these obligations, leaving huge swaths of America left outside of the reach of fast, inexpensive, competitive broadband (that's particularly true if you're poor).


----------



## ekim68

This Group Teaches Kids to Love Guns, and U.S. Taxpayers Foot the Bill



> In the middle of Alabama sits a $20 million shooting range run by a group that's largely financed by the American taxpayer. It is, to be accurate, a spread of rifle and pistol ranges designed with state-of-the-art targets and electronic scoring, set under a canopy of trees on country club-like grounds. A fleet of gleaming golf carts zooms across 500 acres, tricked out with custom rifle holders to prevent mishaps on the rolling terrain.
> 
> This facility is run by the Civilian Marksmanship Program, or CMP, an understated pro-gun group with a quarter-billion dollars in assets. Most of that wealth-far more than the National Rifle Association Foundation has-effectively comes from the continuing generosity of the federal government. CMP is the U.S. Army's designated retailer of cast-off weapons, making it a nonprofit with a very profitable franchise. The next big payday will come later this year when CMP starts selling thousands of M1911s, the U.S. military's sidearm of choice for more than 70 years.


----------



## ekim68

Plan to tow icebergs from Antarctica to parched Dubai



> What do you do if you're a fast-growing city in the desert with lots of thirsty people and little freshwater reserves? Park an iceberg off the coast.
> 
> That's one Dubai-based engineering firm's plan to provide fresh drinking water to the city's rapidly-expanding population.
> 
> The National Advisor Bureau (NABL), a private engineering firm, wants to schlep a glacial iceberg from Antarctica - weighing approximately 100 million tons - to Dubai, via an intermediate stop in either Perth, Australia, or Cape Town, South Africa.
> 
> If the iceberg doesn't melt along the way, the firm will sell the water to Dubai's government.


----------



## ekim68

Wikipedia seeks photos of 20 million artifacts lost in Brazilian museum fire



> The items in the Museu Nacional in Rio may be gone, but Wikipedia doesn't want them to be forgotten.


----------



## ekim68

Battery-packed drone can fly for up to 2 hours per charge



> As well as taking aerial photography to the next level, small drones can help tackle wildlife poaching, survey industrial sites, be used for mapping, deliver packages or assist with policing an area. But most battery-powered drones are limited by a relatively short battery life. California's Impossible Aerospace says its upcoming US-1 drone will fly for much, much longer per charge than competitors, and should put electric drones on a par with gas-fueled systems.


----------



## ekim68

'You Can See Almost Everything.' Antarctica Just Became the Best-Mapped Continent on Earth



> Antarctica might not be the hottest tourist destination, but for anyone who does visit, scientists now have an incredibly high-resolution map of the white tundra. According to the scientists at Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota who created the imagery, Antarctica is now the best-mapped continent on Earth.
> 
> The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) was constructed using hundreds of thousands of satellite images taken between 2009 and 2017, Earther reports. A supercomputer assembled the massive amounts of data, including the elevation of the land over time, and created REMA, an immensely detailed topographical map, with a file size over 150 terabytes.


----------



## ekim68

European Parliament endorses upload filters and "link tax"



> Today's decision is a *severe blow to the free and open internet.* By endorsing new legal and technical limits on what we can post and share online, the European Parliament is putting corporate profits over freedom of speech and abandoning long-standing principles that made the internet what it is today.


----------



## ekim68

Alphabet's Loon balloons just beamed the internet across 1000km



> Loon, the former Google X project and now independent Alphabet company, has developed an antenna system that could create a far greater ground coverage than previously possible.
> 
> According to Loon each of its balloons, from 20km above earth, can cover an area of about 80km in diameter and serve about 1,000 users on the ground using an LTE connection. However, Loon balloons need a backhaul connection from an access point on the ground and without that connection the balloons can't provide connectivity to users on the ground.
> 
> But on Tuesday the company revealed it had sent data across a network of seven balloons from a single ground connection spanning a distance of 1,000 kilometers, or about 621 miles.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/09/12/tesla-releasing-more-battery-capacity-free-supercharging-hurricane-florence/']Tesla is releasing more battery capacity and giving free Supercharging to owners in Hurricane Florence's path[/URL]



> For Tesla owners who don't have free Supercharging and battery packs with software-limited battery capacity, Tesla is temporarily enabling both for those in Hurricane Florence's path in order to facilitate their travels.
> 
> That's due to Tesla using an unforeseen feature of their over-the-air software update system.
> 
> Tesla used to offer the option to buy a Model S or Model X with a 75 kWh battery pack software-locked at a capacity of 60 kWh. The option would result in a less expensive vehicle with a shorter range and the option to pay to remotely enable the longer range at a later stage.


----------



## ekim68

New Report Brings Clarity to U.S. Arms Manufacturing Role in Global Conflicts



> Most Americans want peace-in the world, in their country, and in their own homes and communities.
> 
> Even the most committed Trump supporter might want peace in Latin America and the Middle East-if it means "illegal" refugees stop "pouring" in to the USA.
> 
> Yet, somehow, U.S. "commandos" were deployed to 149 countries in 2017 alone.
> 
> Worse, according to a 2016 International Criminal Court report, U.S. troops allegedly committed war crimes in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military and CIA allegedly tortured at least 88 people in Poland, Romania, and other countries as well.
> 
> So why is it then that so many Americans work for private, for-profit companies profiting from war? And why are so many Americans invested financially in the merchants of death profiting from war and manufactured terror around the globe?


----------



## ekim68

5 Trillion operations per second... 


Apple debuts iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max with A12, 512GB, and new cameras



> The A12 Bionic is a 6-core CPU with 2 performance cores deliver up to 15 percent speeds and 40 percent lower power, with 4 efficiency cores running at up to 50 percent lower power. Apple is touting a 50 percent GPU performance improvement over the A11 Bionic, as well. It also has a second-generation Neural Engine, and can process 5 trillion operations per second, up from 600 billion the year before; this is said to unlock the potential of machine learning for the iPhones.


----------



## ekim68

Crimes Were Committed



> Before, during and after the crisis, Financial Felonies abounded


----------



## ekim68

Apple finally moves beyond the shadow of Steve Jobs with a truly life-changing product



> Think that it was the iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max  that stole the show at yesterday's Apple event?  Nope. The real innovation isn't in creating a smartphone that costs over $1,000 . The real innovation is in building a wearable that can save lives.


----------



## ekim68

Europe just voted to wreck the internet, spying on everything and censoring vast swathes of our communications



> Lobbyists for "creators" threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair's-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.


----------



## ekim68

Auto, tech industries urge Congress to pass self-driving legislation



> John Bozzella, president and CEO of Global Automakers, said at an Axios event Thursday that it's "critically important" that Congress pass federal legislation on autonomous vehicles.
> 
> *Why it matters:* It's been one year since the House approved the Self Drive Act, but the Senate has yet to pass it. This delay is set against a growing fear in Washington, Silicon Valley and the auto industry that the U.S. will fall dangerously behind in autonomous vehicle standards and policies while China and Europe leap ahead.


----------



## ekim68

A look back... 


10 Things People Still Get Wrong About the Financial Crisis



> One of the most intriguing aspects of the 2007-09 financial crisis is how little understanding there is of what actually occurred. Some of this has to do with the complexities of the event, as well as how hard it is to identify forces lurking below the surface that had built up over the years.
> 
> Even a decade later, many people still cling to false ideas about the underlying causes (there wasn't just one, folks!) of the crisis.


----------



## ekim68

Data breaches affect stock performance in the long run, study finds



> A multi-year study on the stock price evolution for breached companies reveals that data breaches have a long-term impact on a company's stock price, even if it's somewhat minimal.
> 
> The study, carried out by the research team behind the CompariTech web portal, looked only at companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that suffered and publicly disclosed breaches of one million records and over in the past three years.


----------



## ekim68

Road makers turn to recycled plastic for tougher surfaces



> OF ALL the plastic produced since the 1950s, less than 10% has been recycled. The vast majority ends up being dumped, most of it in landfill. Some is left to litter the natural environment, where it can get into rivers and wash out into the sea (see article). The plastic-waste problem will worsen before it gets better: some 380m tonnes of the stuff are likely to be made this year. That is more than three times as much as the 120m tonnes of bitumen produced annually, most of which goes into building the world's roads.
> 
> There is a connection. Just as plastic is derived from petrochemicals, bitumen is produced as a by-product of refining oil. Both are polymers, which consist of long strands of molecules bound together firmly. It is this characteristic that makes plastic strong and contributes to its great longevity. Such features are also useful for road builders, who use hot bitumen to bind together aggregates made from broken rocks and stones, into what is commonly known as asphalt. All of which has got some people thinking: why not swap one polymer with another?


----------



## ekim68

American Eating Habits Are Changing Faster than Fast Food Can Keep Up



> Home cooking would be making a comeback if it ever really went away.
> 
> Restaurants are getting dinged by the convenience of Netflix, the advent of pre-made meals, the spread of online grocery delivery, plus crushing student debt and a focus on healthy eating. Eighty-two percent of American meals are prepared at home -- more than were cooked 10 years ago, according to researcher NPD Group Inc. The latest peak in restaurant-going was in 2000, when the average American dined out 216 times a year. That figure fell to 185 for the year ended in February, NPD said.


----------



## ekim68

More than half of tech workers say they delayed kids because of soaring cost of living



> Even Bay Area tech workers blame a lot of their problems on housing. The region's sky-high rents and home prices are exacerbating their commutes, forcing their paychecks to stretch thinner, and, according to a new survey keeping them childless longer.
> 
> Though some residents blame the area's highly paid tech workers for driving up the cost of housing, data increasingly shows that these days, even tech workers feel squeezed by the Bay Area's scorching prices. Fifty-eight percent of tech workers surveyed recently said they have delayed starting a family due to the rising cost of living, according to a poll that included employees from Apple, Uber, Google, LinkedIn, Facebo0ok, Lyft, and other Bay Area companies.


----------



## ekim68

EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019



> European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc on Friday announced that the EU will stop the twice-yearly changing of clocks across the continent in October 2019.
> 
> The practice, which was used as a means to conserve energy during the World Wars as well as the oil crises of the 1970s, became law across the bloc in 1996.
> 
> All EU countries are required to move forward by an hour on the last Sunday of March and back by an hour on the final Sunday in October.
> 
> Bulc said EU member states would have until April 2019 to decide whether they would permanently remain on summer or winter time.


----------



## ekim68

World's first hydrogen fuel cell passenger train begins service in Germany



> Sept. 16 (UPI) -- The world's first hydrogen fuel cell train to conduct passenger service began operating in Germany on Sunday.
> 
> The Coradia iLint, built by French manufacturer Alstom, arrived to its station in Bremervörde and will run a regular schedule in the Lower Saxony region.
> 
> The train can reach speeds of 140 km per hour by using fuel cells that can convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity. The train itself is emission-free, but the production of hydrogen does release some emissions.


----------



## ekim68

Fans Are Spoofing Spotify With "Fake Plays," And That's A Problem For Music Charts



> The spoofing could erode the veracity of widely respected Billboard chart metrics, especially since the fan campaigns appear to be getting more sophisticated.


----------



## ekim68

The Future of Fish Farming May Be Indoors



> New advancements in water filtration and circulation make it possible for indoor fish farms to dramatically grow in size and production


----------



## ekim68

Study: people tend to cluster into four distinct personality "types"




> Study: people tend to cluster into four distinct personality "types"


----------



## ekim68

Websites are attacked 58 times a day, even when patched properly



> Websites fall victim to malware attacks an average of 58 times a day, which is a 16% increase from last quarter, according to SiteLock's Q2 2018 report. Some 55% of infected sites were up-to-date on their core versions at the time of attack, meaning websites are still being targeted after being properly patched, according to a press release for the report.


----------



## ekim68

Why Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet's Most Successful Failure



> In 2010, Google rocked the $60 billion broadband industry by announcing plans to deploy fiber-based home internet service, offering connections up to a gigabit per second - 100 times faster than average speeds at the time. Google Fiber, as the effort was named, entered the access market intending to prove the business case for ultra-high-speed internet. After deploying to six metro areas in six years, however, company management announced in late 2016 that it was "pausing" future deployments.
> 
> In the _Big Bang Disruption_ model, where innovations take off suddenly when markets are ready for them, Google Fiber could be seen as a failed early market experiment in gigabit internet access. But what if the company's goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google's expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes?
> 
> Seen through that lens, Google Fiber succeeded wildly. It stimulated the incumbents to accelerate their own infrastructure investments by several years.


----------



## ekim68

Cloudflare wants internet route leaks to be a thing of the past



> Cloudflare told TechCrunch that rolling out resource public key infrastructure (RPKI) to all of its customers for free will make it far more difficult to reroute traffic - either by accident or deliberately.
> 
> RPKI, in a nutshell, helps to ensure that traffic goes to the right place through a route that's verified as legitimate and correct by using cryptographically signed certificates.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon is considering opening as many as 3,000 cashierless stores by 2021, report says




> Amazon





> is considering opening 3,000 of its cashierless stores by 2021, Bloomberg said in a report on Wednesday, based on conversations with people familiar with the matter. The e-commerce giant's push into retail would threaten the likes of convenience stores and fast-food chains across the U.S. selling items for customers in a pinch for time.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Cloudflare wants internet route leaks to be a thing of the past


And then there's this....


ICANN sets plan to reinforce internet DNS security



> In a few months, the internet will be a more secure place.
> 
> That's because the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to go ahead with the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the internet's address book - the Domain Name System (DNS).


----------



## ekim68

IBM launches tools to detect AI fairness, bias and open sources some code



> IBM said it will launch cloud software designed to manage artificial intelligence deployments, detect bias in models and mitigate its impact and monitor decision across multiple frameworks.
> 
> The move by IBM highlights how AI management is becoming more of an issue as companies deploy machine learning and various models to make decisions. Executives are likely to have trouble understanding models and the data science under the hood.
> 
> IBM said its technology will monitor AI so enterprises comply with regulations. In addition, IBM's software works with models build on machine learning frameworks such as Watson, Tensorflow, SparkML, AWS SageMaker, and AzureML.


----------



## ekim68

New York Times Sues FCC for Net Neutrality Records



> The New York Times Co. is suing the Federal Communications Commission for records the newspaper alleges may reveal possible Russian government interference in a public comment period before the commission rolled back Obama-era net neutrality rules.
> 
> The plaintiffs, including Times reporter Nicholas Confessore and investigations editor Gabriel Dance, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Sept. 20 under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking to compel the commission to hand over data.


----------



## ekim68

FCC angers cities and towns with $2 billion giveaway to wireless carriers



> The Federal Communications Commission's plan for spurring 5G wireless deployment will prevent city and town governments from charging carriers about $2 billion worth of fees.
> 
> The FCC proposal, to be voted on at its meeting on September 26, limits the amount that local governments may charge carriers for placing 5G equipment such as small cells on poles, traffic lights, and other government property in public rights-of-way. The proposal, which is supported by the FCC's Republican majority, would also force cities and towns to act on carrier applications within 60 or 90 days.


----------



## ekim68

New Lithium-Based Battery Design Makes Use of Greenhouse Gas



> A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.
> 
> While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.


----------



## ekim68

How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?



> Mars P.D. will have to deal with new blood-spatter patterns, different body decay rates, and space-suit sabotage-and they won't be able to fire guns indoors.


----------



## ekim68

CCleaner Updates Itself Without Notifying Users



> After several controversies earlier this year, Avast-owned CCleaner has brought yet another upon itself. This time the controversy is about the CCleaner software auto-updating without notifying users and even updating in spite of users disabling the auto-updating feature.


----------



## ekim68

Greece uses high-tech drones to fight tax evasion in holiday hot spots



> ATHENS: Greece are using drones to buzz over boats running day trips on the Aegean at the start of a new effort aimed at cracking down on rampant tax evasion at holiday hotspots.


----------



## ekim68

Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room



> A visual prank exposes an Achilles' heel of computer vision systems: Unlike humans, they can't do a double take.


----------



## ekim68

Panasonic completing 3 new cell production lines at Tesla's Gigafactory



> In a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg, the head of Panasonic's Automotive Division said that the company was on track to complete an additional three battery-cell production lines at Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory before the end of this year. That puts the expansion ahead of schedule for completion.


----------



## ekim68

Good stuff.. 


[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/09/28/tesla-model-3-production-goal-achieved-record-quarter/']Tesla achieves Model 3 production goal for record quarter with 2 days still to go[/URL]



> Tesla had quite the ambitious Model 3 production goal for this quarter and it was hard to believe it was achievable after months of delays.
> 
> Now Electrek has learned that Tesla already achieved the goal for a new record production with two days still to go before the end of the quarter.


----------



## ekim68

IBM is on a mission to remove prejudice from AI



> "The values adopted to build today's AI systems will be reflected in the decisions those systems make for a decade or more," says IBM. Whether it's rating your credit history, offering you a job or even granting your parole, organizations are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to automate that decision making.
> 
> Yet only recently we looked at how facial recognition systems can amplify rather than remove human bias, and that's just one example of an area of increasing concern: AI algorithms using imperfect data and flawed assumptions, inheriting the biases and prejudices of the humans behind them.
> 
> With its newly-announced AI Fairness 360 toolkit, IBM is throwing down the gauntlet. The toolkit is a sort of Swiss Army knife of algorithms, available to anyone, designed to eliminate that bias.


----------



## ekim68

Ana Carrasco becomes first female motorcycle world champion



> A significant milestone was passed on the road to gender equality yesterday when 21-year-old Ana Carrasco became the first female motorcycle world champion, surviving the final round of the 2018 World 300 Supersport Championship at Mangy Cours in France with just three points from her 13th place, enough to give her the title by a one-point margin.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web']Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web[/URL]




> With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web hopes it's game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.


----------



## ekim68

LinkNYC's 5 million users make 500,000 phone calls each month



> In 2014, in a bid to replace the more than 11,000 aging payphones scattered across New York City's pedestrian walkways with more functional fixtures, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a competition - the Reinvent Payphones initiative - calling on private enterprises, residents, and nonprofits to submit designs for replacements.





> Two years after the deployment of prototypical kiosks in Manhattan, Intersection - a part of the aforementioned CityBridge, which with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes manages the kiosks - is ready to declare them a success. The roughly 1,600 Links recently hit three milestones: 1 billion sessions, 5 million users, and 500,000 phone calls a month.


----------



## ekim68

North, South begin clearing away landmines along Korean border



> SEOUL, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- North and South Korean authorities began removing landmines along the border on Monday as part of the process to ease military tensions, agreed in the third inter-Korean summit.


----------



## ekim68

Internet, social media use and device ownership in U.S. have plateaued after years of growth



> The use of digital technology has had a long stretch of rapid growth in the United States, but the share of Americans who go online, use social media or own key devices has remained stable the past two years, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center data.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous driving: Facing dogs, pigeons, heavy rain, this driverless bus passes test



> We're not talking about the future anymore. Driverless vehicles are here. In the latest example, in Catalonia, Spain, an autonomous bus called Èrica is being tested around the region to help citizens become familiar with what driverless technology entails.
> 
> These bus experiments are also designed to allow local-government officials to adapt to this new means of transportation, which they expect to be fully functioning by 2020.
> 
> Equipped with eight sensors, the red and yellow self-driving shuttle unveiled by the Association of Municipalities for Mobility and Urban Transport, AMTU, is 100 percent electrically powered with 14 hours of autonomous driving. It's air-conditioned and suitable for reduced-mobility passengers.


----------



## ekim68

'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds



> An academic paper finds that half of criticism aimed at director Rian Johnson was politically motivated.


----------



## ekim68

Cities will sue FCC to stop $2 billion giveaway to wireless carriers




> After FCC vote, cities try to restore local control over 5G fees and equipment.


----------



## ekim68

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley applies for federal bailout for farmers hurt by Trump's trade war



> Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has applied for a federal bailout being offered to farmers who are suffering economic hardships as a result of President Donald Trump's trade policies.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers create 'memory-boosting' font



> Australian researchers say their new font, called Sans Forgetica, could be the tool to help people retain information.
> 
> The typeface, which slants to the side and has gaps in the middle, is not easy on the eyes. But according to the team at RMIT University in Australia who conceived Sans Forgetica, it has the perfect combination of "obstruction" needed to recall information.


----------



## ekim68

Analyst: Taiwan's purchase of $330M U.S. arms package challenges China



> Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Taiwan's purchase of weapons from the United States is becoming a critical issue for China, as ties between the world's two largest economies decline over a trade dispute and Europe is emerging as a challenger, a European analyst says.
> 
> Michal Thim, a Taiwan analyst with the Association for International Affairs in the Czech Republic, says the $330 million planned purchase of arms by Taiwan is providing Beijing another reason to forgo improving bilateral relations with Washington.


----------



## ekim68

A shadowy op-ed campaign is now smearing SpaceX in space cities




> "Commercial space companies like SpaceX play by different rules," the op-ed states.


----------



## ekim68

Chernobyl fires back up as a solar power plant



> More than 30 years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the Chernobyl area is once again producing power. From the (somewhat literal) ashes of the Nuclear Power Plant springs the Chernobyl Solar Power Plant, which was officially launched with an opening ceremony on Friday.
> 
> The Solar Chernobyl project is headed up by the Ukranian energy company Rodina and Enerparc AG in Germany. Over 3,700 solar panels are arranged over about 1.6 hectares (4 ac), sitting just 100 m (328 ft) away from Reactor 4, ground zero of the 1986 disaster. The new power plant has been feeding energy into the Ukraine power grid since July 1, about 18 years after the last of the nuclear reactors was finally shut down.


----------



## ekim68

Will Drones and Planes be Treated as Equals by FAA?



> Soon, perhaps even by the time you read this, the rules for flying remote-controlled aircraft in the United States will be very different. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is pushing hard to repeal Section 336, which states that small remote-controlled aircraft as used for hobby and educational purposes aren't under FAA jurisdiction. Despite assurances that the FAA will work towards implementing waivers for hobbyists, critics worry that in the worst case the repeal of Section 336 might mean that remote control pilots and their craft may be held to the same standards as their human-carrying counterparts.


----------



## ekim68

German Art Activists Get Passport Using Digitally Altered Photo of Two Women Merged Together




> It's part of an artwork called "Mask ID," a campaign that's encouraging ordinary citizens to "flood government databases with misinformation" and disrupt mass surveillance programs.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90248074/mozillas-ambitious-plan-to-teach-ethics-in-the-age-of-evil-tech']Mozilla's ambitious plan to teach coders not to be evil[/URL]




> The nonprofit's founder and chairwoman explains her latest initiative: a $3.5M competition in partnership with the Omidyar Network to explore new ways to teach ethics to computer science students.


----------



## RT

Indian Clinic Treats First Case of Netflix Addiction


----------



## Johnny b

That's a link (?)

Here ya go:
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2018/10/india-clinic-treat-first-ever-case-of-netflix-addiction


----------



## RT

thanks John, yep i thought i did it right, i was wrong, you were right :barefoot:

...umm i'm going off to watch some mindless crap on TV...


----------



## Johnny b

enjoy


----------



## ekim68

It's weird, after all this time, to think of MS as a Hardware business...


Gartner: Microsoft passes Acer to become top 5 PC vendor in the U.S.



> The PC market is seeing some very interesting moves this year. In Q2 2018, global shipments were up for the first time in six years - it was the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012. Now we're learning that in Q3 2018, Microsoft broke into the top five list of PC vendors in the U.S. for the first time with its line of Surface computers, laptops, and tablets.


----------



## Johnny b

MS has had a lot of hardware ventures in the past. Just not very successful until their laptops of recent which seem well received. 
But by the numbers, MS sales do kinda pale to the number 4 seller, Apple,

I didn't realize Acer had sunk so low,
Must be why I'm see such good bargains on them at Newegg.
Too much surplus.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/10/14/tesla-powerpack-project-save-colorado-ratepayers/']Tesla deploys new Powerpack project that could save Colorado ratepayers $1 million per year[/URL]



> Tesla's energy division is deploying a new Powerpack project in Weld County, Colorado, where it could save ratepayers and the local utility as much as $1 million per year.
> 
> We are just starting to understand the value of large-scale energy storage system deployed on the electric grid.


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon grounds all F-35 fighter jets following crash - latest issue for costly program



> The U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marines - as well as 11 international partners who participated in the program - grounded all F-35 fighters on Thursday as part of an ongoing investigation into a jet that crashed in Beaufort, South Carolina, late last month.





> The United States has spent over $320 billion so far to develop and acquire more than 2,400 fighter jets, according to the GAO report.


----------



## ekim68

The Stick Shift Index: Where Do People Still Drive Stick Shift in America?



> Learning to drive stick shift was once a rite of passage. Learning how to carefully release the clutch, change gears according to the rev of the engine, and avoid stalling on big hills was all part of driving a car with a manual transmission.
> 
> With the technology behind automatic transmission improving rapidly over the last few decades, do people in the United States still drive stick? We decided to analyze our data to find out.


----------



## ekim68

West Virginia Courts in Chaos After GOP Impeachment of Chief Justice Is Ruled Illegal



> Earlier this year, Republicans in the West Virginia legislature took the extraordinary action of impeaching every single member of the state Supreme Court.
> 
> But the entire process has blown up in Republicans' face. The state courts are now in a full-blown constitutional crisis, because the impeachment of Democratic Chief Justice Margaret Workman has been ruled unconstitutional and there is no judge willing to preside over her trial.


----------



## ekim68

Most Americans say they can't tell the difference between a social media bot and a human



> Most Americans say they can't tell social media bots from real humans, and most are convinced bots are bad, according to a new study from Pew Research Center. Only 47 percent of Americans are somewhat confident they can identify social media bots from real humans. In contrast, most Americans surveyed in a study about fake news were confident they could identify false stories.


----------



## ekim68

99.7 Percent of Unique FCC Comments Favored Net Neutrality




> A new report from Stanford University shows that most commenters were knowledgeable about the issue and very much in favor of keeping the protections.


----------



## ekim68

Google Maps adds EV charging station info



> Following recent updates that help users plan their commutes and group events, Google Maps is now helping EV drivers figure out where to charge their vehicles. A new feature is rolling out today that will let you search for charging stations and provide you with useful information about that station.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change Will Cause Beer Shortages and Price Hikes, Study Says



> It's been one week since a consortium of climate scientists released a dire United Nations report urging a global restructuring of energy industries within 12 years to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change. While the report galvanized worldwide efforts to confront climate change, it was also met with apathy and denial from key leaders.
> 
> But a new study from _ Nature Plants_ might have identified the one climate-related issue that can unite people from myriad political backgrounds-beer. Led by Wei Xie, an agricultural scientist at Peking University, the paper finds that regions that grow barley, the primary crop used to brew beer, are projected to experience severe droughts and heat waves due to anthropogenic climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Facial recognition tech to verify age for alcohol sales in UK supermarkets: report



> UK supermarkets are reportedly going to adopt facial recognition technology at self-checkouts to verify the age of customers buying products.
> 
> The pilot scheme will be rolled out in checkout areas in which customers serve themselves by the end of the year. Should the scheme be a success, the technology could be more widely adopted in 2019, as reported by The Telegraph.


----------



## ekim68

The Internet Apologizes …



> There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry - even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being "weaponized." Even Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he lamented recently.


----------



## ekim68

Internet provider groups sue Vermont over net neutrality law



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Five industry groups representing major internet providers and cable companies filed suit on Thursday seeking to block a Vermont law barring companies that do not abide by net neutrality rules from receiving state contracts.





> Scott said he was disappointed the lawsuit was filed against the state "for taking action to protect our citizens and our economy." The Republican governor said he believed Vermont residents "have a right to free and open access to information on the internet. In the absence of a national standard to protect that right, states must act."


----------



## ekim68

New 'Dark Ads' pro-Brexit Facebook campaign may have reached over 10M people, say researchers



> A major new campaign of disinformation around Brexit, designed to stir up U.K. 'Leave' voters, and distributed via Facebook,  may have reached over 10 million people in the U.K., according to new research. The source of the campaign is so far unknown, and will be embarrassing to Facebook, which only this week claimed it was clamping down on "dark" political advertising on its platform.


----------



## ekim68

The Army is preparing to send driverless vehicles into combat



> WARREN, Michigan - The Army is getting ready to drive into war - in driverless trucks.
> 
> Next fall, its "Leader-Follower" technology will enable convoys of autonomous vehicles to follow behind one driven by a human. It's a direct response to the improvised explosive devices that caused nearly half the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.


----------



## ekim68

Broadband Industry Sues Vermont For Daring To Protect Consumers, Net Neutrality



> As we've made pretty clear, the broadband industry is successfully obliterating most meaningful federal and state oversight of their broken, largely uncompetitive broadband monopolies. They've had great success in convincing the Trump administration to effectively neuter the FCC, driving any piddly, remaining enforcement authority to an FTC that's ill-equipped for the job. At the same time, the federal government and ISPs like Comcast are also waging a not-so-subtle and completely coordinated war on state authority to step in and fill the consumer protection void.


----------



## ekim68

Spain to lead Japan in global life expectancy, US continues to slide



> (CNN)Spain will overtake Japan's long-held position at the top of the world's life expectancy table by 2040, while the United States is set to take a big fall in rankings, new research finds.
> 
> People in Spain will live for 85.8 years on average, marginally edging out expected lifespans in Japan (85.7), Singapore (85.4) and Switzerland (85.2).
> 
> The United States will take the biggest drop in ranking of all high-income countries, falling from 43rd in 2016 to 64th by 2040, with an average life expectancy of 79.8.


----------



## ekim68

Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them



> New trackers make it easy for developers to identify fed-up users and pester them with targeted ads.


----------



## ekim68

China opens world's longest sea bridge and tunnel to connect Hong Kong and Macau to the mainland



> Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated China's latest mega-infrastructure project on Tuesday: The world's longest sea crossing.
> 
> The 34.2-mile bridge and tunnel that have been almost a decade in the making for the first time connect the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau to the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai by road.
> 
> The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge spans the mouth of the Pearl River and significantly cuts the commuting time between the three cities. The previously four-hour drive between Zhuhai and Hong Kong will now take 45 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla shares soar on surprise third-quarter profit that beats Wall Street expectations



> Tesla shares soared by more than 12 percent after the company reported a surprise profit for the third quarter as CEO Elon Musk made good on his promise to start turning regular profits in the last half of the year.


----------



## ekim68

Texas, Arkansas, & Nebraska AGs Are Now Aiding The Broadband Industry's Assault On Net Neutrality



> Back in January, 23 state attorneys general sued the FCC over its net neutrality repeal, claiming it ignored the public, ignored the experts, and was little more than a glorified handout to uncompetitive, predatory telecom monopolies. That trial will also determined whether the FCC ignored rules like the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires you, oh, actually have data to support a major, wholesale reversal of such a major policy (if you're just tuning in, they didn't). The suit, which is also backed by a few companies (including Mozilla), could result in the FCC's repeal being overturned and the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules being restored.
> 
> This week three additional state AGs (Texas, Arkansas, and Nebraska) decided to take the opposite tack, and filed a brief (pdf) last Friday in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, insisting that judges reject the lawsuit against the FCC. Not too surprisingly, the brief is filled with the kind of arguments net neutrality opponents have been trying to make for years, including the repeatedly, and clearly debunked claim that net neutrality simply *had* to be repealed because it was killing broadband industry network investment:


----------



## ekim68

How Good Is Tesla's "Enhanced Autopilot" Feature?



> Car companies predict that self-driving cars will save millions of lives. They talk about a future without personal auto ownership, drivers' licenses, car insurance or the search for parking. When you need a ride, simply use an app to call an autonomous taxi.
> 
> But not everyone is sold on the dream. In fact, 73 percent of respondents told the American Automobile Association in a recent survey that they wouldn't want to ride in a self-driving car. They don't want to give up control to a machine. They don't trust it, don't think it's safe.


----------



## ekim68

With 5G, you won't just be watching video. It'll be watching you, too



> Remember the last time you felt terrified during a horror movie? Take that moment, and all the suspense leading up to it, and imagine it individually calibrated for you. It's a terror plot morphing in real time, adjusting the story to your level of attention to lull you into a comfort zone before unleashing a personally timed jumpscare.
> 
> Or maybe being scared witless isn't your idea of fun. Think of a rom-com that stops from going off the rails when it sees you rolling your eyes. Or maybe it tweaks the eye color of that character finally finding true love so it's closer to your own, a personalized subtlety to make the love-struck protagonist more relatable.
> 
> You can thank (or curse) 5G for that.


----------



## ekim68

Maine Could Be First in US to Guarantee Universal Home Health Care



> When voters in Maine head to the polls in November, they won't just cast a vote for who they want to represent them in U.S. Congress or the governor's mansion. They'll also vote on whether to become the first state in the nation to guarantee universal home health care for people with disabilities and elderly.


----------



## ekim68

Australian National University develops tiny diamond transistor



> Scientists from the university, alongside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, have developed a new type of ultra-thin transistor. The team's diamond transistor is in the proof of concept stage, with lead researcher Dr Zongyou Yin anticipating that diamond transistor technology could be ready for large-scale fabrication within three to five years.
> 
> The team purchased special forms of tiny, flat diamonds and modified the surfaces so that they could grow ultra-thin materials on top to make the transistors, ANU explained, noting also the material they grew on the diamond consisted of a deposit of hydrogen atoms and layers of hydrogenated molybdenum oxide.


----------



## ekim68

They Said Seattle's Minimum Wage Would Cost Workers a Lot. Now the Picture Looks Brighter.



> A research team including economists from the University of Washington has put out a paper showing that Seattle's recent minimum-wage increases brought benefits to many workers employed at the time, while leaving few employed workers worse off.


----------



## ekim68

Creating the first quantum internet



> Scientists in Chicago are trying to create the embryo of the first quantum internet.
> 
> *Why it matters*: If they succeed, the researchers will produce one, 30-mile piece of a far more secure communications system with the power of fast quantum computing.
> 
> The key was the realization of an unused, 30-mile-long fiber optic link connecting three Chicago-area research institutions - Argonne National Lab, Fermi Lab and the University of Chicago.


----------



## ekim68

China produces nano fibre that can lift 160 elephants - and a space elevator?



> A research team from Tsinghua University in Beijing has developed a fibre they say is so strong it could even be used to build an elevator to space.
> 
> They say just 1 cubic centimetre of the fibre - made from carbon nanotube - would not break under the weight of 160 elephants, or more than 800 tonnes. And that tiny piece of cable would weigh just 1.6 grams.


----------



## ekim68

Muslims crowdfund for victims of Pittsburgh synagogue attack



> The Muslim-American community has raised tens of thousands of dollars in a crowdfunding effort to help the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left at least 11 people dead and six wounded.
> 
> The campaign, which is hosted by Muslim crowdfunding site LaunchGood, aims to help shooting victims, "whether it is the injured victims or the Jewish families who have lost loved ones".


----------



## ekim68

Charter Spectrum Jacks Up Rates (Again) Thanks To Merger 'Synergies'



> When Charter Communications (Spectrum) proposed merging with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, the company repeatedly promised that the amazing "synergies" would lower rates, increase competition, boost employment, and improve the company's services. Of course like countless telecom megamergers before it, that never actually happened. Instead, the company quickly set about raising rates to manage the huge debt load. And its service has been so aggressively terrible, the company recently almost got kicked out of New York State, something I've never seen in 20 years of covering telecom.


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon Wants to Predict Anti-Trump Protests Using Social Media Surveillance



> The United States government is accelerating efforts to monitor social media to preempt major anti-government protests in the US, according to scientific research, official government documents, and patent filings reviewed by Motherboard. The social media posts of American citizens who don't like President Donald Trump are the focus of the latest US military-funded research. The research, funded by the US Army and co-authored by a researcher based at the West Point Military Academy, is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military's role and influence on domestic intelligence.


----------



## ekim68

Why a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone in a Medical Facility




> The bizarre incident happened during the installation of an MRI machine and was a surprise to everyone except Apple.


----------



## ekim68

Sulfur regulations on coal power plants could improve air quality, study says




> A Rice University study of Texas coal power plants found regulations on sulfur dioxide emissions could have a significant effect on improving air quality.


----------



## ekim68

'Hologram' lecturers to teach students at Imperial College London



> University classes are set to be given a futuristic spin by letting lecturers appear as hologram-like apparitions beamed in from afar.
> 
> Imperial College London will show off the technology at a special event later on Thursday before deploying it more widely.
> 
> It believes it will be the first academic body to do so regularly.


----------



## ekim68

Sen. Ron Wyden Introduces Bill That Would Send CEOs to Jail for Violating Consumer Privacy



> Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a comprehensive new privacy bill he claims will finally address the lack of meaningful privacy protections for American consumers.
> 
> Wyden says his Consumer Data Protection Act is a direct response to the ocean of privacy scandals that have plagued the internet for the better part of the last decade.


----------



## ekim68

TikTok surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & YouTube in downloads last month



> Beijing-based ByteDance's 2017 acquisition of tween and teen-focused social app Musical.ly is paying off. The company this year merged Musical.ly with its own short video app TikTok as a means of entering the U.S. market. Today, the result of that merger is sitting at the top of the U.S. App Store, ahead of Facebook. More importantly, it recently surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat in monthly installs for the first time in September.


----------



## ekim68

1 in 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked to Commit Scientific Fraud



> As the saying goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." We know that's true because statisticians themselves just said so.
> 
> A stunning report published in the _Annals of Internal Medicine _concludes that researchers often make "inappropriate requests" to statisticians. And by "inappropriate," the authors aren't referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they're referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud.


----------



## ekim68

Migrant Caravan: Border Troops Preparing for Threat of Armed, Unregulated Militias, Leaked Documents Show



> As President Donald Trump directs thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in a show of military force against an approaching caravan of migrants from Central America, preliminary intelligence assessments are preparing for encounters with a litany of groups from unregulated militias to transcontinental criminal organizations, according to documents obtained by _ Newsweek. _


----------



## ekim68

A powerful new battery could give us electric planes that don't pollute




> A manufacturing trick with magnetic fields produces a battery that may discharge fast enough to get an aircraft off the ground.


----------



## ekim68

Stupid Patent of the Month: How 34 Patents Worth $1 Led to Hundreds of Lawsuits



> One of the nation's most prolific patent trolls is finally dead. After more than a decade of litigation and more than 500 patent suits, Shipping & Transit LLC (formerly known as Arrivalstar) has filed for bankruptcy. As part of its bankruptcy filing [PDF], Shipping & Transit was required to state how much its portfolio of 34 U.S. patents is worth. Its answer: $1.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers launch plan to sequence 66,000 species in the United Kingdom. But that's just a start



> *LONDON-*In the first attempt of its kind, researchers plan to sequence all known species of eukaryotic life-66,000 species of animals, plants, fungi, and protozoa-in a single country, the United Kingdom. The announcement was made here today at the official launch of an even grander $4.7 billion global effort, called the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), to sequence the genomes of all of Earth's known 1.5 million species of eukaryotes within a decade.


----------



## ekim68

The future of the kilo: a weighty matter



> A lump of metal in a building near Paris has long served as the global standard for the kilogram. That's about to change…


----------



## ekim68

Oracle confirms China Telecom internet traffic 'misdirections'



> Oracle's Internet Intelligence division has confirmed today the findings of an academic paper published two weeks ago that accused China of "hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries."


----------



## ekim68

Drones, data analytics, smart seeds: How to reforest 1,000 times faster after wildfires



> A Spanish startup says it's developed a cheap method of rapidly rebuilding damaged ecosystems using Iseeds.


----------



## ekim68

Self-Driving Cars Will Make Organ Shortages Even Worse



> Much has been said about the ways we expect our oncoming fleet of driverless cars to change the way we live-remaking us all into passengers, rewiring our economy, retooling our views of ownership, and reshaping our cities and roads.
> 
> They will also change the way we die. As technology takes the wheel, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It's a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ donation.


----------



## ekim68

Sprint Is Throttling Microsoft's Skype Service, Study Finds



> Sprint Corp. has been slowing traffic to Microsoft Corp.'s internet-based video chat service Skype, according to new findings from an ongoing study by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts.
> 
> More than 100,000 consumers have used the researchers' Wehe smartphone app to test internet connections. Information from those tests are aggregated and analyzed by the researchers to check if data speeds are being slowed, or throttled, for specific mobile services.


----------



## ekim68

NASA is showering one city with sonic booms and hoping no one notices



> NASA has been deliberately creating sonic booms off the coast of Galveston, Texas, since Monday in the hope that residents on the barrier island community won't be too bothered by the sound of an F/A-18 aircraft briefly going supersonic.
> 
> That's because the research jet is performing a dive maneuver designed to reduce the normally thunderous sonic boom to what NASA calls a "quiet thump," more like the sound of a car door slamming.
> 
> The test flights are aimed at measuring the community response to the new, quieter booms and are part of NASA's larger effort to develop a new, more muted supersonic plane that might be able to fly over land.


----------



## ekim68

Meet Harley-Davidson's great electric hope: The production-ready 2020 Livewire



> It's looking more and more like Harley's only hope is to branch out into new segments in search of a replacement for its withering customer base, and the 2020 Livewire represents the storied company's first big punch as it tries to fight its way into millennial relevancy. There are a few of key things we still don't know about this bike - namely power, torque, range, voltage and price. H-D's EICMA reveal stayed silent on these very important points, but it did give us our first glimpse of what it'll look like - and it's not bad at all.


----------



## ekim68

Cord cutting accelerates as pay TV loses 1 million customers in largest-ever quarterly loss



> Scratch the theory that cord cutting might be decelerating.
> 
> Cable and satellite TV providers lost about 1.1 million subscribers during the July to September period, the largest quarterly loss ever - and the first time the industry lost more than 1 million subscribers in a quarter, according to media and telecommunications research firm MoffettNathanson.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers Defeat Most Powerful Ad Blockers, Declare a 'New Arms Race'




> Perceptual ad blockers will come out on the losing side in the war against internet advertisers and expose users to a host of new attack vectors in the process, the researchers warned.


----------



## ekim68

Dyson Is Working on an Air Purifier That's Also Headphones



> Dyson is considering developing a wearable air purifier that could double as a pair of headphones, hoping to tap demand from pollution-choked cities in Asia, people with knowledge of the project said.


----------



## ekim68

The US Military Just Publicly Dumped Russian Government Malware Online



> Usually it's the Russians that dump its enemies' files. This week, US Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), a part of the military tasked with hacking and cybersecurity focused missions, started publicly releasing unclassified samples of adversaries' malware it has discovered.
> 
> CYBERCOM says the move is to improve information sharing among the cybersecurity community, but in some ways it could be seen as a signal to those who hack US systems: we may release your tools to the wider world.


----------



## ekim68

VW plans to sell electric Tesla rival for less than $23,000: source



> FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) intends to sell electric cars for less than 20,000 euros ($22,836) and protect German jobs by converting three factories to make Tesla (TSLA.O) rivals, a source familiar with the plans said.


----------



## ekim68

Just so you know.. 

INTERNET GROWTH STATISTICS


----------



## ekim68

Air pollution is associated with increased emergency department visits for heart and lung disease



> Outdoor air pollution is a major health threat worldwide. New research by George Mason University found that exposure to certain air pollutants is linked to increased emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street Makes Money From Your Location Data



> Wall Street is making money off of our smartphone location data. Thasos Group recently captured user location data around Tesla's headquarters, created a map of it, and sold it to its hedge fund clients (via _Wall Street Journal_).


----------



## ekim68

Gold mining is devastating the rainforests of Peru



> More than 170,000 acres of primary rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon have been destroyed in the past 5 years due to small-scale gold mining. This is 30 percent more than has been previously reported, according to new research carried out by scientists at Wake Forest University's Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA).


----------



## ekim68

Massive global health study reveals "disturbing" trends



> Running for over a decade now, the annual Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is a giant peer-reviewed assessment of global health trends. The results this year, published across a series of articles in the prestigious journal _The Lancet_, present some concerning trends, from a worrying plateau in global mortality rates to a decline in global fertility rates.
> 
> Coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, the GBD study offers a fantastically detailed snapshot of the current state of the world's health, involving over 3,500 researchers from 140 countries around the globe.


----------



## ekim68

US overtakes China in top supercomputer list



> China has been pushed into third place on a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
> 
> The latest list by Top 500, published twice a year, puts two US machines - Summit and Sierra - in the top two places. The US has five entries in the top 10, with other entries from Switzerland, Germany and Japan.
> 
> However, overall China has 227 machines in the top 500, while the US has 109.
> 
> Summit can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second.
> 
> Both Summit and Sierra were built by the tech giant IBM.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo to Start First Driverless Car Service Next Month



> In just a few weeks, humanity may take its first paid ride into the age of driverless cars.
> 
> Waymo, the secretive subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is planning to launch the world's first commercial driverless car service in early December, according to a person familiar with the plans. It will operate under a new brand and compete directly with Uber and Lyft.


----------



## ekim68

Nigerian firm takes blame for routing Google traffic through China



> SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nigeria's Main One Cable Co took responsibility on Tuesday for a glitch that temporarily caused some Google global traffic to be misrouted through China, saying it accidentally caused the problem during a network upgrade.


----------



## ekim68

Oh Look, Wireless Sector Investment Is Declining Despite Tax Cuts, Repeal Of Net Neutrality



> You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that it had somehow killed broadband industry investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproves this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would spike.
> 
> You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.


----------



## ekim68

United Nations considers a test ban on evolution-warping gene drives



> The billionaire Bill Gates wants to end malaria, and so he's particularly "energized" about gene drives, a technology that could wipe out the mosquitoes that spread the disease.
> 
> Gates calls the new approach a "breakthrough," but some environmental groups say gene drives are too dangerous to ever use.
> 
> Now the sides are headed for a showdown.
> 
> In a letter circulated today, scientists funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others are raising the alarm over what they say is an attempt to use a United Nations biodiversity meeting this week in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to introduce a global ban on field tests of the technology.


----------



## ekim68

The US military is testing stratospheric balloons that ride the wind so they never have to come down




> A sensor that can spot the wind direction from miles away will let DARPA's surveillance balloons hover at the very edge of space in one spot indefinitely.


----------



## ekim68

China says it has developed a quantum radar that can see stealth aircraft



> Radar is a powerful military tool because it makes it possible to spot enemy aircraft beyond the line of sight. It does this by sending out a burst of radio energy, which bounces back when it encounters another object. So-called "stealth" aircraft try to get around this by becoming invisible to radar - either by using flat, angular shapes to reflect radar signals away from radar equipment or by using materials which absorb radar signals.
> 
> So far, so old news, right? Perhaps so, but things could be about to change if a new report coming out of China proves to be correct. At a recent air show in the city of Zhuhai, state-owned Chinese defense giant China Electronics Technology Group Corporation displayed what it claims to be a quantum radar that's able to detect even the stealthiest of stealth aircraft.


----------



## ekim68

Pentagon spends $560M to fix failures found by 'largest audit in history'



> Nov. 16 (UPI) -- In what it calls the largest audit in history, the U.S. Department of Defense on Friday outlined deficiencies within the Pentagon it says will cost roughly $600 million to fix.
> 
> The audit details inventory discrepancies, financial reporting errors and cybersecurity issues as some of the greatest problems found in the department-wide review.


----------



## ekim68

The Economist Goes Anti-Monopoly



> The _Economist_ magazine is joining the anti-monopoly cause.
> 
> A special report in this week's issue focuses on the decline of competition and dynamism in Western economies, especially the United States, and the rise of much too-powerful firms. This combination has led to lower growth, more inequality, and a widespread belief that the game is "rigged." The report calls for new and improved anti-trust policies that aim to bring back robust competition.


----------



## ekim68

We asked the US military for its 'do not buy' list of Russian, Chinese gear. Surprise: It doesn't exist



> The US Department of Defense's "do not buy" list of foreign software and equipment turns out to be about as long as the list of bug-free Windows releases or privacy-focused Facebook apps.
> 
> In other words, it doesn't exist.


----------



## ekim68

Tech companies are dialling down the hype around 5G mobile - here's why



> Technology is, unfortunately, a hype-infested industry. Every new device has to be insanely great; every new piece of software has to be the harbinger of a business revolution.
> 
> Occasionally it's actually true. But mostly we're just the victims of the hyperbole put out by marketing people trying to encourage us to buy what's often a modest upgrade at best. Software -- and indeed most technology -- is pretty dry stuff, so companies need to tell stories about their products to explain where they fit in the world and why we should care.
> 
> So it's interesting to see how the story around 5G is currently evolving. 5G means more bandwidth and lower latency, which should mean richer and more responsive mobile applications and services. That could be anything from real-time augmented reality (without the motion sickness) to swarms of Internet of Things devices all transmitting data in real time.
> 
> So far, so sci-fi.


----------



## ekim68

Maryland Test Confirms Drones Can Safely Deliver Human Organs



> When a patient who needs an organ transplantation is finally matched with a donor, every second matters. A longer wait between when an organ is removed from a donor and when it is placed into a recipient is associated with poorer organ function following transplantation. To maximize the chances of success, organs must be shipped from A to B as quickly and as safely as possible-and a recent test run suggests that drones are up to the task.


----------



## ekim68

Why some open-source companies are considering a more closed approach



> At the peak of its power, open-source software is having an existential crisis.
> 
> There's no question that the concept of open-source software has revolutionized the enterprise software world, which spent billions of dollars fighting the mere idea for several years before accepting that a new future had arrived. But more than a few people are starting to wonder if the very nature of open-source software ― the idea that it can be used by pretty much anyone for pretty much anything ― is causing its developers big problems in the era of distributed cloud computing services.


----------



## ekim68

Sackler family members face mass litigation and criminal investigations over opioids crisis



> Members of the multibillionaire philanthropic Sackler family that owns the maker of prescription painkiller OxyContin are facing mass litigation and likely criminal investigation over the opioids crisis still ravaging America.
> 
> Some of the Sacklers wholly own Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, the company that created and sells the legal narcotic OxyContin, a drug at the center of the opioid epidemic that now kills almost 200 people a day across the US.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft and Google working on Chrome for Windows on ARM



> Microsoft and Google engineers appear to be collaborating to support a version of Chrome running on Windows on ARM. _9to5Google_ has spotted various commits by Microsoft engineers assisting with the development of Chrome for Windows 10 on ARM. The details follow claims by a Qualcomm executive last month that the chip maker was working on an ARM version of Chrome for Windows 10.


----------



## ekim68

Decaf Tea Found In The Wild



> AsianScientist (Nov. 19, 2018) - Chinese scientists have discovered a type of tea plant that naturally does not produce caffeine. They published their findings in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Read more from Asian Scientist Magazine at: https://www.asianscientist.com/2018/11/in-the-lab/china-low-caffeine-tea/


----------



## ekim68

The 'Neo-Banks' Are Finally Having Their Moment



> SAN FRANCISCO - After the financial crisis 10 years ago, unhappy customers were expected to flee the megabanks for smaller competitors.
> 
> It didn't happen. And the big banks became even more entrenched.
> 
> Now another wave of alternative banks are at it again, and they say they've learned from the mistakes of the upstart banks that tried - and failed - before them.
> 
> Chime, the biggest new name to pop up, has opened two million fee-free online checking accounts and is adding more customers each month than Wells Fargo or Citibank.


----------



## ekim68

MRI technique predicts dementia up to three years before symptoms appear



> An exciting new study suggests a single MRI scan can accurately predict whether a person will develop dementia up to three years before any cognitive symptoms are detectable. It's hoped the prospective diagnostic tool will be able to better identify at-risk patients so preventative measures can be deployed to slow the onset of neurodegeneration.


----------



## ekim68

Controversial spraying method aims to curb global warming

*



NEW YORK -

Click to expand...

*


> A fleet of 100 planes making 4,000 worldwide missions per year could help save the world from climate change. Also, it may be relatively cheap. That's the conclusion of a new peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research Letters.
> 
> It's the stuff of science fiction. Planes spraying tiny sulphate particulates into the lower stratosphere, around 60,000 feet up. The idea is to help shield the Earth from just enough sunlight to help keep temperatures low.


----------



## ekim68

Seaweed could make cows burp less methane and cut their carbon hoofprint




> A diet supplemented with red algae could lessen the huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cows and sheep, if we can just figure out how to grow enough.


----------



## ekim68

Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World




> Surveillance capitalism and targeted advertising have become the norm on the internet, and it's hurting all of us.


----------



## ekim68

Police can remotely drive your stolen Tesla into custody



> Imagine this: You're leaving work, walking to your car, and you find an empty parking spot - someone stole your brand new Tesla (or whatever fancy autonomous car you're driving). When you call the police, they ask your permission for a "takeover," which you promptly give them. Next thing you know, your car is driving itself to the nearest police station. And here's the kicker - if the thief is inside he will remain locked inside until police can arrest them.
> 
> This futuristic and almost slapstick scenario is closer than we think, says Chief Innovation Officer Hans Schönfeld who works for the Dutch police. Currently, his team has already done several experiments to test the crime-halting possibilities of autonomous cars.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon rainforest deforestation 'worst in 10 years', says Brazil



> Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has hit its highest rate in a decade, according to official data.
> 
> About 7,900 sq km (3,050 sq miles) of the world's largest rainforest was destroyed between August 2017 and July 2018 - an area roughly five times the size of London.
> 
> Environment Minister Edson Duarte said illegal logging was to blame.


----------



## ekim68

Lawmakers introduce bill to stop bots from ruining holiday shopping



> Scalpers use bots to buy out all the best gifts and resell them at much higher prices.


----------



## ekim68

Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research



> Science journals are laughing all the way to the bank, locking the results of publicly funded research behind exorbitant paywalls. A campaign to make content free must succeed


----------



## ekim68

Volvo's self-driving trucks get hired to cart limestone around a Norwegian mine



> Volvo's self-driving truck program has already opened up some interesting possibilities, with trials underway exploring autonomous sugar cane harvesting and garbage collection. The Swedish automaker is now set to see how its robo-trucks fare in real-world scenarios, after inking its first commercial deal with a Norwegian resource company to cart limestone away from its mine.


----------



## HOBOcs

I usually ignore emails that come with jokes, shared philosophy and such but the contents of this latest one circulating was sort of "Sign of the Times" and worth a repeat for some of us older members. (I hate to think I'm in that group now - but these are all too familiar)

LOST WORDS FROM OUR CHILDHOOD.....

Do you remember this word? Would you believe the email spell checker did not recognize the word Mergatroyd? *Heavens to Mergatroyd!*

The other day a not so elderly (65) (I say 75) lady said something to her son about driving a *Jalopy* and he looked at her quizzically and said "What the heck is a Jalopy?" OMG (new phrase)! He never heard of the word jalopy!! She knew she was old..... but not that old. Well, I hope you are _*Hunky Dory*_ after you read this and chuckle.

About a month ago, I illuminated some old expressions that have become obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology. These phrases included *"Don't touch that dial," "Carbon copy," "You sound like a broken record"*_ and_* "Hung out to dry."*

Back in the olden days we had a lot of '_*moxie.*_' We'd put on our best '_*bib and tucker*_' to' _*straighten up and fly right*_'.

_*Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumping Jehoshaphat! Holy moley!
We were 'in like Flynn' and 'living the life of Riley'*_', and even a regular guy couldn't accuse us of being a _*knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill. Not for all the tea in China!*_

Back in the olden days, life used to be _*swell*_, but when's the last time anything was swell?
Swell has gone the way of _*beehives, pageboys and the D.A.; of spats, knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes and pedal pushers...AND DON'T FORGET.... Saddle Stitched Pants*_.

Oh, my aching back! _*Kilroy was here*_, but he isn't anymore.

We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say, _*Well, I'll be 'a monkey's uncle!'*_ Or, _*This is a 'fine kettle of fish'*_! We discover that the words we grew up with, the words that seemed omnipresent, as oxygen, have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.

Poof, go the words of our youth, the words we've left behind. We blink, and they're gone.

Where have all those great phrases gone? ( My Favorite)" Let's all go to the beach Saturday"...

Long gone: Pshaw, The milkman did it. Hey! _*It's your nickel. Don't forget to pull the chain. Knee high to a grasshopper. Well, Fiddlesticks! Going like sixty. I'll see you in the funny papers. Don't take any wooden nickels. Wake up and smell the roses.*_

It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter has liver pills. This can be disturbing stuff! ("_*Carter's Little Liver Pills*_" are gone too!)

We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeable times. For a child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age. We at the other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our collective memory. It's one of the greatest advantages of aging.

_*Leaves us to wonder where Superman will find a phone booth...*_

_*See ya later, alligator!
Okidoki*_

WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE FABULOUS 50'S & 60'S...NO ONE WILL EVER HAVE THAT OPPORTUNITY AGAIN...WE WERE GIVEN ONE OF OUR MOST PRECIOUS GIFTS:
.............OUR MEMORIES........


----------



## ekim68

Endurance exercise beats pumping iron when it comes to anti-aging benefits



> Exercise is generally good for us, but new research has found that some forms of exercise provide anti-aging benefits that others don't. The research found that endurance exercise, such as running, swimming or cycling, and high intensity interval training (HIIT) has the ability to not only slow, but actually reverse cellular aging, whereas resistance exercise, like pumping iron, does not.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Parent Has a Plan to Eliminate Mosquitoes Worldwide



> (Bloomberg) -- Silicon Valley researchers are attacking flying bloodsuckers in California's Fresno County. It's the first salvo in an unlikely war for Google parent Alphabet Inc.: eradicating mosquito-borne diseases around the world.
> 
> A white high-top Mercedes van winds its way through the suburban sprawl and strip malls as a swarm of male _Aedes aegypti_ mosquitoes shoot out of a black plastic tube on the passenger-side window. These pests are tiny and, with a wingspan of just a few millimeters, all but invisible.


----------



## ekim68

Taiwan's TSMC Could Be About to Dethrone Intel



> For more than 30 years, Intel Corp. has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world's computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of.
> 
> Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.
> 
> These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry.


----------



## ekim68

Sedans Aren't Dead. American Sedans Are.



> The supremacy of Japanese cars has been 40-plus years in the making.


----------



## Johnny b

Apparently American History isn't being taught in all public or private schools.

* Couple forced to prove that New Mexico is a state while applying for marriage license *

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ew-mexico-statehood-washington-dc/2158889002/

I've been there, interesting culture (  )


----------



## ekim68

Drug overdoses, suicides cause drop in 2017 US life expectancy; CDC director calls it a 'wakeup call'



> (CNN)Life expectancy in the United States declined from 2016 to 2017, yet the 10 leading causes of death remained the same, according to three government reports released Thursday. Increasing deaths due to drug overdoses and suicides explain this slight downtick in life expectancy, the US Centers for Disease Control says.
> 
> Overdose deaths reached a new high in 2017, topping 70,000, while the suicide rate increased by 3.7%, the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reports.


----------



## ekim68

China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists And Students



> In the past decade or so, China has been expanding its commitment to scientific research, and it shows. Chinese researchers now produce more scientific publications than U.S. scientists do, and the global ratings of Chinese universities are rising.


----------



## ekim68

CO2 Emissions Rose for the First Time in 4 Years



> Human emissions of carbon dioxide have gone up for the first time since 2013, according to the UN's ninth annual Emissions Gap Report, meaning the world isn't on track to mitigate the worst of climate change's already disastrous effects.
> 
> The report, published on Tuesday, says that while carbon emissions stayed relatively level between 2014 and 2016, carbon emissions in 2017 went up by 1.2 percent.


----------



## ekim68

More than 40 percent of world coal plants are unprofitable: report



> LONDON (Reuters) - More than 40 percent of the world's coal plants are operating at a loss due to high fuel costs and that proportion could to rise to nearly 75 percent by 2040, a report by environmental think-tank Carbon Tracker showed on Friday.
> 
> Institutional investors are increasingly divesting from fossil fuel companies due to the risk their assets will become stranded as tougher emissions cut targets discourage their use and renewable energy becomes even cheaper.
> 
> London-based Carbon Tracker analysed the profitability of 6,685 coal plants around the world, representing 95 percent of operating capacity and 90 percent of capacity under construction.


----------



## ekim68

America's Epidemic of Empty Churches



> Religious communities often face a choice: Sell off the buildings they can no longer afford, or find a way to fill them with new uses.


----------



## ekim68

Toxic waste from most Illinois coal plants polluting groundwater, report shows



> Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Toxic waste at more than 90 percent of Illinois' coal-fired power plants is polluting groundwater and putting drinking water in surrounding communities at risk, a new environmental report says.
> 
> The analysis conducted by multiple nonprofit environmental groups -- Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice, Prairie Rivers Network and the Sierra Club -- found 22 of the state's 24 dumpsites have released toxic pollutants into the groundwater.
> 
> The report is based on data supplied by industry reports on the power facilities.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/richard-branson-says-he-s-going-to-send-people-into-spa-1830794784']Richard Branson Says He's Going to Send People Into Space by Christmas[/URL]



> Billionaire Richard Branson really, really wants you to believe he's going to send people to space-and soon. In a new interview with CNN, the Virgin Group founder now says he's "reasonably confident" his spaceflight company can beat out competitors like Blue Origin and SpaceX with crewed trips to space before Christmas.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/30/novameat-3d-printed-meat-free-steak/']Novameat develops 3D-printed vegan steak from plant-based proteins[/URL]



> Italian bioengineer Giuseppe Scionti from Spanish startup Novameat has invented the "world's first" 3D-printed meat-free steak made from vegetable proteins, which mimics the texture of beef.


----------



## ekim68

New Metal-Air Transistor Replaces Semiconductors



> It is widely predicted that the doubling of silicon transistors per unit area every two years will come to an end around 2025 as the technology reaches its physical limits. But researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air channel transistor (ACT) they have developed could maintain transistor doubling for another two decades.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen says last generation of combustion engines to be launched in 2026



> WOLFSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Volkswagen's (VOWG_p.DE) strategy chief said on Tuesday the German carmaker's core brand will develop its final generation of vehicles using combustion engine technology in 2026.
> 
> Volkswagen made a strategy shift toward battery-driven vehicles in the wake of a damaging diesel-emissions cheating scandal in 2015, which forced the carmaker to pay more than 27 billion euros in fines for hiding excessive pollution.


----------



## ekim68

Japan's final pager provider to end its service in 2019



> Japan's last pager provider has announced it will end its service in September 2019 - bringing a national end to telecommunication beepers, 50 years after their introduction.
> 
> Around 1,500 users remain subscribed to Tokyo Telemessage, which has not made the devices in 20 years.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo One self-driving taxi service launches in Phoenix



> Waymo - formerly the Google Self Driving Car Project - began inviting folks in Phoenix to ride its autonomous cars in April 2017, a few months after the new Alphabet company was formed to commercialize the technology. Now Waymo One has officially launched, a commercial endeavor aimed at getting more of the public on board.


----------



## ekim68

Mapping the Spectral Landscape of IPv6 Networks



> The Internet is a scary big place, comprising tens of billions of devices hooked together through a series of smaller networks. While most of the global network is known and mapped, there is a large and growing portion of it that is uncharted territory.
> 
> That non-trivial section of the Internet is made up of IPv6 addresses and the unknowable number of devices behind them. The major network operators began running out of unallocated IPv4 addresses about three years ago, an event that networking experts had been anticipating for about 30 years. There are about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses and all of them have been allocated, meaning that they're owned by some network operator or another. While many of those addresses aren't actually in use--large companies and network operators typically have large pools of allocated but unused IP addresses--there aren't any more of them to go around.


----------



## ekim68

We're No Longer in Smartphone Plateau. We're in the Smartphone Decline.



> From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession. They were the good years, the type that would inspire a Scorsese montage: millions and then billions of smartphones going out; billions and then trillions of dollars in rising company valuations; every year new models of phones hitting the market, held up triumphantly at events that were part sales pitch, part tent revival. (To nail the Scorsese effect, imagine "Jumpin' Jack Flash" playing while you think about it.)
> 
> But just like every Scorsese movie, the party ends. Smartphone growth began to slow starting in 2013 or 2014. In 2016, it was suddenly in the single digits, and in 2017 global smartphone shipments, for the first time, actually declined - fewer smartphones were sold than in 2017 than in 2016.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/tesla-battery-report/']Tesla's giant battery saved $40 million during its first year, report says[/URL]



> Neoen, the owner of the giant Tesla battery system in South Australia, released a new report for the first full year of operation and revealed that the energy storage system saved about $40 million over the last 12 months.
> 
> Tesla's 100MW/129MWh Powerpack project in South Australia provide the same grid services as peaker plants, but cheaper, quicker, and with zero-emissions, through its battery system.


----------



## ekim68

Google Translate learns to reduce gender bias




> Google





> continues to make its tools less gender-biased.
> 
> On Thursday, the search giant said its Google Translate service will give both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word. Previously, the service defaulted to the masculine options. The new function is available when translating words from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Spanish. It provides a similar function when translating into English.


----------



## ekim68

California Gives Final OK To Require Solar Panels On New Houses



> Solar panels will be a required feature on new houses in California, after the state's Building Standards Commission gave final approval to a housing rule that's the first of its kind in the United States.
> 
> Set to take effect in 2020, the new standard includes an exemption for houses that are often shaded from the sun. It also includes incentives for people to add a high-capacity battery to their home's electrical system, to store the sun's energy.


----------



## ekim68

UPS Tries Delivery Tricycles As Seattle's Traffic Doom Looms



> Bike messengers have long known cycling is the fastest way to get around traffic-choked cities. More commuters are getting it too. Now UPS is giving it a shot: The 111-year-old delivery service has started moving packages around Seattle by electric tricycle, in a yearlong pilot.


----------



## ekim68

Focusing on the negative is good when it comes to batteries



> Imagine not having to charge your phone or laptop for weeks. That is the dream of researchers looking into alternative batteries that go beyond the current lithium-ion versions popular today. Now, in a new study appearing in the journal _Science_, chemists at several institutions, including Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech for NASA, as well as the Honda Research Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have hit on a new way of making rechargeable batteries based on fluoride, the negatively charged form, or anion, of the element fluorine.


----------



## ekim68

Madoff's Victims Are Close to Getting Their $19 Billion Back



> A decade after Bernard Madoff was arrested for running the world's biggest Ponzi scheme, the bitter fight to recoup investors' lost billions has astounded experts and victims alike.
> 
> While no one will ever collect the phantom profits Madoff pretended he was earning, the cash deposits by his clients have been the primary objective for Irving Picard, a New York lawyer overseeing liquidation of Madoff's firm in bankruptcy court. So far he's recovered $13.3 billion-about 70 percent of approved claims-by suing those who profited from the scheme, knowingly or not. And Picard has billions more in his sights.


----------



## ekim68

Smallest 3D transistors ever made measure a minuscule 2.5 nanometers



> Just a few years ago the industry standard for chips was 14 nanometers (nm), which describes the width of each transistor. Commercially, it's now 10 nm and quickly moving over to 7 nm, most notably in Apple's A12 Bionic processor, which powers the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max. IBM, meanwhile, has already begun to experiment with 5-nm chips.
> 
> Some of the new transistors developed by the researchers halve that again, measuring a record-setting 2.5 nm wide. To make them, the team modified a fairly-recently developed microfabrication method known as thermal atomic layer etching (thermal ALE). They start with an alloyed semiconductor material called indium gallium arsenide, then expose it to hydrogen fluoride, which creates a thin layer of metal fluoride on the substrate surface.


----------



## ekim68

Freshwater Is Getting Saltier, Threatening People and Wildlife



> Salts that de-ice roads, parking lots and sidewalks keep people safe in winter. But new research shows they are contributing to a sharp and widely rising problem across the U.S. At least a third of the rivers and streams in the country have gotten saltier in the past 25 years. And by 2100, more than half of them may contain at least 50 percent more salt than they used to. Increasing salinity will not just affect freshwater plants and animals but human lives as well-notably, by affecting drinking water.


----------



## ekim68

This For-Profit College Chain Is Leaving Students With Lots of Debt and No Degrees



> The Education Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit college chains, announced last week it was immediately closing more than 70 campuses in 21 states. Between fifteen and twenty thousand students are now in the unenviable position of being thousands of dollars in debt with no completed degrees or certifications and, reportedly, little prospect of being able to transfer their academic credits to different schools.
> 
> NBC reports that in some instances, students were told in the middle of class - some of them while in the middle of their certification exams - that their school no longer exists. Their student debt, however, sure does.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon Admits Defeat With $4.6 Billion AOL-Yahoo Writedown




> Verizon Communications Inc.





> is conceding defeat on its crusade to turn a patchwork of dot-com-era businesses into a thriving online operation.
> 
> The wireless carrier slashed the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions by $4.6 billion, an acknowledgment that tough competition for digital advertising is leading to shortfalls in revenue and profit.
> 
> The move will erase almost half the value of the division it had been calling Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast rejected by small town-residents vote for municipal fiber instead



> A small Massachusetts town has rejected an offer from Comcast and instead plans to build a municipal fiber broadband network.
> 
> Comcast offered to bring cable Internet to up to 96 percent of households in Charlemont in exchange for the town paying $462,123 plus interest toward infrastructure costs over 15 years. But Charlemont residents rejected the Comcast offer in a vote at a special town meeting Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

Just so you know.. 


7 easy ways you can tell for yourself that the moon landing really happened


----------



## ekim68

Number of Streaming Shows Overtakes Basic Cable, Broadcast for First Time, FX Reports



> Streaming services snatched their biggest piece of the TV pie ever in 2018.
> 
> According to FX's annual report on the number of scripted originals on TV, the number of streaming shows has surpassed the number of basic cable and broadcast shows for the first time ever. Out of 495 scripted originals that aired in 2018, 160 of them did so on a streaming platform. That is compared to 146 on broadcast and 144 on basic cable. Pay cable accounted for the remaining 45 shows.


----------



## ekim68

Homelessness Rises More Quickly Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income



> Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness, according to new Zillow-sponsored research on the size and root causes of the nation's homelessness challenge. The research also estimates that the scale of homelessness nationwide has been undercounted by roughly 115,000 people, or 20 percent.


----------



## ekim68

1980s Amiga has been running the AC and heat in 19 schools for 30 years



> The Grand Rapids Public School district took a big step into the future back in the 1980s when it used money from an energy bond to purchase a Commodore Amiga computer. The Amiga, which replaced a computer the size of a refrigerator, was set up to control heat and air conditioning at the district's 19 schools. It has been doing that job tirelessly for the last 30 years. How long do you think you could keep a modern laptop working? Four or five years? Maybe?


----------



## ekim68

System uses ultrasound to keep bats away from wind turbines



> Although wind turbines may be a valuable source of eco-friendly energy, they do have at least one drawback - bats are frequently killed by their spinning blades. A promising new system is designed to help keep that from happening, however, by producing an ultrasonic acoustic field.


----------



## ekim68

A slashed tire, a pointed gun, bullies on the road: Why do Waymo self-driving cars get so much hate?



> CHANDLER, Arizona - A Waymo self-driving van cruised through a local neighborhood Aug. 1 when test driver Michael Palos saw something startling as he sat behind the wheel - a bearded man in shorts aiming a handgun at him as he passed the man's driveway.
> 
> The incident is one of at least 21 interactions documented by local police during the past two years where people have harassed the autonomous vehicles and their human test drivers.


----------



## ekim68

These are the most popular 'Should I?' Google searches in every US state



> With 2019 right around the corner, the year-end retrospectives about how we digitally spent the last 12 months have already started rolling in. Just last week, for example, Spotify rolled out _Spotify Wrapped_, which tells users which songs and artists they listened to the most over the past year. And earlier this week, Netflix released a list of the most binged shows across 2018.
> 
> In light of that, one of the more interesting 2018 retrospectives we've seen focuses on which Google searches were the most popular across each state. Specifically, AT&T tapped into data from Google Trends and came up with a rather amusing look at the most popular "should I…" questions on a state by state basis.


----------



## ekim68

Smart farming: How IoT, robotics, and AI are tackling one of the biggest problems of the century



> The world's human population currently stands at around 7.6 billion and is projected to reach 11.2 billion by 2100. We will therefore need a food production and distribution system that can accommodate another 3.6 billion people--ideally while consuming as little additional land and leaving as small an environmental footprint as possible, in order to maintain vital ecosystem services and conserve Earth's remaining wildlife.


----------



## ekim68

Hyundai prices its electrified Kona SUV for the mass market



> Hyundai has finally shared the first pricing information for its electric Kona SUV, and the figures will be welcome news for those looking to shed fuel costs and emissions from their everyday travel without entering premium-price tag territory. The 2019 Kona Electric will start at US$36,450, with EV-related tax incentives available to US customers that can drive the price below the $30,000 mark.


----------



## ekim68

'No evidence' of Huawei spying, says German IT watchdog



> Germany's IT watchdog has expressed scepticism about calls for a boycott of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, saying it has seen no evidence the firm could use its equipment to spy for Beijing, news weekly Spiegel reported Friday.
> 
> "For such serious decisions like a ban, you need proof," the head of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Arne Schoenbohm, told Spiegel, adding that his agency had no such evidence.


----------



## ekim68

Norway Is Entering a New Era of Climate-Conscious Architecture



> The country now has a suite of buildings that generate more energy than they use.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/turning-off-facebook-location-tracking-doesnt-stop-it-f-1831149148']Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn't Stop It From Tracking Your Location[/URL]



> Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook's access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she "Never" wants the app to get her location. She doesn't "check-in" to places and doesn't list her current city on her profile.
> 
> Despite all this, she constantly sees location-based ads on Facebook.


----------



## ekim68

The Boring Company's first tunnel opens its doors



> The Boring Company has moved rather swiftly since CEO Elon Musk first floated the idea of overcoming LA's notorious traffic woes by digging underneath them. Two years after he publicly raised the concept, the startup has now snipped the ribbon on its first tunnel at an opening event in LA, with attendees watching on in anticipation of taking the first subterranean rides.


----------



## ekim68

Breakthrough ultrasound treatment to reverse dementia moves to human trials



> An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia.


----------



## ekim68

40 Years of Music Industry Sales



> The record industry has seen a lot of change over the years.
> 
> 8-tracks took a short-lived run at the dominance of vinyl, cassettes faded away as compact discs took the world by storm, and through it all, the music industry saw its revenue continue to climb. That is, until it was digitally disrupted.


----------



## ekim68

Why battery-powered vehicles stack up better than hydrogen



> Low energy efficiency is already a major problem for petrol and diesel vehicles. Typically, only 20% of the overall well-to-wheel energy is actually used to power these vehicles. The other 80% is lost through oil extraction, refinement, transport, evaporation, and engine heat. This low energy efficiency is the primary reason why fossil fuel vehicles are emissions-intensive, and relatively expensive to run.
> 
> With this in mind, we set out to understand the energy efficiency of electric and hydrogen vehicles as part of a recent paper published in the Air Quality and Climate Change Journal.


----------



## ekim68

Annual Smart Speaker IQ Test



> We recently tested four smart speakers by asking Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana 800 questions each. Google Assistant was able to answer 88% of them correctly vs. Siri at 75%, Alexa at 73%, and Cortana at 63%. Last year, Google Assistant was able to answer 81% correctly vs. Siri (Feb-18) at 52%, Alexa at 64%, and Cortana at 56%.


----------



## ekim68

Silent 55 yacht promises up to 100 miles of solar-powered cruising per day



> It seems we jumped the gun when we called the SolarImpact the world's first ocean-going solar yacht based just off its CAD renders. There's another company out there with boats in the water, and the Silent 55 can cruise for up to 100 miles (160 km) per day for weeks at a time on solar power alone.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T will put a fake 5G logo on its 4G LTE phones



> AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year - not because they're using a 5G phone connected to a 5G network, but because AT&T is going to start pretending its most advanced 4G LTE tech is 5G.
> 
> According to _FierceWireless_, AT&T will display an icon reading "5G E" on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting - but still definitively 4G - technologies. The "E," displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to "5G Evolution," the carrier's term for networks that aren't quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE.


----------



## ekim68

Burnout, stress lead more companies to try a four-day work week



> BERLIN (Reuters) - Work four days a week, but get paid for five?
> 
> It sounds too good to be true, but companies around the world that have cut their work week have found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout.
> 
> "It is much healthier and we do a better job if we're not working crazy hours," said Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder of Berlin-based project management software company Planio, who introduced a four-day week to the company's 10-member staff earlier this year.
> 
> In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian reported a fall in stress and a jump in staff engagement after it tested a 32-hour week earlier this year.


----------



## ekim68

Hmm, I didn't think of Die Hard being a Christmas Movie... 


The 20 Best Christmas Movies of All Time



> Here are the 20 best movies that capture the heart of Christmas (in alphabetical order, as we love them all too much to play total favorites).


----------



## ekim68

Why some parents are banning "smart toys" this Christmas



> Parents are realizing that it's not just Santa who's keeping tabs on their kids. Many popular high-tech gadgets that may end up being given as holiday presents can actually track, monitor and record children.





> While federal law requires a parent's permission to track and collect data on children under 13, a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed this week alleges widespread violations through apps that "send persistent identifiers to third parties without giving direct notice to parents."


----------



## ekim68

A brief history of GPS



> It all started with Sputnik. What seemed at the time like a major defeat in the Cold War, turned out to be the catalyst for one of the most important technologies of the 20th century, and maybe the 21st.
> 
> It was October 4th, 1957. Scientists at MIT noticed that the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the small Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away. This was caused by the Doppler Effect, the same thing that makes the timbre of a car horn change as the car rushes by.


----------



## ekim68

India Curbs Power of Amazon and Walmart to Sell Products Online



> The Indian government dealt a surprise blow on Wednesday to the e-commerce ambitions of Amazon and Walmart, effectively barring the American companies from selling products supplied by affiliated companies on their Indian shopping sites and from offering their customers special discounts or exclusive products.


----------



## ekim68

The Great Chinese Art Heist



> Strange how it keeps happening, how the greatest works of Chinese art keep getting brazenly stolen from museums around the world. Is it a conspiracy? Vengeance for treasures plundered years ago? We sent Alex W. Palmer to investigate the trail of theft and the stunning rumor: Is the Chinese government behind one of the boldest art-crime waves in history?


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90283504/a-woman-on-twitter-is-abused-every-30-seconds']A woman on Twitter is abused every 30 seconds[/URL]



> That shocking statistic comes from a study conducted by Amnesty International and AI software startup Element AI. In the study, called Troll Patrol, Amnesty International and Element AI looked at data from 288,000 tweets sent to 778 female politicians and journalists in the U.S. and U.K. in 2017. Using machine learning on the data, the group then extrapolated just how wide-ranging abuse toward women is on Twitter. The result: *1.1 million abusive or problematic tweets were sent to the women in the study during the year-that's one abusive or problematic tweet every 30 seconds.*


----------



## ekim68

[url= https://www.asianscientist.com/2018/12/in-the-lab/whale-shark-tourism-coral-reef/]Whale shark tourism hurts coral reef ecosystem



> AsianScientist (Dec. 26, 2018) - Scientists in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Guam have found that whale shark tourism in Tan-awan, Oslob, the Philippines, has led to degradation of the local coral reef ecosystem. They reported their findings in Environmental Management. Read more from Asian Scientist Magazine at: https://www.asianscientist.com/2018/12/in-the-lab/whale-shark-tourism-coral-reef/


----------



## ekim68

Study Says Wireless Retail Workers Could Make Up To 7% Less In Wake Of Sprint, T-Mobile Merger



> As T-Mobile and Sprint attempt to merge (once again), their executives are making all the usual claims ahead of such mergers: that the mega deal will create immeasurable "synergies", that the reduction of major U.S. wireless competitors from four to three will somehow create competition, that the deal will somehow make it easier for them to deploy next-gen "5G" networks, and that the deal will somehow magically create oodles of new jobs.


----------



## ekim68

Proximity testing complete, Jetpack Aviation prepares to launch the world's first jetpack race series



> The team at Jetpack Aviation (JPA) has just completed test flights in which two pilots flew close enough together to playfully boop each other on the nose. Next step: the world's first jetpack race series, starting in 2019, and yes, the jetboards and jet suits of the world are invited to participate!


----------



## ekim68

The cost of natural disasters this year: $155 billion



> Natural disasters cost $155 billion this year, and several of them struck the United States particularly hard. Hurricanes Michael and Florence, the California wildfires and Hawaii's volcano eruption are all on the list of the most expensive global disasters of 2018, according to the Zurich-based reinsurance company Swiss Re.


----------



## ekim68

Marine debris study counts trash from Texas to Florida



> From February 2015 to August of 2017, the researchers kept tabs on marine debris that washed up on the shoreline every month at 12 different sites on nine barrier islands from North Padre Island, Texas to Santa Rosa, Florida. The trash was sorted by type, frequency, and location.
> 
> The most shocking discovery was that ten times more trash washes up on the coast of Texas than any of the other Gulf states throughout the year.
> 
> Most of the trash, 69 to 95 percent, was plastic. The plastic items included bottles and bottle caps, straws, and broken pieces of plastic. Researchers also cited that more trash washed ashore during the spring and summer. This could be because more people are outside and on the water during this time.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/3041300/portlands-new-pipes-harvest-power-from-drinking-water']Portland's New Pipes Harvest Power From Drinking Water[/URL]



> If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city's pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.
> 
> Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.
> 
> "It's pretty rare to find a new source of energy where there's no environmental impact," says Gregg Semler, CEO of Lucid Energy, the Portland-based startup that designed the new system. "But this is inside a pipe, so no fish or endangered species are impacted. That's what's exciting."


----------



## ekim68

NYPD Deploying Drone for First Time to Secure New Year's Party



> New York City police will deploy a camera-equipped drone above Times Square, along with new "counter-drone technology" blocking other devices from the area, where they expect as many as 2 million New Year's Eve revelers.


----------



## ekim68

18 striking findings from 2018



> Pew Research Center takes the pulse of Americans and people around the world on a host of issues every year. We explore public opinion on topics ranging from foreign policy to cyberbullying, as well as demographic trends, such as the emergence of the post-Millennial generation and changes in the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Here are 18 of this year's standout findings, taken from our analyses over the past year.


----------



## ekim68

Literally Just A Big List Of Facebook's 2018 Scandals



> Mark Zuckerberg began the year promising that he would fix Facebook. He didn't, and 2018 has only presented more problems.


----------



## ekim68

Millet anyone? Facing soil crisis, US farmers look beyond corn and soybeans



> "Mainstream agriculture, they just don't get it," says Jerry Doan, standing by a mix of 20-plus cover crops from low-lying legumes to tall stalks of millet on his farm in Sterling, N.D. "You have got to feed the biology of the soil."
> 
> It's an international problem, with a third of the world's soils already degraded, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, due to everything from erosion and salinization to untreated urban waste and mining. Here in the United States, a big concern is commercial agriculture, where evidence is growing that decades of an exclusive corn-soybean rotation has caused farmland to lose nutrients and its ability to hold and filter water.


----------



## ekim68

Nine forest vital signs reveal the impacts of the climate



> Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Ecologists at the Santa Fe Institute have identified nine forest vital signs, measurable traits among trees and tree stands, that best showcase the influence of climate on forest health.
> 
> Researchers looked at databases of forest characteristics, as well as records of climate change. By comparing datasets, scientists were able to isolate links between measurable traits and large-scale changes.


----------



## ekim68

Norway's electric cars zip to new record: almost a third of all sales



> OSLO (Reuters) - Almost a third of new cars sold in Norway last year were pure electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025.


----------



## ekim68

Renewables overtake coal as Germany's main energy source



> FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Renewables overtook coal as Germany's main source of energy for the first time last year, accounting for just over 40 percent of electricity production, research showed on Thursday.
> 
> The shift marks progress as Europe's biggest economy aims for renewables to provide 65 percent of its energy by 2030 in a costly transition as it abandons nuclear power by 2022 and is devising plans for an orderly long-term exit from coal.


----------



## ekim68

Wireless 'pacemaker for the brain' could offer new treatment for neurological disorders



> A new neurostimulator can listen to and stimulate electric current in the brain at the same time, potentially delivering fine-tuned treatments to patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson's.


----------



## ekim68

Texas has enough sun and wind to quit coal, Rice researchers say



> Texas might have the perfect environment to quit coal for good.
> 
> Texas is one of the only places where the natural patterns of wind and sun could produce power around the clock, according to new research from Rice University.
> 
> Scientists found that between wind energy from West Texas and the Gulf Coast, and solar energy across the state, Texas could meet a significant portion of its electricity demand from renewable power without extensive battery storage. The reason: These sources generate power at different times of day, meaning that coordinating them could replace production from coal-fired plants.


----------



## ekim68

This million-core supercomputer inspired by the human brain breaks all the rules



> For all their fleshly failings, human brains are the model that computer engineers have always sought to emulate: huge processing power that's both surprisingly energy efficient, and available in a tiny form factor. But late last year, in an unprepossessing former metal works in Manchester, one machine became the closest thing to an artificial human brain there is.
> 
> The one-million core SpiNNaker -- short for Spiking Neural Network Architecture -- is the culmination of decades of work and millions of pounds of investment. The result: a massively parallel supercomputer designed to mimic the workings of the human brain, which it's hoped will give neuroscientists a new understanding of how the mind works and open up new avenues of medical research.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://twocents.lifehacker.com/stores-in-these-states-must-give-you-cash-for-your-gift-1831488224']Stores in These States Must Give You Cash for Your Gift Cards[/URL]



> Everyone's been in a situation where they've used a gift card and are left with a tiny amount of money left-it's not enough for another purchase, and you don't _really_ want to buy something else with only a $1.43 discount, but you don't want to discard the gift card either. That'd be like throwing away money.
> 
> One solution, depending on the state you live in, is to ask the store for cash. Many stores have policies against this, but some states, including California and New Jersey, require companies to reimburse you if you have less than a certain amount of money left on the gift card.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce looks to smash speed record with the world's fastest electric airplane



> A partnership led by Rolls-Royce is building an all-electric aircraft that may smash into the record books with a top speed of over 300 mph (480 km/h) - beating the previous record of 210 mph (338 km/h) set in 2017 by Siemens. Scheduled to fly in 2020, the zero-emission electric speedster is being developed as part of the Accelerating the Electrification of Flight (ACCEL) and is billed as a leader of the "third wave" of aviation.


----------



## ekim68

Waydoo is set to make personal electric hydrofoils more accessible



> It was just a couple of years ago that we heard about Lift Foils' eFoil, a surfboard-like personal electric hydrofoil. And while it does look like a lot of fun, it also costs US$12,000. China's Waydoo is now about to provide some competition, though, with its $4,999 Flyer.
> 
> First of all, here are the basic specs.
> 
> Propelled by a 6,000-watt brushless motor, the carbon fiber-bodied Waydoo Flyer has a top speed of 35 km/h (22 mph - the eFoil tops out at 25 mph), and can reportedly run for 40 to 60 minutes on one 2-hour charge of its 18650 lithium-ion battery pack. It weighs 25 kg (55 lb), can accommodate riders weighing up to 120 kg (265 lb), is 1,800 mm long (71 inches), and disassembles into two pieces for transport - it can be put back together by hand.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/gofundme-is-still-enabling-garbage-cancer-treatment-sca-1831472117']GoFundMe Is Still Enabling 'Garbage' Cancer Treatment Scams, Study Finds[/URL]



> Medical crowdfunding has become a billion-dollar industry practically overnight, led by sites like GoFundMe. But yet another new study shows a dark side of the trend: Millions of dollars funneled to ludicrous, unscientific treatments for life-threatening diseases like cancer. Tragically, the study also found that many of the desperate people at the center of these campaigns died despite whatever treatments they sought.


----------



## ekim68

China to launch self-driving bullet trains that will travel at 350km per hour



> China will introduce the world's first driverless trains to run at speeds of up to 350kph on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway line.
> 
> The automatic operation bullet trains were trialled on a section of the Beijing-Shenyang line in 2018 by the China Railway Corporation (CRC) and the system passed all safety tests.


----------



## ekim68

Vinyl and cassette sales saw double digit growth last year



> Albums sold on vinyl and cassette both saw double digit sales growth in the US last year, according to a new report produced by _BuzzAngle_ (via _Genius_). Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12 percent from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19 percent from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US. It wasn't quite the 41.8 percent growth seen in music streaming, but it's still very impressive for two formats that are decades old.


----------



## ekim68

Are you in the middle class?



> You probably think you are, according to new research from the Pew Research Center, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're right. It turns out household size is a major determiner of status in the lower, middle and upper classes.


----------



## ekim68

Seattle City Council Members Visit New York to Warn About Amazon HQ2



> Two politicians from Amazon.com Inc.'s hometown traveled across the country to New York to deliver a cautionary message about the company's expansion in the city.
> 
> Members of the Seattle City Council, Lisa Herbold and Teresa Mosqueda, are urging elected officials in New York to pass legislation now that will address potential housing and transportation issues that will inevitably follow in the wake of Amazon's decision to build a major new campus in Queens. Both are speaking Monday at an event hosted by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which has been backing efforts to organize workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island.


----------



## ekim68

https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/...aising-cable-tv-rates-to-counter-cord-cutting
AT&T, Dish, Comcast All Raising Cable TV Rates To Counter Cord-Cutting




> Cable and satellite providers are hoping to squeeze more money from consumers who remain loyal to their packages with hundreds of channels, Philip Cusick, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst, said in a note this week, even though "this strategy could accelerate video sub declines." The latest price increases come as cord-cutting accelerates. In the third quarter, the TV industry saw its largest ever rate of decline, with subscribers shrinking by 3.7 percent, according to MoffettNathanson LLC. Consumers are dropping traditional TV for lower-cost online options like Netflix Inc. and slimmer TV options from Hulu and YouTube.


----------



## ekim68

Connecting your bank account to an app is now a $3-billion business



> When you link your checking account to Venmo or use it to buy bitcoin, a startup called Plaid Inc. is likely facilitating the connection with your bank. You punch in your user name and password; Plaid checks those credentials with the financial institution and, if they're accurate, passes banking information back to the app. That's it.
> 
> This kind of software has been around for decades. But in the last year, Plaid has captured investors' attention. The San Francisco startup was the subject of a bidding war among venture capitalists and at least one tech company, ultimately resulting in a $250-million investment last month. That money will partly go toward the acquisition of one of its biggest competitors.


----------



## ekim68

Nissan gives upcoming Leaf e+ a significant range increase



> In 2011, an entry level Tesla Model S rocked a 40 kWh battery pack for up to 160 miles (about 260 km) of range per charge. That's the same capacity as the current Nissan Leaf models (though Nissan's EPA-estimated range is given as 150 miles), so a boost for this year's upcoming Leaf e+ that will offer up to 226 miles (363 km) of EPA-estimated range per charge should only add to the appeal of the world's best-selling electric car.


----------



## ekim68

The Impossible Burger 2.0 is a plant-based beef replacement that's meatier than ever



> The new formula uses soy instead of wheat protein so it can take on new forms.


----------



## ekim68

Why it pays to declutter your digital life



> If we feel overwhelmed by 'stuff', most of us believe physical clutter is the culprit. But researchers are finding that having too many digital files could be the problem, too.


----------



## ekim68

A Reuters analysis of 29 global automakers found that they are investing at least $300 billion in electric vehicles



> Global automakers are planning an unprecedented level of spending to develop and procure batteries and electric vehicles over the next five to 10 years, with a significant portion of their budgets targeted at China, according to a Reuters analysis of public data released by those companies.
> 
> Automakers' plans to spend at least $300 billion on EVs are driven largely by environmental concerns and government policy, and supported by rapid technological advances that have improved battery cost, range and charging time. The accelerated rate of industry spending - much of it led by Germany's Volkswagen - is greater than the economies of Egypt or Chile.


----------



## ekim68

Couldn't help myself..


----------



## ekim68

Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school students from 2020



> Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China.


----------



## ekim68

Crowded Cities Short on Housing Are Looking to Turn Water Into Land



> Buy land, the old adage goes: They're not making it anymore.
> 
> It's never been true (Boston and New Orleans were built on water), and it's never been less true than right now. Fast-growing cities in the Gulf and Southeast Asia are turning water into real estate at a spectacular pace and scale. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam is backing a plan to throw $64 billion into the construction of four artificial islands. A few thousand miles away, in Copenhagen, the Danish government has announced plans to build two massive new groups of islands with room for thousands of new jobs and residents.


----------



## ekim68

Court Strikes Down Iowa's 'Ag-Gag' Law That Blocked Undercover Investigations



> A federal judge in Iowa says it's no longer a crime to go undercover at factory farms, slaughterhouses and any other ag-related operations. The 2012 law was a clear violation of the First Amendment, the judge said.
> 
> The Animal Legal Defense Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the case, called the ruling "a win for free speech and animal protection."
> 
> "Ag-Gag laws are a pernicious attempt by animal exploitation industries to hide some of the worst forms of animal abuse in the United States," ALDF Executive Director Stephen Wells said in a statement. "Today's victory makes it clear that the government cannot protect these industries at the expense of our constitutional rights."


----------



## Johnny b

Things change in the most unexpected ways.

Popularity, for instance.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...t-kylie-jenner-loses-title-to-egg/2568000002/

A photo of Eugene the Egg's egg










is more popular than Kylie Jenner's post showing her daughter's hand clinging to her mom's thumb and announcing the newborn's name.

Has sanity finally returned to Instagram?


----------



## ekim68

How Mitch McConnell's weak-kneed cowardice makes him the perfect target for agents of power and influence



> On Saturday January 12, the government shutdown became the longest in American history, eclipsing the former record of 21 days. At the forefront of this burgeoning disaster is Mitch McConnell, a one-man blockade to re-opening the government.
> 
> I don't refer to him by his formal title because it falls short of describing what he really is: he's a tyrant, a malevolent dictator.
> 
> No bill comes to the floor without his say-so. Even if every one of the other 99 senators wanted to vote on a particular bill, McConnell can prevent it. The only meaning _majority_ has for him is that he has power over it.
> 
> And he's using this power to single-handedly keep the government shut down.


----------



## ekim68

A very good read..


Why is Congress so dumb?



> We lawmakers dumped our in-house experts. Now lobbyists do the thinking for us.


----------



## ekim68

VW investing $800M in Tennessee factory to make next-generation electric vehicles



> Volkswagen will spend $800 million to expand a U.S. factory that will produce the automaker's next generation of electric vehicles.
> 
> The factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. will be the company's North American base for manufacturing electric vehicles, VW CEO Dr. Herbert Diess said during a presentation at the Detroit Auto Show on Monday. The expansion is expected to create 1,000 jobs at the plant.


----------



## ekim68

China Asks State Firms to Avoid Travel to U.S. and Its Allies



> China asked some state-run enterprises to avoid business trips to the U.S. and its allies and to take extra precautions to protect their devices if they need to travel, according to people familiar with the request.
> 
> In recent weeks, the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission -- a regulatory body that oversees about 100 government-run companies -- has told some firms to only take secure, company-issued laptops meant for overseas use if traveling is necessary, the people said. They said the warning extended to the other countries in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing pact: the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.


----------



## ekim68

The 'World's Most Beautiful Data Center' is a Supercomputer Housed in a 19th Century Church



> From the outside, Torre Girona Chapel at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona looks like any one of the thousands of old churches that can be found throughout Spain, with a large cross mounted on the roof and a rose window perched above the entrance. Step through the chapel doors, however, and you won't find any religious iconography or a congregation in prayer.
> 
> Instead, you'll find the 25th most powerful supercomputer in the world: the MareNostrum 4.


----------



## ekim68

Space firm to launch 90 satellites for constellation blanketing earth



> An Argentinian satellite and logistics company will launch 90 satellites into Low Earth Orbit. The news comes after the company, Satellogic, closed an agreement with launch services provider China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC), which will send the first 13 satellites into LOE on a Long March-6 (LM-6) Rocket from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi Province, China.
> 
> The array of 90 satellites will remap the planet at one meter of resolution every week. With its team of data scientists, Satellogic will analyze data on behalf of organizations in a variety of sectors, including oil & gas, agriculture, forestry, finance, and insurance.


----------



## ekim68

New satellite network will make it impossible for a commercial airplane to vanish



> For the first time, a new network of satellites will soon be able to track all commercial airplanes in real time, anywhere on the planet. Currently, planes are largely tracked by radar on the ground, which doesn't work over much of the world's oceans.
> 
> The final 10 satellites were launched Friday to wrap up the $3 billion effort to replace 66 aging communication satellites, reports CBS News' Kris Van Cleave, who got an early look at the new technology.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers report breakthrough in ice-repelling materials



> Icy weather is blamed for multibillion dollar losses every year in the United States, including delays and damage related to air travel, infrastructure and power generation and transmission facilities. Finding effective, durable and environmentally stable de-icing materials has been stymied by the stubborn tenacity with which ice adheres to the materials on which it forms.
> 
> Researchers from the University of Houston have reported a new theory in physics called stress localization, which they used to tune and predict the properties of new materials. Based on those predictions, the researchers reported in _Materials Horizons_ that they have created a durable silicone polymer coating capable of repelling ice from any surface.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-breakthrough-ice-repelling-materials.html#jCp


----------



## ekim68

New York Privacy Bill Forces Businesses to Disclose Consumer Data Use



> A new bill (S00224) known as the "Right to know act of 2019" was proposed by New York State Senator Brad Madison Hoylman on January 9 to amend the general business law so that consumers have the right to request personal information that has been collected by a company and is being disclosed to third-parties.


----------



## ekim68

Key West takes first step in banning some sunscreens that experts say damage coral reefs



> The Key West City Commission on Tuesday unanimously voted to ban the sale of sunscreens that contain two ingredients - oxybenzone and octinoxate - that a growing body of scientific evidence says harm coral reefs.
> 
> "This ordinance is just one other thing we can do to help improve and protect our water quality," said Mill McCleary, of the nonprofit environmental protection group Reef Relief.
> 
> The measure, which passed 7-0, isn't law yet, though. The commission must review it a second time and pass the measure again before it would become law. The second vote is scheduled for Feb. 5.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/world-s-oldest-known-periodic-table-found-during-cleanu-1831848121']World's Oldest Known Periodic Table Found During Cleanup of Scottish Lab[/URL]



> A classroom chart bearing an early version of the periodic table of elements has been discovered in a University of St. Andrews chemistry lab. Dating back to the 1880s, the chart is thought to be the world's oldest.


----------



## ekim68

"Game-changing" research could lead to novel treatment for osteoporosis in women



> Scientists have genetically engineered female mice to develop super strong, dense bones by altering neurons in the rodents' brains. The development could be the first step towards a new treatment for the brittle bone disease osteoporosis in women.


----------



## ekim68

The 60 most valuable scientific artifacts of 2018


----------



## ekim68

Artificially produced cells communicate with each other



> Friedrich Simmel and Aurore Dupin, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have for the first time created artificial cell assemblies that can communicate with each other. The cells, separated by fatty membranes, exchange small chemical signaling molecules to trigger more complex reactions, such as the production of RNA and other proteins.
> 
> Scientists around the world are working on creating artificial, cell-like systems that mimic the behavior of living organisms. Friedrich Simmel and Aurore Dupin have created such artificial cell assemblies in a fixed spatial arrangement. The highlight is that the cells are able to communicate with each other.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Gets Green Light to Start Delivering Model 3 in Europe




> Tesla Inc.





> received permission to start selling its Model 3 in Europe, clearing the final hurdle in bringing the electric-car maker's top seller to the home turf of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
> 
> Deliveries should start in February for the Long Range Battery version of the midsize sedan -- the same variant first sold in the U.S. -- according to Tesla, after Dutch vehicle authority RDW issued the OK.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change Is Even Worse for Our Health Than We Thought



> Climate change could take a greater toll on global health than previously estimated. That's according to a new report published Thursday in the _New England Journal of Medicine._ The article, along with an editorial published in the same issue, calls on health professionals to lead actions to allay the threat.
> 
> The World Health Organization previously predicted that the effects of climate change could lead to an additional 250,000 deaths each year by 2030. Authors of the _New England Journal_ article now say that number is a conservative estimate since it doesn't include health outcomes that could be indirectly influenced by climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Russia opens civil cases against Facebook, Twitter: report



> MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's communication watchdog said on Monday it was opening administrative proceedings against Twitter (TWTR.N) and Facebook (FB.O) for failing to explain how they plan to comply with local data laws, the Interfax news agency reported.
> 
> Roskomnadzor, the watchdog, was quoted as saying that Twitter and Facebook had not explained how and when they would comply with legislation that requires all servers used to store Russians' personal data to be located in Russia.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's Security Expert Joined the ACLU to Tackle 'Authoritarian Fever'




> Apple security expert Jon Callas, who helped build protection for billions of computers and smartphones against criminal hackers and government surveillance, is now taking on government and corporate spying in the policy realm.


----------



## ekim68

Julian Assange launches legal challenge against Trump administration



> Julian Assange, the fugitive WikiLeaks founder whose diplomatic sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy appears increasingly precarious, is launching a legal challenge against the Trump administration.
> 
> Lawyers for the Australian activist have filed an urgent application to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) aimed at forcing the hand of US prosecutors, requiring them to "unseal" any secret charges against him.
> 
> The legal move is an attempt to prevent Assange's extradition to the US at a time that a new Ecuadorian government has been making his stay in the central London apartment increasingly inhospitable.


----------



## ekim68

Driverless air taxis, drones, pods: Dubai puts future tech at heart of transportation



> You cannot fault the ambition. While other countries are discussing the rules and regulations surrounding autonomous vehicles, the emirate of Dubai is simply powering ahead with them.
> 
> In 2016, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, announced plans for a quarter of all journeys in Dubai to be driverless by 2030.
> 
> He described the move as part of a "globally unique model for future cities… turning [Dubai] into the world's biggest laboratory for technology, research and development".


----------



## ekim68

YouTube TV opens to the whole U.S. ahead of Super Bowl LIII



> Google is today expanding its premium YouTube TV streaming service to the majority of locations in the U.S., with the rest to follow shortly.
> 
> YouTube has long evolved beyond its origins as a platform for sharing cat videos and is now a major player in the mainstream entertainment sphere.


----------



## ekim68

Sweden Will Ban Sale Of Gasoline & Diesel Cars After 2030. Germany Lags Behind



> Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven has announced that the sale of cars with gasoline or diesel engines will be banned in his country after 2030. Sweden now joins Denmark, India, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Israel on the list of nations which say they will ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by that date. Countries which have announced earlier bans include Costa Rica, Norway, and South Korea, according to Wikipedia.


----------



## ekim68

Record number of Americans see climate change as a current threat



> More Americans are very worried about global warming and say the issue is personally important to them than ever before, according to a new poll released Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Study: Gunshot Wounds Cost Us Nearly $1 Billion in Hospital Bills Every Year



> Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine, building on prior research, determined that from 2010 to 2015, firearm injuries amounted to $911 million in inpatient hospitalizations nationwide annually and that 9.5 percent of that cost, or $86 million, was from victims needing to return to the hospital. According to the study, about 1 in 7 gun violence survivors in that five-year period was readmitted to the hospital within six months.


----------



## ekim68

Carbon capture system turns CO2 into electricity and hydrogen fuel



> The new device, which the team calls a Hybrid Na-CO2 System, is basically a big liquid battery. A sodium metal anode is placed in an organic electrolyte, while the cathode is contained in an aqueous solution. The two liquids are separated by a sodium Super Ionic Conductor (NASICON) membrane.
> 
> When CO2 is injected into the aqueous electrolyte, it reacts with the cathode, turning the solution more acidic, which in turn generates electricity and creates hydrogen. In tests, the team reported a CO2 conversion efficiency of 50 percent, and the system was stable enough to run for over 1,000 hours without causing any damage to the electrodes. Unlike other designs, it doesn't release any CO2 as a gas during normal operation - instead, the remaining half of the CO2 was recovered from the electrolyte as plain old baking soda.


----------



## ekim68

This 3D Printing Technique Is 100 Times Faster Than Standard 3D Printers



> A new 3D-printing technique could render a three-dimensional object in minutes instead of hours-at up to 100 times current speeds. The experimental approach uses a vat of resin and some clever tricks with UV and blue LED lights (no lasers needed) to accelerate the printing process.


----------



## ekim68

Automation will change every job, but only 25% are on the chopping block



> Automation is coming, but not for everyone. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimate just 25% of occupations in the US-in production, food service, and transportation-are at "high risk" for losing jobs from the advance of automation. "Automation is not the end of work," said Mark Muro, policy director for the Brookings Institution's program on urban economies and co-author of a study published Jan. 24.


----------



## ekim68

Caterers in China are reportedly using AI to spot unhygienic cooks



> If you've ever harbored doubts about the hygiene of the cooks flipping your burger and frying your fries, you're definitely not the only one. Thepaper.cn (via the_ South China Morning Post_) reports that local authorities in eastern China have tapped artificial intelligence (AI) to clamp down on unsanitary cooks in kitchens - and to reward those who adhere to best practices.
> 
> According to the report, a camera-based system currently being piloted in the Zhejiang city of Shaoxing automatically recognizes "poor [sanitation] habits" and alerts managers to offending workers via a mobile app.


----------



## ekim68

The tiny library bringing books to remote villages



> "Without a book, so often the child is alone," says Antonio La Cava.
> 
> The retired schoolteacher converted his three-wheeled van into a mobile library, the Bibliomotocarro. Driving the hills and mountains of Basilicata, Italy, La Cava is able to reach children in remote villages like San Paolo Albanese, which only has two children of primary school age.
> 
> "I was strongly worried about growing old in a country of non-readers." La Cava believes that it's important to spread the joy of literature to as many children as possible: "carrying out such action has a value, not only social, not only cultural, but has a great ethical meaning."


----------



## ekim68

The world is having to confront the toxic results of our love affair with plastic. Could nature offer some alternatives?



> Drinking straws and polythene bags may be bearing the brunt of the backlash, but the true scourge of single-use plastics is our sheer overreliance on them. From transport to manufacturing to food services, plastic is everywhere, and combatting this "white pollution" will require a sea change in the material itself.
> 
> Fortunately, scientists, engineers and designers are shifting their focus to ecologically friendly alternatives that create circular, low-waste ecosystems - liquid wood, algae insulation, and polymer substitutes made from fermented plant starch such as corn or potatoes, for example.
> 
> These alternatives do more than stem the growing tide of plastics: they also address issues such as safely housing a growing population, offsetting carbon emissions, and returning nutrients to the earth.


----------



## ekim68

$1.5 trillion U.S. tax cut has no major impact on business capex plans: survey



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration's $1.5 trillion cut tax package appeared to have no major impact on businesses' capital investment or hiring plans, according to a survey released a year after the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/neuroscientists-translate-brain-waves-into-recognizable-1832155006']Neuroscientists Translate Brain Waves Into Recognizable Speech[/URL]



> Using brain-scanning technology, artificial intelligence, and speech synthesizers, scientists have converted brain patterns into intelligible verbal speech-an advance that could eventually give voice to those without.
> 
> It's a shame Stephen Hawking isn't alive to see this, as he may have gotten a real kick out of it. The new speech system, developed by researchers at the Neural Acoustic Processing Lab at Columbia University in New York City, is something the late physicist might have benefited from.


----------



## ekim68

The World Economic Forum Tells Davos: Electronics Are 'the Fastest-Growing Waste Stream in the World'




> "The material value of e-waste alone is worth $62.5 billion, three times more than the annual output of the world's silver mines and more than the GDP of most countries."


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk gears up for Model Y crossover as Tesla makes second straight quarterly profit



> Tesla is gearing up to begin making its next vehicle - an electric crossover called the Model Y - as it boosts production of its current vehicles, lowers prices and cuts costs.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Is Doing More to Police Facebook Than the US Government



> When Apple said on Wednesday that, in response to a revelation that Facebook was monitoring minors' cellphone usage, it would curtail the platform's ability to distribute apps, it overshadowed the US government as a regulator of the company's privacy practices.





> Facebook has had its access to Apple's Enterprise Developer Program suspended; the program is designed to let developers distribute and test apps internally within their own companies. Facebook instead used it to sidestep the Apple app store's more stringent privacy requirements.


----------



## ekim68

Fake news sites are simply changing their domain name to get around Facebook fact-checkers



> Facebook has been cracking down on the fake news that gets shared on its platform. One problem: one of the biggest fake news websites has found a workaround.
> 
> In order to avoid Facebook's fact checking system, the site formerly known as YourNewsWire, one of the most well-known purveyors of fake news online, has simply rebranded. The site now goes by News Punch and posts fake news content similar to what it published under their former name, according to a report by Poynter.


----------



## ekim68

Return of the Ever-Wrongs



> As the Fed was battling the after effects of the Great Financial Crisis, a group of finance types wrote an open letter to Fed chair Ben Bernanke (November 15, 2010). They urged the Fed Chair to discontinue the Bank's "quantitative easing" (QE) plan, warning:
> 
> "We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk *currency debasement and inflation*, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment."
> 
> Subsequent events proved this group to be completely wrong.


----------



## ekim68

'Inkjet' solar panels poised to revolutionise green energy



> What if one day all buildings could be equipped with windows and facades that satisfy the structure's every energy need, whether rain or shine?
> 
> That sustainability dream is today one step closer to becoming a reality thanks to Polish physicist and businesswoman Olga Malinkiewicz.
> 
> The 36-year-old has developed a novel inkjet processing method for perovskites-a new generation of cheaper solar cells-that makes it possible to produce solar panels under lower temperatures, thus sharply reducing costs.


----------



## ekim68

FCC struggles to convince judge that broadband isn't "telecommunications"



> A Federal Communications Commission lawyer faced a skeptical panel of judges today as the FCC defended its repeal of net neutrality rules and deregulation of the broadband industry.
> 
> FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson struggled to explain why broadband shouldn't be considered a telecommunications service, and struggled to explain the FCC's failure to protect public safety agencies from Internet providers blocking or slowing down content.
> 
> Oral arguments were held today in the case, which is being decided by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (Audio of the four-hour-plus oral arguments is available here.) Throttling of firefighters' data plans played a major role in today's oral arguments.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen's Electrify America buys Tesla devices for EV charging stations



> By this June Electrify America will have 484 charging stations built across America. The company is discussing using more battery storage packs with regulators for its next round of infrastructure investment, company CTO Jones said.


----------



## ekim68

Firefox to block auto-playing audio starting March 2019



> Starting with Firefox 66 --scheduled for release on March 19, 2019-- Mozilla plans to block auto-playing audio on both desktop and mobile.
> 
> The new rule will apply to any website that plays audio without user interaction in advance --such as a user clicking a button.


----------



## ekim68

The infrastructural humiliation of America



> I'm flying back to the USA today, and as an infrastructure aficionado, it's nice to be going home, but I'm dreading the disappointment. I just spent two weeks in Singapore and Thailand; last year I spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen; and compared to modern Asia, so much American infrastructure is now so contemptible that it's hard not to wince when I see it.


----------



## ekim68

The Cost of Dirty Money



> Since the financial crisis, dozens of crackdowns have targeted money launderers who effectively rely on banks, shell companies, and other mechanisms to cover their tracks. Fines have surged into the billions of dollars, but it's unclear whether the enforcement efforts-some of the more notable ones are described here-have made much of a dent. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, shady transactions continue to reach as much as $2 trillion a year.


----------



## ekim68

Muscle-inspired materials that get stronger after stretching



> Scientists a Hokkaido University have found a way to create materials that actually get stronger the more you use them. By mimicking the mechanism that allows living muscles to grow and strengthen after exercise, the team led by Jian Ping Gong developed a polymer that breaks down under mechanical stress, then regrows itself into a stronger configuration by feeding off a nutrient bath.


----------



## ekim68

Google now pays more money in EU fines than it pays in taxes




> Google files 2018 revenues revealing that it pays $900m more in fines than it pays in taxes


----------



## ekim68

Ex-NSA Personnel Spied On Americans And Journalists For The United Arab Emirates



> When former NSA employees and contractors decide to start working for a journalist-murdering authoritarian, they should feel sick. Instead, after targeting journalists, dissidents, and other people the United Arab Emirates government doesn't like, they felt exhilarated.


----------



## ekim68

Green New Deal bill aims to move US to 100% renewable energy, net-zero emissions



> On Thursday morning, NPR posted a bill drafted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) advocating for a Green New Deal-that is, a public works bill aimed at employing Americans and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the face of climate change.
> 
> A similar version of the bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.).


----------



## ekim68

Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless Broadband Than Countries Without It



> When an ISP decides to exempt certain applications or services from cutting into a user's data cap, that's zero rating. And the evidence is in that it conclusively makes broadband more expensive.
> 
> A comprehensive multi-year study by the non-profit Epicenter.works, comparing the 30 member countries of the European Union (EU) on net neutrality enforcement, has found that zero rating business practices by wireless carriers have _increased_ the cost of wireless data compared to countries without zero rating. This directly contradicts all of the assertions by major wireless carriers that their zero rating practices are "free data" for consumers.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter Still Can't Keep Up With Its Flood of Junk Accounts, Study Finds



> Since the world learned of state-sponsored campaigns to spread disinformation on social media and sway the 2016 election, Twitter has scrambled to rein in the bots and trolls polluting its platform. But when it comes to the larger problem of automated accounts on Twitter designed to spread spam and scams, inflate follower counts, and game trending topics, a new study finds that the company still isn't keeping up with the deluge of garbage and abuse.


----------



## ekim68

Attacking a Pay Wall That Hides Public Court Filings



> WASHINGTON - The federal judiciary has built an imposing pay wall around its court filings, charging a preposterous 10 cents a page for electronic access to what are meant to be public records. A pending lawsuit could help tear that wall down.


----------



## ekim68

The Tesla killers that could? Ten cars gunning for a slice of the EV pie



> It didn't come easily, but Tesla's mission to become an influential force in electric vehicle manufacturing, and the automotive industry as a whole, is beginning the bear some fruit. The Palo Alto-based company is not without its problems, but did start 2019 as the maker of the best-selling luxury vehicle in the US after recording back-to-back quarterly profits for the first time in its history, and has now claimed an unparalleled share of the EV market as it begins expansions into China and Europe. But the new year will also bring new competitors, with legacy automakers preparing to wheel out shiny new electric cars of their own. So how will they stack up?


----------



## ekim68

How Big-Box Stores Bilk Local Governments



> A multibillion-dollar philosophy question is rippling through small-town America. If you build something that is fundamentally useless to anyone but you, should you have to pay property taxes on it?
> 
> Dozens of big-box stores are arguing the answer is, essentially, no. As the country confronts an epidemic of retail closures, spurred by e-commerce, obsolescence, changing economic geography, and corporate mismanagement, mega-stores are using their shuttered rivals as "comps" in fights with local appraisers in order to reduce their tax bills.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 = #1 Best Selling Electric Car in World, 7% of Global EV Market in 2018



> We've published something like a bazillion Tesla sales charts and stats. (See "30 Nasty Charts," for example.) But this is actually a new one. Jose Pontes of EV Volumes and CleanTechnica has his 2018 tally wrapped up and it puts the Tesla Model 3 in the #1 position globally among all plug-in vehicles.
> 
> In fact, the Model 3 was approximately 55,000 sales above the #2 BAIC EC-Series, an extremely popular Chinese model. The Model 3 gobbled 7% of the plug-in vehicle market, while the #2 EC-Series and #3 Nissan LEAF each had 4%.


----------



## ekim68

Has There Been a Shift in Support for Brexit?



> Unsurprisingly, protagonists on all sides in the Brexit debate are keen to claim that their views reflect the will of a majority of voters. After all, the decision to leave the EU was made by the public in the first place, so being able to argue that what should happen now is backed by voters is a potentially valuable currency in the political debate.


----------



## ekim68

Landmark Australian ruling rejects coal mine over global warming



> An Australian court has rejected an application for an open-cut coal mine because of its potential contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions and global warming.
> 
> The New South Wales Land and Environment Court turned down an appeal by mining company Gloucester Resources, which had sought to overturn a previous government decision against establishing a coal mine near the town of Gloucester in the Hunter Valley.


----------



## ekim68

Light pollution affects most of the planet's key wildlife areas




> Feb. 11 (UPI) -- Light pollution now affects much of the globe -- and most of the planet's most important wildlife areas, according to new research.
> 
> As the new research reveals, light can reach habitat far from human settlements. When it's reflected and refracted in the atmosphere, light beams can travel long distances. This type of light, called "skyglow," impacts some two-thirds of Earth's Key Biodiversity Areas, as defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.


----------



## ekim68

China and India lead the way in "greening" the Earth since 2000



> Human activities on Earth generally have negative outcomes on the environment - we're pouring plastic into the oceans and melting the ice caps at alarming rates. But it's not all bad news. A new study of satellite data has shown that the Earth has gotten "greener" in the last 20 years or so, with the biggest contributors being China and India. Before we celebrate though, there are a few caveats to consider.
> 
> For the new study, researchers from Boston University examined remote sensing data gathered by NASA satellites between the years 2000 and 2017. Interestingly, the total amount of leafy green areas on Earth's land surface has gone up by about five percent in that time. That's about 5.5 million sq km (2.1 million sq mi) - the equivalent of the Amazon worth of new vegetation.
> 
> The researchers were surprised by the fact that the two countries leading the charge are China and India.


----------



## ekim68

The World Is on the Brink of Widespread Water Wars



> The most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned of increasingly intense droughts and mass water shortages around large swaths of the globe.
> 
> But even more conservative organizations have been sounding the alarm. "Water insecurity could multiply the risk of conflict," warns one of the World Bank's reports on the issue. "Food price spikes caused by droughts can inflame latent conflicts and drive migration. Where economic growth is impacted by rainfall, episodes of droughts and floods have generated waves of migration and spikes in violence within countries."


----------



## ekim68

Bacteria used to neutralize algae-bloom toxin



> When algal blooms occur in lakes, the over-abundant cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) produce a toxin known as microcystin. Now, Ohio-based scientists are using _other_ types of bacteria to neutralize that toxin, in a process that could be cheaper and more eco-friendly than the alternatives.


----------



## ekim68

The great Equifax mystery: 17 months later, the stolen data has never been found, and experts are starting to suspect a spy scheme



> On Sept. 7, 2017, the world heard an alarming announcement from credit ratings giant Equifax: In a brazen cyberattack, somebody had stolen sensitive personal information from more than 140 million people, nearly half the population of the U.S.
> 
> It was the consumer data security scandal of the decade. The information included Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, information from credit disputes and other personal details. CEO Richard Smith stepped down under fire. Lawmakers changed credit freeze laws and instilled new regulatory oversight of credit ratings agencies.
> 
> Then, something unusual happened. The data disappeared. Completely.


----------



## ekim68

Bomb Threat Hoaxer Exposed by Hacked Gaming Site



> Federal authorities this week arrested a North Carolina man who allegedly ran with a group of online hooligans that attacked Web sites (including this one), took requests on Twitter to call in bomb threats to thousands of schools, and tried to frame various online gaming sites as the culprits. In an ironic twist, the accused - who had fairly well separated his real life identity from his online personas - appears to have been caught after a gaming Web site he frequented got hacked.
> 
> On Feb. 12, the *U.S. Justice Department* announced the arrest of *Timothy Dalton Vaughn*, a 20-year-old from Winston-Salem, N.C. Vaughn is alleged to have been a key member of the *Apophis Squad*, a gang of ne'er-do-wells who made bomb threats against thousands of schools and launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Web sites - including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions.


----------



## ekim68

Rahm Emanuel Calls For 100% Renewable Electricity In Chicago



> Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has released "Resilient Chicago," a roadmap for addressing the city's most pressing challenges through the lens of urban resilience. As the first action in implementing the roadmap, Emanuel has joined the Sierra Club to announce Chicago's bold goal of transitioning to 100% renewable energy in buildings community-wide by 2035 and to an electric Chicago Transit Authority bus fleet by 2040.


----------



## ekim68

Chernobyl: The end of a three-decade experiment



> On 26 April, 1986, at 1:23AM, engineers cut power to some systems at Chernobyl nuclear power plant's number 4 reactor. It was a critical point in a test to understand what would happen during a blackout. What engineers did not know was that the reactor was already unstable.
> 
> The cut-off slowed turbines that drove cooling water to the reactor. As less water turned to more steam, the pressure inside built. By the time operators realised what was happening and tried to shut down the reactor, it was too late.


----------



## ekim68

Here's Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans



> A social and financial divide is forming - between those who have student debt, and those who do not - that will have ramifications for decades to come.


----------



## ekim68

Thought I'd share this.. 

Majestic views: The winners of the International Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://thetakeout.com/diet-drinks-stroke-heart-attacks-early-death-study-1832653495']Study: Daily diet drinks linked to strokes, heart attacks, and early death[/URL]



> Bad news for those who've been chugging diet sodas under the belief that they're healthier than regular sodas. CNN reports that a new study from no less an authority than the American Heart Association says that "Drinking two or more of any kind of artificially sweetened drinks a day is linked to an increased risk of clot-based strokes, heart attacks and early death in women over 50."


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen wants its new ID EVs to be totally carbon neutral



> Volkswagen may be bound to eternal penitence for its Dieselgate shemozzle, but good things are coming of it. Today VW announced plans to give its new electric cars the ability to go carbon neutral for their entire life cycles.
> 
> While there are some people buying electric cars purely because of their otherworldly performance, the average early EV buyer tends toward the planet-conscious side of the spectrum. So Volkswagen is trying to make sure its upcoming electric vehicles are not only emissions-free on the road, but throughout the entire production process.


----------



## ekim68

You have around 20 minutes to contain a Russian APT attack



> Governments and private organizations have around 20 minutes to detect and contain a hack from Russian nation-state actors.
> 
> New statistics published today by US cyber-security firm Crowdstrike ranked threat groups based on their "breakout time."
> 
> "Breakout time" refers to the time a hacker group takes from gaining initial access to a victim's computer to moving laterally through its network. This includes the time the attacker spends scanning the local network and deploying exploits in order to escalate his access to other nearby computers.


----------



## ekim68

Seabubbles brings its electric, self-stablizing, hydrofoiling Bubble Taxis to Miami



> Raising boats out of the water on hydrofoils makes them much more comfortable and efficient - and this French design uses electric propulsion and an automatic self-stabilizing system to give you clean, quiet and sexy water transport.
> 
> Making its US debut in Miami this week, the Seabubbles Bubble Taxi is a five-seat design about the size of a family car, with a sleek shape reminiscent of a flying car from _The Fifth Element._


----------



## ekim68

Britain managing Huawei risks, has no evidence of spying: official



> LONDON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain is able to manage the security risks of using Huawei telecoms equipment and has not seen any evidence of malicious activity by the company, a senior official said on Wednesday, pushing back against U.S. allegations of Chinese state spying.


----------



## ekim68

NASA's drone traffic control system moves into the final phase of testing



> Drones are already very capable machines, but before they are unleashed over busy cities to police the streets, carry out deliveries and repair potholes, authorities need to have a plan in place for all that extra air traffic. NASA has been developing a solution to this over the past four years, and is now moving ahead with its final phase of testing where drones will put through their most complex demonstrations yet.
> 
> NASA's drone traffic management system is an effort to avoid Wild West-type situation where unmanned aircraft are free to fly wherever they want and bring some order to the order to the skies. The idea is to have corridors of airspace reserved for unmanned aircraft carrying out different tasks, below the altitude where general aviation begins at 500 ft (152 m).


----------



## ekim68

Japan wants to boost the use of electric vehicles as a power source during natural disasters



> Japan, a country which frequently suffers natural calamities such as tsunamis, typhoons, and earthquakes-which can often paralyze energy supplies-is looking to further harness the power of batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) during such disasters, local media reported (paywall) yesterday (Feb.20)
> 
> Nissan, which produces the Leaf, the world's best-selling EV model, plans to hold an event in March to let people stay overnight in their cars and try using the electricity stored in their car batteries to simulate the experience of being in an emergency, according to Japanese newswire Jiji (link in Japanese). A fully charged electric vehicle can supply power to a standard home for up to four days, a Nissan official told the news outlet.


----------



## ekim68

China's CRISPR twins might have had their brains inadvertently enhanced




> New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Release Controversial Genetically Modified Mosquitoes In High-Security Lab



> Scientists have launched a major new phase in the testing of a controversial genetically modified organism: a mosquito designed to quickly spread a genetic mutation lethal to its own species, NPR has learned.
> 
> For the first time, researchers have begun large-scale releases of the engineered insects, into a high-security laboratory in Terni, Italy.
> 
> "This will really be a breakthrough experiment," says Ruth Mueller, an entomologist who runs the lab. "It's a historic moment."
> 
> The goal is to see if the mosquitoes could eventually provide a powerful new weapon to help eradicate malaria in Africa, where most cases occur.


----------



## ekim68

Chelating agent selectively grabs uranium from oceans



> The world's oceans contain some 4 billion metric tons of dissolved uranium. That's roughly 1,000 times as much as all known terrestrial sources combined, and enough to fuel the global nuclear power industry for centuries. But the oceans are so vast, and uranium's concentration in seawater is so low-roughly 3 ppb-that extracting it remains a formidable challenge. That task may have just become easier thanks to a new adsorbent material based on a bioinspired chelating agent (_Nat. Commun._ 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08758-1).


----------



## ekim68

NHS told to ditch 'outdated' pagers



> The NHS has been told to stop using pagers for communications by 2021, in order to save money.
> 
> The health service still uses about 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally. They cost the NHS about £6.6m a year.
> 
> Health Secretary Matt Hancock called them "outdated" and said he wanted to rid the NHS of "archaic technology like pagers and fax machines".


----------



## ekim68

The five most highly anticipated electric vehicles to be released (and none is a Tesla)



> If you're a fan of electric cars, you might find it interesting that there are already 40 EV (electric vehicle) and plug-in hybrid models available in the U.S., with many more to come.


----------



## ekim68

Renewable energy policies actually work



> For most of the industrial era, a nation's carbon emissions moved in lock step with its economy. Growth meant higher emissions. But over the past decade or so, that has changed. Even as the global economy continued to grow, carbon emissions remained flat or dropped a bit.


----------



## ekim68

First CRISPR therapy administered in landmark human trial



> The first confirmed CRISPR gene editing clinical trial to take place outside of China is officially underway, with pharmaceutical companies CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex revealing a human patient has been administered the experimental treatment targeting a rare blood disease.
> 
> Following a setback in 2018 with the FDA temporarily hitting pause on the US arm of a Phase 1/2 clinical trial pending "the resolution of certain questions," one of the first CRISPR human trials to take place outside of China has now commenced. The gene-editing therapy, called CTX001, is designed to treat beta-thalassemia and sickle cell disease. Both conditions are caused by a mutation in a single gene. CTX001 involves engineering a patient's stem cells with a single genetic change designed to raise levels of fetal hemoglobin in red blood cells.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing's autonomous fighter jet could arrive next year




> Boeing





> has unveiled an autonomous fighter jet which is expected to take to the skies in 2020. The aircraft is designed to fly alongside crewed jets during combat, performing early warning tests, intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance.
> 
> The aircraft, called the Boeing Airpower Teaming System, will help mitigate some of the risk involved in combat situations -- without a human pilot, the jet will be able to fly for longer periods, withstand higher g-force and process more information at a given time.


----------



## ekim68

The Polestar 2 is a Google-powered all-electric Tesla competitor



> The first all-electric car from Volvo Cars is here. Polestar, the performance sub-brand that was spun out of Volvo in 2017, announced its second car on Wednesday, the aptly named Polestar 2. Billed as a competitor to Tesla's Model 3, the electric sedan will combine might with smarts, as it will be the first car to feature Google's new native version of Android for the car.


----------



## ekim68

Why Is The EU Parliament Pushing Fake Propaganda From Hollywood?



> The EU Commission put out a Medium post that literally mocked the public as an "angry mob" for raising legitimate concerns about the EU's proposed Copyright Directive. And that followed a bizarrely incoherent "Q & A" page put out by the EU Parliament's Legislative Affairs Committee (JURI), spewing pure nonsense about the Copyright Directive. In both cases, those involved were publicly mocked for this (to the point that the Commission even took down its post, but blaming others for misunderstanding it as the reason).


----------



## ekim68

Deep sleep may be crucial in clearing toxic Alzheimer's proteins from the brain



> For the first time, scientists have demonstrated how the brain washes away toxic proteins during a specific phase of deep sleep. The study builds on a growing body of evidence suggesting chronic sleep disruption could play a role in the onset of Alzheimer's and dementia.


----------



## ekim68

Workplace Theft Is on the Rise



> As the line between work and home blurs, office supplies attract sticky fingers.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.gizmodo.com/underground-garbage-fire-in-arkansas-has-been-burning-f-1833023418']Underground Garbage Fire in Arkansas Has Been Burning for Over Seven Months[/URL]



> An underground garbage fire at an illegal Arkansas dumping site has been burning for over seven months straight, the Associated Press reported on Sunday, and filling parts of the nearby town of Bella Vista with smoke residents say is causing health problems.


----------



## ekim68

Massive Database Leak Gives Us a Window into China's Digital Surveillance State



> Earlier this month, security researcher Victor Gevers found and disclosed an exposed database live-tracking the locations of about 2.6 million residents of Xinjiang, China, offering a window into what a digital surveillance state looks like in the 21st century.
> 
> Xinjiang is China's largest province, and home to China's Uighurs, a Turkic minority group. Here, the Chinese government has implemented a testbed police state where an estimated 1 million individuals from these minority groups have been arbitrarily detained. Among the detainees are academics, writers, engineers, and relatives of Uighurs in exile. Many Uighurs abroad worry for their missing family members, who they haven't heard from for several months and, in some cases, over a year.


----------



## ekim68

Drones help scientists count koalas in Australia



> March 1 (UPI) -- Researchers have trained drones outfitted with infrared sensors to recognize a koala bear's heat signature. Wildlife managers and biologists are using the technology to accurately and efficiently monitor koala populations in Australia.
> 
> An algorithm processes the drone's infrared readings and determines whether the heat signatures belong to a koala or some other animal. Researchers plan to eventually train algorithms to recognize the heat signatures of other animals, too.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90302036/over-120-data-brokers-inch-out-of-the-shadows-under-landmark-vermont-law']A landmark Vermont law nudges over 120 data brokers out of the shadows[/URL]



> As of February, businesses collecting and selling data about Vermont residents are required to register under the country's first law governing the murky "data broker" industry. So far, 121 companies have registered, according to data from the Vermont secretary of state's office.
> 
> The law also requires companies to spell out whether there's any way for consumers to opt out of their data collections, to specify whether they restrict who can buy their data, and to indicate whether they've had any data breaches within the past year.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90311509/we-have-to-fix-fashion-if-we-want-to-survive-the-next-century']We have to fix fashion if we want to survive the climate crisis [/URL]





> The industry churned out 100 billion pieces of clothing for 7 billion people in 2015. The problem is so bad, some brands are burning unsold inventory. The waste has got to stop.


----------



## ekim68

Volvo to test full-size driverless bus in Singapore



> SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Sweden's Volvo Buses and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on Tuesday unveiled a full-size autonomous electric bus for testing this year in the city state.
> 
> High-density Singapore has been encouraging the development of driverless technology in hopes that its residents will use more shared vehicles and public transport.
> 
> Tests with one bus on the university campus could begin in a few weeks to months, before moving to public roads after regulatory approvals, NTU President Subra Suresh told reporters.


----------



## ekim68

Harley-Davidson scoots into kids electric bikes with StaCyc deal



> (Reuters) - Harley-Davidson Inc moved into kids electric bikes on Tuesday with the purchase of California-based StaCyc Inc, tapping a new business outside its declining core market in classic motorcycles.
> 
> StaCyc's 'EDRIVE' bikes, which retail at around $650, are aimed at toddlers and kids, encouraging them to have fun outdoors as they learn to balance while getting a hang of biking.
> 
> The lightweight bikes have an aluminum frame and boast of three power modes and a 45 to 60 minutes charge time. A single charge delivers a cycle time between 30 and 60 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

The Speeder: Jetpack Aviation opens pre-orders on jet powered flying motorcycle




> Jetpack Aviation





> has leap-frogged its own flying car project with the announcement that it's taking pre-orders now on a self-stabilizing, jet turbine-powered flying motorcycle capable of 150 mph speeds, 20 minute endurance and 15,000 ft altitudes.
> 
> The Speeder builds on JPA's jet turbine expertise, developed over the years working on the company's astounding JB-series jetpacks. It uses a cluster of four turbojet engines putting out a combined maximum thrust of 705 lbf - enough to lift the 231-lb (105 kg) airframe and a pilot up to 240 lb (109 kg).


----------



## ekim68

Cool stuff.. 

The amazing avant-garde works of 2019 Pritzker Prize winner Arata Isozaki


----------



## ekim68

GoFundMe CEO: 'Gigantic Gaps' In Health System Showing Up In Crowdfunding



> Scrolling through the GoFundMe website reveals seemingly an endless number of people who need help or community support. A common theme: the cost of health care.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung patents wireless TV with no power cable



> Could Samsung be on the cusp of a fully wireless TV? A recent patent hints that a Samsung TV without any pesky cables could be around the corner.
> 
> Spotted by LetsGoDigital, the patent was filed in March 2018 but only released publicly in late February of this year.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2019/03/06/tesla-supercharger-v3-kw-capacity-efficiency/']Tesla launches new Supercharger with 1,000 mph charging, better efficiency, and more[/URL]



> In Fremont today, Tesla is launching the next generation Supercharger V3 with higher charging capacity (250 kW), better efficiency, and more.
> 
> Some of the most important points:
> 
> 
> 250 kW peak power without powershare between stations
> Just for Model 3 vehicles after software update for now
> Model S and Model X to follow later - again through software
> First non-beta stations coming in Q2


----------



## ekim68

US Military Changing 'Killing Machine' Robo-tank Program After Controversy



> It was a frightening and dramatic headline:* "*The US Army Wants to Turn Tanks Into AI-Powered Killing Machines." The story, published this week in Quartz, details the new Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System, or ATLAS, which seeks to give ground combat vehicles the ability to "acquire, identify, and engage targets at least 3X faster than the current manual process."
> 
> The response seems to have spooked the Army, which is now changing its request for information to better emphasize that the program will follow Defense Department policy on human control of lethal robots.


----------



## ekim68

Norway is starting the world's biggest divestment in oil and gas



> Norway has said its $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the world's biggest, should sell stocks in oil and gas exploration companies, in a move that is the biggest divestment from hydrocarbons yet.
> 
> The Government Pension Fund Global, which was built off Norway's oil revenues, should begin phasing out $8 billion held in 134 firms to reduce the fund's risk from volatile oil prices, the country's finance ministry said in a statement on 8 March.


----------



## ekim68

Activists Are Pushing to Remove Donor Influence From College Campuses



> Students and faculty across the U.S. have begun to push back against undue donor influence on campuses - particularly when orchestrated by a network of conservative Libertarian donors including David and Charles Koch - arguing that such influence violates faculty governance and compromises academic freedom and integrity.


----------



## ekim68

Infrared drowning detection system to be installed at 11 public swimming pools by 2020



> SINGAPORE: A drowning detection system, which alerted a lifeguard early after a man became unconscious while swimming, will be installed in 11 public pools in Singapore by April 2020.
> 
> Sport Singapore (SportSG) will progressively implement the computer vision drowning detection system (CVDDS) to boost safety at public swimming complexes across Singapore, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Grace Fu said on Friday (Mar 8).


----------



## ekim68

John Oliver fights robocalls… by robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC



> Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners.
> 
> In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's _Last Week Tonight_, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners.


----------



## ekim68

Debit card with built-in fingerprint reader begins trial in the UK



> British bank NatWest is trialling the use of a new NFC payment card with a built-in fingerprint scanner. The trial, which will include 200 customers when it begins in mid-April, will allow its participants to make NFC payments (called "contactless" in the UK) without needing to input a PIN or offer a signature. The standard £30 limit for contactless payments will not apply when the fingerprint is used.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft to start nagging users in April about the January 2020 Windows 7 end-of-support deadline



> Starting next month, Microsoft will start displaying periodic pop-up notifications reminding Windows 7 users that support for that OS is ending early next year. Happily, you'll be able to shut them off.


----------



## ekim68

Russia laws ban 'disrespect' of government and 'fake news'



> Russia's parliament has passed two bills outlawing "disrespect" of authorities and the spreading of what the government deems to be "fake news".
> 
> The first ban refers to "blatant disrespect" of the state, its officials and Russian society, and repeat offenders face up to 15 days in jail.
> 
> The second bill prohibits sharing "false information of public interest, shared under the guise of fake news," the TASS state news agency reported.


----------



## ekim68

Wyoming's coal plants are so unprofitable Republicans turned to a 'socialist program' to save them




> Wyoming lawmakers pass bill forcing ratepayers to buy dirty, uneconomic coal power.


----------



## ekim68

You will soon be able to pay your subway fare with your face in China



> China has led the world in adoption of smartphone-based mobile payments to the point where the central bank had to remind merchants not to discriminate against cash. The next phase of development may be to pay with your face.
> 
> In Shenzhen, the local subway operator is testing various advanced technologies backed by the ultra-fast 5G network, including facial-recognition ticketing.


----------



## ekim68

DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System




> The system will be fully open source and designed with newly developed secure hardware to make the system not only impervious to certain kinds of hacking, but also allow voters to verify that their votes were recorded accurately.


----------



## ekim68

University of Tennessee joins list of U.S. schools offering free tuition



> March 15 (UPI) -- The University of Tennessee said it will offer free tuition for lower-income students in a program that seeks to make higher education accessible to everyone -- joining a growing list of U.S. campuses.
> 
> Interim President Randy Boyd announced the new program Thursday and said it covers potential students with a household income less than $50,000 per year.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Las Vegas underground loop gets the green light



> Las Vegas will officially get a tunnel from Elon Musk, perhaps within this year.
> 
> The billionaire's Boring Company on Tuesday got the approval from the 14-member board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) to build and operate an underground loop that would carry people in autonomous electric vehicles at the city's convention center.
> 
> Musk has responded to the approval in a tweet, saying he'll make the tunnel "operational by end of year," even though the convention center's expansion won't be done until 2021, according to LVCVA's release.


----------



## ekim68

How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2018

_



Broadcast TV news coverage of climate change plummeted 45 percent from 2017 to 2018, even as the climate crisis steadily worsened. The major news programs on the broadcast networks aired a combined total of just 142 minutes of climate coverage in 2018, or less than two and a half hours. Almost three-quarters of that coverage aired in just the last three months of the year. The networks did a particularly poor job of explaining how climate change exacerbates extreme weather; none of the networks' news reports on the major hurricanes of 2018 even mentioned climate change.

Click to expand...

_


----------



## ekim68

Flying Taxis. Seriously?



> Two words for you: flying taxis. That's right. In the not-so-distant future, you'll open your ride-hailing app and, in addition to ground options like car, SUV, scooter or bicycle, you'll see on-demand air flight.
> 
> At least that's according to the optimists at South by Southwest, the annual tech-music-film convention in Austin, Texas.
> 
> When the flying taxi comes, most of us will be passengers. We might hail it on our smartphones and head to the rooftop, where a ride is waiting at the helipad. It might look like a minivan with wings and four seats; or more like a gigantic drone.
> 
> Either way, it won't fly itself anytime soon, experts say. One seat will be reserved for the driver-pilot.


----------



## ekim68

How the healing power of Irish soil may help fight superbugs



> As antibiotic-resistant bacteria become more common and more deadly, the solution to this relatively new problem may come from a bit of old Irish folklore and tradition.
> 
> For microbiologist Gerry Quinn, the search for new medications led back to his childhood home in Ireland. On a hunch, he followed up on some folklore his family had passed on to him: Old timers insisted that the dirt in the vicinity of a nearly 1,500-year-old church in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, an area once occupied by the Druids, had almost miraculous curative powers.


----------



## ekim68

New Mirai malware variant targets signage TVs and presentation systems



> Security researchers have spotted a new variant of the Mirai IoT malware in the wild targeting two new classes of devices --smart signage TVs and wireless presentation systems.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers create hydrogen fuel from seawater



> Stanford researchers have devised a way to generate hydrogen fuel using solar power, electrodes and saltwater from San Francisco Bay.
> 
> The findings, published March 18 in _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_, demonstrate a new way of separating hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater via electricity. Existing water-splitting methods rely on highly purified water, which is a precious resource and costly to produce.


----------



## ekim68

Qualcomm wins Apple patent case, loses Apple patent case, wins Apple patent case, loses Apple patent case...

*



Analysis

Click to expand...

*


> Qualcomm has won a $31m judgment against Apple in the US after the iGiant infringed three of Qualy's mobile phone battery patents - the latest ruling in a long series of intellectual property spats between the two companies.





> Although Qualcomm can claim victory this time, it is a battle in a much larger war that may end costing both companies more than they win. Last month, Qualcomm lost in the German courts when four of its eight patent lawsuits against Apple were dismissed. And last week, Qualcomm was ordered to pay Apple $1bn in royalty rebate payments, although it may not actually have to write the check because of the myriad of other patent disputes it has with the company.


----------



## ekim68

Ford adds production of electric vehicles at second North American site



> DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co said on Wednesday it is adding production of a fully electric vehicle at a second North American plant as part of its $11 billion investment plan set last year.
> 
> The No. 2 U.S. automaker said it is investing about $900 million in southeast Michigan and creating 900 jobs through 2023 as part of its electric vehicle push. That includes a plan to invest more than $850 million to expand production capacity at its Flat Rock, Michigan, plant to build EVs.


----------



## ekim68

Britain (Yes, Rainy Britain) Could Run Short of Water by 2050, Official Says



> LONDON - To the casual observer, Britain - an island nation that's no stranger to rain - could not get much wetter.
> 
> But, as it turns out, that's a fallacy. And if preventive steps are not taken, in less than three decades, Britain might run out of water, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, a public body responsible for conservation in England, said on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Canada is becoming a tech hub. Thanks, Donald Trump!




> US companies are moving tech jobs to Canada rather than deal with Trump's immigration policies.


----------



## ekim68

Cable lobby seeks better reputation by dropping "cable" from its name



> Cable lobbyists don't want to be called cable lobbyists anymore. The nation's top two cable industry lobby groups have both dropped the word "cable" from their names. But the lobby groups' core mission-the fight against regulation of cable networks-remains unchanged.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Says the FCC 'Overstates' Broadband Availability in the US



> Generally speaking, you can't fix a problem you don't fully understand. That's particularly true of US broadband, where the government's efforts to map the scope of the nation's broadband coverage gaps have long been ridiculed as an inaccurate mess.
> 
> Microsoft this week was the latest to highlight the US government's terrible broadband mapping in a filing with the FCC, first spotted by journalist Wendy Davis. In it, Microsoft accuses the FCC of over-stating actual broadband availability and urges the agency to do better.


----------



## ekim68

Cool stuff... 

A tour through the extraordinary Pima Air & Space Museum in Arizona


----------



## ekim68

Oslo's electric taxis will soon be able to roll up for a wireless battery top up



> When they're not ferrying folks around from A to B, taxis can be sitting around doing nothing. Electric taxis in Norway's capital will soon be able to wirelessly top up their batteries while waiting for their next fare.
> 
> The City of Oslo is working with Finnish clean energy company Fortum - which was behind last year's Singalong Shuttle - and wireless charging tech firm Momentum Dynamics from the US to roll out wireless fast charging for the city's electric taxis.


----------



## ekim68

Car crash ER visits fell in states that ban texting while driving, study says



> States with bans on texting while driving saw an average 4% reduction in emergency department visits after motor vehicle crashes, an equivalent of 1,632 traffic-related emergency department visits per year, according to a new analysis.


----------



## ekim68

The Recent Deadly Boeing Crash No One Is Talking About



> A few weeks ago a Boeing jet was maneuvering near an airport when it abruptly nosedived and plowed into the ground at tremendous speed, killing everyone aboard. This was not the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 that has transfixed the world, however. It was an American plane, a 767, and its destruction in a muddy bay near Houston remains even more mysterious and, consequently, potentially more disturbing in its long-term implications.


----------



## ekim68

Germany urged to champion global treaty to ban 'killer robots'



> BERLIN (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams and other activists warned on Thursday that fully autonomous weapons could be deployed in just 3-4 years and urged Germany to lead an international campaign for a ban on so-called "killer robots".


----------



## ekim68

Automating ethics



> We are surrounded by systems that make ethical decisions: systems approving loans, trading stocks, forwarding news articles, recommending jail sentences, and much more. They act for us or against us, but almost always without our consent or even our knowledge. In recent articles, I've suggested the ethics of artificial intelligence itself needs to be automated. But my suggestion ignores the reality that ethics has already been automated: merely claiming to make data-based recommendations without taking anything else into account is an ethical stance. We need to do better, and the only way to do better is to build ethics into those systems.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/hacking-lawyers-or-journalists-is-a-ok-says-notorious-1833533568']Hacking Lawyers or Journalists Is Totally Fine, Says Notorious Cyberweapons Firm[/URL]



> The founder and CEO of NSO Group, the notorious Israeli hacking company with customers around the world, appeared on CBS's _60 Minutes_ Sunday night to defend the use of his company's tools in hacking and spying on lawyers, journalists, and minors when the company's customers determine the ends justify the means.


----------



## ekim68

How edge computing transformed marine biology research at Oregon State University



> With the global Internet of Things (IoT) market expected to exceed $724.2 billion by 2023, many organizations are going to be searching for a way to process all of their IoT data quickly, and in a manner that allows them to derive real business value. But the Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC) at Oregon State University already found an answer: The Amazon Web Service (AWS) Snowball Edge.
> 
> Edge computing is the collection and analysis of data at the site where the data is generated -- or at the 'edge' of the enterprise network. The technology offers a means of analyzing large volumes of data in near real-time, allowing organizations to gain data from IoT devices remotely.


----------



## ekim68

After partnership, first all-electric airline on the way



> Electric propulsion may be coming to commercial flight sooner than many thought. On the heels of a partnership between magniX, an electric aviation company, and Harbour Air, North America's largest seaplane airline, comes the announcement today of a plan to convert the seaplanes in Harbour Air's fleet into electric vehicles by swapping in magniX's 750 horsepower all-electric motor for conventional gas engines.


----------



## ekim68

Hybrid cathodes improve energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries



> Thanks to their better energy density and light weight, lithium-sulfur batteries hold a lot of promise as a potential successor to the time-honored lithium-ion batteries. But there have been growing pains, and the emerging technology has its own problems to overcome. Now, engineers have developed a new type of hybrid cathode for a lithium-sulfur battery that seems to boast better energy density than existing versions of both lithium-ion and lithium-sulfur batteries.


----------



## ekim68

Teeny-Tiny Bluetooth Transmitter Runs on Less Than 1 Milliwatt



> Engineers at the University of Michigan have now built the first millimeter-scale stand-alone device that speaks BLE. Consuming just 0.6 milliwatts during transmission, it would broadcast for 11 years using a typical 5.8-mm coin battery. Such a millimeter-scale BLE radio would allow these ant-sized sensors to communicate with ordinary equipment, even a smartphone.


----------



## ekim68

FTC shuts down four groups responsible for billions of illegal robocalls



> Four companies that made billions of illegal robocalls have been caught and fined.
> 
> The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday said the agency reached settlements with four operations responsible for billions of illegal robocalls pitching debt-relief services, home security systems, fake charities, auto warranties and Google search results services. The companies were charged with violating the FTC Act, as well as the agency's Telemarketing Sales Rule and its Do Not Call provisions.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft takes control of 99 domains operated by Iranian state hackers




> Court documents





> unsealed today revealed that Microsoft has been waging a secret battle against a group of Iranian government-sponsored hackers.
> 
> The OS maker sued and won a restraining order that allowed it to take control of 99 web domains that had been previously owned and operated by a group of Iranian hackers known in cyber-security circles as APT35, Phosphorus, Charming Kitten, and the Ajax Security Team.
> 
> The domains had been used as part of spear-phishing campaigns aimed at users in the US and across the world.


----------



## ekim68

What Happens in an Internet Minute in 2019?



> When it comes to gauging the epic scale of the internet, it would seem that each minute leans closer to the extraordinary side of the spectrum.
> 
> Today's infographic from @LoriLewis and @OfficiallyChadd aggregates the online activity of billions of people globally, to see what an internet minute looks like.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90326383/eu-to-ban-plastic-plates-cups-and-cutlery-by-2021']EU to ban plastic plates, cups, and cutlery by 2021[/URL]



> The European Union is taking the lead in saving the world. The EU parliament has voted to ban single-use plastic cutlery, plastic cotton swabs, straws, and coffee stirrers as part of a sweeping law aimed at fighting the plastic waste that pollutes oceans and beaches. The ban on single-use plastics will go into effect by 2021 in all EU member states (and maybe the U.K., depending on what happens with Brexit).
> 
> The countries aren't stopping there, either: EU member states will also have to reduce the use of plastic food containers and plastic coffee lids. The new legislation also states that by 2025, plastic bottles should be made of 25% recycled content. According to _Bloomberg_, the new legislation also sets an admirable target of recycling 90% of plastic bottles by 2029-as well as a goal of making them out of 30% recycled material by 2030.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is three years ahead of all its competitors



> ARK Invest has estimated that Tesla is three years ahead of its electric vehicle (EV) production peers based on its battery production and efficiency capabilities, autonomous hardware and AI, and the massive amount of autonomous driving data.


----------



## ekim68

Renewables 'have won the race' against coal and are starting to beat natural gas



> The rapidly dropping cost of renewable energy has upended energy economics in recent years, with new solar and wind plants now significantly cheaper than coal power.
> 
> But new research shows another major change is afoot: The cost of batteries has been declining so unexpectedly rapidly that renewables plus battery storage are now cheaper than even natural gas plants in many applications, according to a report released this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).


----------



## ekim68

Survey: Streaming Surpasses Pay TV In U.S. Households For The First Time [Infographic]



> In recent years, streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have soared in popularity, turning into one of Americans' favorite ways to consume video content. With more digital media and entertainment options on offer to consumers than ever before, new research from Deloitte has shown just how mainstream Netflix and co really are across the U.S. today. On average, American households subscribed to three paid streaming services in late 2018, and notably, more U.S. households subscribed to a video streaming service than traditional pay TV for the first time ever.


----------



## ekim68

Gmail celebrates its 15th birthday with scheduled emails and smarter AI



> When Google launched Gmail on April 1, 2004 with 1 GB of storage space for free, many people assumed it was a joke - but the service has gone on to be one of the most popular email platforms of all. In honor of its 15th birthday, Gmail is getting a few new features to make it even more useful.


----------



## ekim68

The Serengeti-Mara squeeze -- One of the world's most iconic ecosystems under pressure



> Increased human activity around one of Africa's most iconic ecosystems is "squeezing the wildlife in its core", damaging habitation and disrupting the migration routes of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle, an international study has concluded. The study, led by the University of Groningen and with collaborators at 11 institutions around the world, looked at 40 years of data, and revealed that some boundary areas have seen a 400 percent increase in human population over the past decade while larger wildlife species populations in key areas (the Kenyan side) were reduced by more than 75%.


----------



## ekim68

Burger King is testing a vegetarian Whopper made with Impossible Burger



> Burger King is testing a vegetarian version of its Whopper that uses an Impossible Burger for its patties, becoming the first national fast-food chain to sell the plant-based burger.
> 
> The Restaurant Brands International subsidiary is offering the Impossible Whopper at 59 St. Louis locations. The chain already sells veggie patties made by Kellogg's vegetarian brand, Morningstar Farms.


----------



## ekim68

"World's first working thermal battery" promises cheap, eco-friendly, grid-scalable energy storage



> South Australia has recently put the world's biggest lithium battery into operation - but perhaps it should've waited. A local startup says it's built the world's first working thermal battery, a device with a lifetime of at least 20 years that can store six times more energy than lithium-ion batteries per volume, for 60-80 percent of the price.


----------



## ekim68

No more broken phone screens: New see-through film stronger than aluminum




> Tests showed the resulting films were 10 times stronger than conventional see-through films.


----------



## ekim68

Americans borrow $88 billion annually to pay for health care, survey finds



> Americans borrowed a staggering $88 billion in the past year to pay for health care, a new survey finds.
> About 1 in 8 had to resort to borrowing to afford care in the previous year, according to a West Health-Gallup survey released Tuesday. Also, 65 million adults say they had a health issue but didn't seek treatment due to cost. Nearly a quarter had to cut back on spending to pay for health care or medicine.


----------



## ekim68

The price of college is breaking America.



> At a moment when Hollywood celebrities and private equity titans have allegedly been spending hundreds of thousands in bribes to get their children into elite schools, it seems quaint to recall that higher learning is supposed to be an engine of social mobility. Today, the country's best colleges are an overpriced gated community whose benefits accrue mostly to the wealthy. At 38 colleges, including Yale, Princeton, Brown and Penn, there are more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Ban Fortnite? Prince Harry Says Game "Shouldn't Be Allowed"



> Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and sixth in line for the royal British crown, has sharply criticized the popular battle royale game Fortnite and called for it to be banned. The BBC reports that Harry's comments came at a YMCA event in London, just before the gaming BAFTA awards.
> 
> "[Fortnite] shouldn't be allowed," he said. "Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It's created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It's so irresponsible. It's like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorsteps and families being broken down."
> 
> He also suggested that social media is "more addictive than alcohol and drugs."


----------



## ekim68

Alzheimer's disease affects 'twice as many people' as experts thought



> Twice as many people may have Alzheimer's disease as currently estimated, experts now believe.
> 
> In the US, 5.8 million people are living with the debilitating condition, according to the Alzheimer's Association, and that number is projected to rise to nearly 14 million by 2050.
> 
> Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota believe, however, that many more people are probably already living with it without having a formal diagnosis.


----------



## ekim68

Sea Levels Are Rising. Time to Build ... Floating Cities?



> With sea levels expected to rise at least 26 inches by the end of the century, due to human-driven climate change, to say that we have a problem is an understatement. By the middle of the next century, many of the world's major cities will be flooded, and in some cases, entire island nations will be underwater. The people who live there will have to relocate. But to where?
> 
> On Wednesday, the United Nations Human Settlements Program, or UN Habitat, convened its first roundtable to discuss the possibility of floating cities as a solution to this problem.


----------



## ekim68

Batteries are key to clean energy - and they just got much cheaper



> Batteries are critical for our clean energy future. Luckily, their cost has dropped so low, we might be much closer to this future than we previously thought.
> 
> In a little less than a year, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 35 percent, according to a new Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. Cheaper batteries mean we can store more solar and wind power even when the sun isn't shining or wind isn't blowing. This is a major boost to renewables, helping them compete with fossil fuel-generated power, even without subsidies in some places, according to the report. Massive solar-plus-storage projects are already being built in places like Florida and California to replace natural gas, and many more are on the way.


----------



## ekim68

Google and other tech giants are quietly buying up the most important part of the internet



> Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it's using those billions to buy up the internet itself - or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone.
> 
> In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company.


----------



## ekim68

Fiat Chrysler will pay Tesla to dodge billions in emissions fines



> Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) has struck a deal with Tesla to count the Silicon Valley automaker's cars as part of its fleet in the European Union, lowering FCA's average emissions output ahead of strict new EU regulations coming in 2021. Tesla will make "hundreds of millions of euros" from the sale of these emissions credits, according to the _Financial Times_.
> 
> The scheme resembles the way regulatory credits can be bought and sold in the United States, which has been a steady (if relatively small) business for Tesla for many years. The electric automaker made $103 million selling emissions credits in 2018, $280 million in 2017, and $215 million in 2016, according to a recent financial filing.


----------



## ekim68

Europe to pilot AI ethics rules, calls for participants



> The European Commission  has announced the launch of a pilot project intended to test draft ethical rules for developing and applying artificial intelligence technologies to ensure they can be implemented in practice.
> 
> It's also aiming to garner feedback and encourage international consensus building for what it dubs "human-centric AI" - targeting among other talking shops the forthcoming G7  and G20 meetings for increasing discussion on the topic.


----------



## ekim68

Ford, UM study whether flying cars would be better for environment



> While the automotive industry grapples with the complexities of releasing self-driving cars on public roads, researchers at the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. are already looking ahead to a time when roads could be irrelevant.
> 
> UM's Center for Sustainable Systems and Ford teamed up to study the environmental impacts of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts - also referred to as VTOLs or flying cars.
> 
> The study found that these flying electric vehicles, while not suitable for short commutes, could play a "niche role in sustainable mobility for longer trips." Flying cars could also be valuable mobility options for congested cities as part of a ride-share taxi service, according to the study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Wing drones approved to make public deliveries in Australia



> Wing, the drone delivery company owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, is launching its first public drone delivery service in Canberra, Australia after the country's aviation authority granted it regulatory approval. Around 100 homes in the suburbs of Crace, Palmerston, and Franklin will initially have access to the service, but in the coming months the company plans to expand it to homes in Harrison and Gungahlin.


----------



## ekim68

Windows XP dies final death as Embedded POSReady 2009 reaches end of life



> Extended support for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009-the last supported version of Windows based on Windows XP-ended on April 9, 2019, marking the final end of the Windows NT 5.1 product line after 17 years, 7 months, and 16 days. Counting this edition, Windows XP is the longest-lived version of Windows ever-a record that is unlikely to be beaten.


----------



## ekim68

Mozilla: Firefox to block cryptomining scripts hidden on websites by default



> An upcoming release of Firefox will give users the option to block two increasingly common and ugly aspects of today's web: browser fingerprinting and cryptomining scripts.
> 
> Neither type of script is helpful or beneficial to browser users. Fingerprinting lets advertising outfits silently track users around the web and profit from users' activity and interests.
> 
> Meanwhile, freeloading opportunists have found it profitable to plant cryptomining JavaScript on websites and secretly sponge off a visitor's CPU to 'earn' cryptocurrency.


----------



## ekim68

Foxconn's Wisconsin 'Factory' Is An Even Bigger Joke Than Everybody Thought



> We've been covering for a while how Paul Ryan's once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion state subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.


----------



## ekim68

DVD and Blu-ray sales nearly halved over five years, MPAA report says



> In its annual Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment report, the Motion Picture Association of America described an immensely sharp drop-off of physical media sales over the past five years. According to the data, which was obtained from DEG and IHS Markit, global sales of video disc formats (which in this context means DVD, Blu-ray, and UltraHD Blu-ray) were $25.2 billion in 2014 but only $13.1 in 2018. That's a drop in the ballpark of 50 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Kaspersky: US security software ban just 'makes cybercriminals happy'



> Moscow-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab believes there's little hope the US government will stop blocking the use of its antivirus software by federal agencies.
> 
> "Unless the political situation changes, we don't expect any change... For the next couple of years, it is going to be more or less the same," Kaspersky Lab's head of CEO office, Anton Shingarev, said at a briefing on Wednesday in Singapore, during the company's annual conference, Security Analyst Summit.


----------



## ekim68

This Has to Be One of the Most Ridiculous Corporate Welfare Deals in Quite Some Time



> The competition for Amazon's second headquarters brought renewed scrutiny to the corporate welfare deals that cities, counties, and states offer to get companies to pick up and move-or stay put. No enterprise seems too grounded to play the game; treasured "hometown" sports teams are some of the worst offenders.
> 
> But even cynics might have been surprised to learn, in Sunday's Wall Street Journal, that Graceland-the iconic Memphis home of Elvis Presley-was ready to decamp, brick by sacred brick, to Nashville, the Middle East, or East Asia after a bruising battle over public subsidy that featured three lawsuits filed against the city and a threat to fund an Elvis-respecting mayor to challenge incumbent Democrat Jim Strickland.


----------



## ekim68

Paul Allen's Stratolaunch flies world's biggest plane for the first time: 'Paul would have been proud'




> Stratolaunch





> , the aerospace venture founded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, sent the world's biggest airplane into the air today for its first flight test.
> 
> The twin-fuselage plane, which incorporates parts from two Boeing 747 jumbo jets and has a world-record wingspan of 385 feet, took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California for a flight that lasted two and a half hours.


----------



## ekim68

NYC orders measles vaccinations in Brooklyn neighborhood



> BROOKLYN, N.Y. - New York City officials on Tuesday declared a public health emergency and ordered mandatory measles vaccinations to halt an outbreak concentrated among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, putting in place the broadest vaccination order in the United States in nearly three decades.
> 
> The order is the latest flashpoint in a nationwide battle to try to stop the second biggest flare-up of the disease since 2000 - spurred by travel to hot spots like Israel, experiencing its own outbreak, and widespread misinformation about vaccines that has frightened a generation of parents who have never witnessed firsthand the ravages of one of the most contagious diseases on Earth.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft has been quietly lobbying against Right to Repair legislation



> Apple has received a lot of stick for opposing the Right to Repair your own property, but of course, the company has always been opposed to letting users tinker with their hardware and software, so it has not exactly been unexpected.
> 
> Much more of a surprise is to hear that Microsoft has also been quietly lobbying against Right to Repair legislation, which would prevent Microsoft from penalizing customers when they open up their devices.


----------



## ekim68

Electric vehicle adoption improves air quality and climate outlook



> EVANSTON, Ill.-- If you have ever wondered how much electric vehicle (EV) adoption actually matters for the environment, a new study provides evidence that making this switch would improve overall air quality and lower carbon emissions.
> 
> The Northwestern University study quantified the differences in air pollution generated from battery-powered electric vehicles versus internal combustion engines. The researchers found that even when their electricity is generated from combustion sources, electric vehicles have a net positive impact on air quality and climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook's activist shareholders are making another dramatic bid to oust Mark Zuckerberg and abolish the firm's share structure



> Activist Facebook investors are again going to try to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman and abolish what they see as the firm's unfair share structure.
> 
> In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, Facebook gave notice of its annual shareholder meeting on May 30 and confirmed the investor proposals that will be voted on during the event.


----------



## ekim68

Up a Package Theft Sting Operation



> In response to Amazon packages being stolen from people's doorsteps, police departments around the country have set up sting operations that use fake packages bugged with GPS trackers to find and arrest people who steal packages. Internal emails and documents obtained by Motherboard via a public records request show how Amazon and one police department partnered to set up one of these operations.


----------



## ekim68

Snow-powered nanogenerator works where solar panels don't



> Snowy places aren't ideal for harvesting solar energy - panels can't do much if they're buried under blankets of snow, of course. Now a team from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has developed a new device that can produce electricity from snow itself.
> 
> The team calls the new device a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or Snow TENG. As the name suggests it works off the triboelectric effect, meaning it uses static electricity to generate a charge through the exchange of electrons. These kinds of devices have been used to make generators that pull energy from body movements, touchscreens, and even footsteps on floors.


----------



## ekim68

Alt-right spreads anti-Muslim rhetoric after Notre Dame fire



> Alt-right supporters have used the Notre Dame Cathedral fire in Paris to spread xenophobic rhetoric on social media.
> 
> The massive blaze that erupted on Monday in the French capital destroyed much of the timber roof and toppled the spire of the cathedral, which was in the middle of a $6.8m renovation.
> 
> The fire was extinguished on Tuesday around 15 hours after it broke out.
> 
> Officials are still investigating the reason behind the fire, but have ruled out arson.


----------



## ekim68

New registrations for electric vehicles doubled in US since last year



> Electric vehicles, still a small percentage of the total automotive market in the U.S., are beginning to gain ground, according to analysis by IHS Markit.
> 
> There were 208,000 new registrations for electric vehicles in the U.S. last year, more than double the number filed in 2017, IHS said Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Samsung chips will get faster and easier on your battery in 2020



> Processor progress is harder to come by these days, but Samsung says it'll build chips next year that will give you a bit more battery life or a little more speed.
> 
> Through improvements charted by Moore's Law, chip electronic components called transistors get steadily smaller. On Monday, Samsung said it's taken the next step along the Moore's Law path, shrinking a transistor measurement to 5 billionths of a meter -- 5nm -- from 7nm. To get some idea of just how teensy that is, about 2,000 would fit end to end across the width of a human hair.


----------



## ekim68

Selfie Deaths Are an Epidemic




> A recent report found that 259 people died between 2011 and 2017 while stepping in front of the camera in often dangerous destinations. Our writer went deep on the psychology of selfies to figure out what's behind our obsession with capturing extreme risk-taking.


----------



## ekim68

The breakthrough that could actually reverse climate change



> So we need to have a little talk about concrete.
> 
> We take it for granted, but concrete is the foundation (no pun intended) of countless buildings, homes, bridges, skyscrapers, millions of miles of highways, and some of the most impressive feats of civil engineering the world has ever known. It's the most widely-used human-made substance on the planet.
> 
> It also happens to be incredibly bad for the climate. Portland cement, the most commonly used base (the goop that gets mixed with sand and gravel, or aggregate, to form concrete), is made with limestone that is quarried and then heated to staggeringly high temperatures - releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the process. Add to that all the fuel burned to mine and crush the aggregate, and you've got a climate disaster.


----------



## ekim68

Maine's Green New Deal bill first in country to be backed by labor unions



> The Maine American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which represents over 160 local labor unions across the state, announced its support Tuesday for the state's recently introduced Green New Deal legislation.
> 
> This is the first Green New Deal-branded proposal to be backed by a state AFL affiliate.


----------



## ekim68

Age-related memory decline reversed with magnetic pulses to the brain



> Researchers at Northwestern University have used a non-invasive form of magnetic brain stimulation to improve the memory of older adults. After just five short sessions the older adults scored as well as a younger cohort on a variety of memory tasks.
> 
> Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is one of the more promising brain stimulation techniques currently being explored by scientists. Unlike other methods, which often involve invasive surgical implantation of electrodes, TMS is non-invasive, simply firing painless magnetic pulses into specific regions of the brain. The idea is that these magnetic pulses can alter neuronal activity, and recent technological advances have allowed researchers to target regions of the brain with incredible precision and specificity.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90336334/the-quest-to-digitally-preserve-the-built-world-from-notre-dame-to-easter-island']The quest to digitally preserve the built world, from Notre-Dame to Easter Island[/URL]



> When the shock of seeing Notre-Dame engulfed in a catastrophic fire on Monday finally wore off, people around the world were quick to wonder how it would be rebuilt. Many pointed to the work of architectural historian Andrew Tallon, who digitally scanned the structure in 2010 to create a detailed documentation of the building that could eventually help reconstruct it.
> 
> Tallon was an early adopter of a technology that is increasingly common today. Known loosely as 3D scanning, it uses lasers to analyze the way light bounces off of a space or object (also known as lidar) to create a digital document of its exact measurements. Microsoft's now-defunct Kinect sensor used it. Archaeologists use it to discover ancient earthworks in Central America, and many robotics and autonomous vehicle companies use it to help vehicles "see." The tech is everywhere, with dozens of startups using it in wildly different ways, from mapping malls to taking detailed measurements of people's bodies for clothing.


----------



## ekim68

Prototype e-bike uses steering-assist to keep seniors upright



> While it's important for seniors to stay active, their decreased sense of balance does _in_crease their risk of being in a bicycle accident. The Netherlands' Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) is attempting to address that situation, with a steering-assist-equipped e-bike.
> 
> Developed in partnership with bicycle manufacturer Royal Dutch Gazelle, the prototype electric-assist bicycle incorporates an inertial measurement unit (an accelerometer/gyroscope combo) that tracks the bike's movements at speeds over 4 km/h (2.5 mph). That motion data is analyzed by an onboard microprocessor, utilizing a previously-developed mathematical model that predicts bicycle stability based on 25 physical parameters.


----------



## ekim68

Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us



> Have you ever noticed that your webcam doesn't have an "off" switch?


----------



## ekim68

Report: 26 States Now Ban or Restrict Community Broadband



> A new report has found that 26 states now either restrict or outright prohibit towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Quite often the laws are directly written by the telecom sector, and in some instances ban towns and cities from building their own broadband networks-even if the local ISP refuses to provide service.


----------



## ekim68

Adding guanidinium thiocyanate to mixed tin-lead perovskites to improve solar cell efficiency



> A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has found a way to improve the efficiency of perovskite-based solar cells-by adding guanidinium thiocyanate to the mix. In their paper published in the journal _Science_, the group describes their work with perovskite-based solar cells and how well they worked.
> 
> For most of its history, silicon has been the material of choice when making solar cells-no other material was as efficient or could produce for as long. But in recent years, chemists have been working with different materials that have come closer. One such promising material is crystalline perovskite. It is generally made from lead, bromine, iodine and other elements.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90336550/how-much-are-we-sacrificing-for-automation']How much are we sacrificing for automation?[/URL]




> Lessons from an Amazon warehouse, and a world where increasingly anything (and anyone) that can be measured, is.


----------



## ekim68

Happy Earth Day... 

Earth Day Image Gallery: Celebrating Earth's Beauty


----------



## ekim68

Facebook's auto-captions for a recent launch video are hilariously bad



> An Antares rocket built by Northrop Grumman launched on Wednesday afternoon, boosting a Cygnus spacecraft with 3.4 tons of cargo toward the International Space Station. The launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, went flawlessly, and the spacecraft arrived at the station on Friday.
> 
> However, when NASA's International Space Station program posted the launch video to its Facebook page on Thursday, there was a problem. Apparently the agency's caption service hadn't gotten to this video clip yet, so viewers with captions enabled were treated not just to the glory of a rocket launch, but the glory of Facebook's automatically generated crazywords. As of Thursday morning, 86,995 people had watched the Facebook video.
> 
> Some of the captions are just hilariously bad. For example, when the announcer triumphantly declares, "And we have liftoff of the Antares NG-11 mission to the ISS," the automatically generated caption service helpfully says, "And we have liftoff of the guitarist G 11 mission to the ice sets."


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's full self-driving computer is now in all new cars and a next-gen chip is already 'halfway done'



> The Tesla  computer, a new custom chip designed to enable full self-driving capabilities, is now in all new Model 3, X and S vehicles, CEO Elon Musk said during the company's Autonomy Day.
> 
> Tesla switched over from Nvidia's Drive platform to its own custom chip for the Model S and X about a month ago and for the Model 3 about 10 days ago, Musk said.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon is now making its delivery drivers take selfies



> Amazon is now making its delivery drivers take selfies, it confirmed to _The Verge,_ in a bid to reduce fraud. Using facial recognition, the company will verify drivers' identities to make sure they are who they say they are, as first reported by _Business Insider_. The new requirements appeared on the Amazon Flex app to drivers, notifying them that they needed to take a selfie before continuing work. Of course, Amazon warns drivers to "not take a selfie while driving."
> 
> By asking drivers to take selfies, Amazon could be preventing multiple people from sharing the same account. These efforts could screen out anyone who is technically unauthorized from delivering packages, such as criminals who are attempting to use Amazon Flex as an excuse to lurk in front of people's homes.


----------



## ekim68

'Longevity gene' responsible for more efficient DNA repair



> Explorers have dreamt for centuries of a Fountain of Youth, with healing waters that rejuvenate the old and extend life indefinitely.
> 
> Researchers at the University of Rochester, however, have uncovered more evidence that the key to longevity resides instead in a gene.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/23/2330210/icann-proposes-allowing-unlimited-fee-increases-for-org-domain-names']ICANN Proposes Allowing Unlimited Fee Increases For .Org Domain Names[/URL]

_



ICANN

Click to expand...





is proposing allowing *unlimited fee increases* for .org domain names, which currently are allowed to increase a maximum of 10% annually. That 10% annual cap on fee increases came about after the huge public outcry that ensued in 2006 when a comparable proposal to eliminate price caps was made, and successfully opposed by the public. It seems that ICANN did not learn from history.

Click to expand...

_


----------



## ekim68

'Technology Needs to Be Regulated.' Apple CEO Tim Cook Says No Oversight Has Led To Great Damage To Society



> Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for more government regulation on the technology industry in order to protect privacy in an interview at the TIME 100 Summit in New York.
> 
> "We all have to be intellectually honest, and we have to admit that what we're doing isn't working," said Cook, in an interview with former TIME Editor in Chief Nancy Gibbs. "Technology needs to be regulated. There are now too many examples where the no rails have resulted in a great damage to society."


----------



## ekim68

Ford invests $500 million in electric pickup truck maker Rivian



> Gambier, Ohio (CNN Business)Ford is investing $500 million in electric pickup truck maker Rivian, saying the two companies will work together to develop a new battery plug-in vehicle for Ford.
> 
> Ford (F) is playing catch-up to a number of other automakers' efforts to develop electric vehicles. It does not currently sell any pure electric vehicles, although it sells some plug-in hybrid cars.
> Company executives said Ford will still move ahead with its own electric vehicle development efforts, including a plug-in version of the Ford F-150 pickup. They said the vehicle it will develop with Rivian will be an addition to its future lineup.


----------



## ekim68

Some Amazon Sellers Are Paying $10,000 A Month To Trick Their Way To The Top

*



For the millions

Click to expand...

*


> of third-party sellers on Amazon's marketplace, maintaining a successful business is a constant battle to rank high in search results, collect positive product reviews, and keep up with Amazon when it releases its own branded versions of sellers' most successful products. This intense competition has led to the emergence of a secretive, lucrative black market where agents peddle "black hat" services, sometimes obtained by bribing Amazon employees, that purportedly give marketplace sellers an advantage over their rivals, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T Settles Lawsuit Over 'Fake 5G,' Won't Change A Thing



> Big wireless carriers haven't been exactly honest when it comes to the looming fifth-generation wireless standard (5G). Eager to use the improvements to charge higher rates and sell new gear, carriers and network vendors are dramatically over-hyping where the service is actually available, and what it can actually do. Some, like AT&T, have gone so far as to actively mislead customers by pretending that its existing 4G networks are actually 5G. AT&T took this to the next level recently by issuing phone updates that change the 4G icon to "5GE" on customer phones, despite the fact that actual 5G isn't really available.


----------



## ekim68

Computers, not TV, are to blame for increase in US sitting time, study says



> There's a key culprit in the battle against sitting. Time spent watching TV and videos has remained consistently high in the United States over the past 15 years, but time sitting at a computer has increased dramatically, new research finds.
> 
> Leisure-time computer use increased between 4.8% and 38% for various age groups between 2001 and 2016, said Yin Cao, senior author of the new study and an assistant professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
> 
> Overall, up to 43% of the US population used a computer for two or more hours a day and up to 25% used a computer for three or more hours each day in 2016.
> 
> The result of these increases: Teens spent about 8.2 hours a day sitting while adults sat for 6.4 hours a day.


----------



## ekim68

Brain implant developed that turns brain signals into synthesized speech



> Scientists have developed an implant that interprets signals in the brain and converts them into understandable, synthesized speech. This innovative piece of technology could one day give a voice to people otherwise unable to communicate.


----------



## ekim68

Caffeine Cranks Up Solar Cells



> Electronics must perform and endure for 1,000 hours at 85 °C to pass a standard accelerated lifetime test. Coffee is best served at 85 °C-a fact that's built right into the name of the fast-growing 85°C Bakery Café chain. Just another meaningless coincidence? Not for the photovoltaics researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles. For them, 85 degrees was a clue hiding in plain sight.
> 
> UCLA professor Yang Yang's lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix. To the team's surprise, caffeine produced longer lasting and more powerful solar cells.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla: An innovator faces competition



> 28 PHOTOS


----------



## ekim68

NSA: That ginormous effort to slurp up Americans' phone records that Snowden exposed? Ehhh, we don't need that no more



> The NSA's mass-logging of people's phone calls and text messages, at home and abroad - a surveillance program introduced after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks - is set to end as it's no longer worth the hassle.
> 
> The blanket spying, which hoovered up the metadata for all calls and texts made by US citizens as well as foreigners around the world, has been widely criticized ever since its existence was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Now intelligence officials are telling the White House that it's no longer needed, with one whispering this week to the Wall Street Journal that "the candle is not worth the flame."


----------



## ekim68

Some internet outages predicted for the coming month as '768k Day' approaches

*



What is 768k Day?

Click to expand...

*


> The term 768k Day comes from the original mother of all internet outages known as 512k Day.
> 
> 512k Day happened on August 12, 2014, when hundreds of ISPs from all over the world went down, causing billions of dollars in damages due to lost trade and fees, from a lack of internet connectivity or packet loss.
> 
> The original 512k Day took place because routers ran out of memory for storing the global BGP routing table, a file that holds the IPv4 addresses of all known internet-connected networks.


----------



## ekim68

Earth's Marine Viruses Studied From Pole To Pole



> New research provides the most complete account to date of the viruses that impact the world's oceans, increasing the number of known virus populations tenfold.
> 
> "This new understanding of viruses from the northern pole to the southern pole and from the surface to 4,000 meters deep may help scientists better understand how the oceans will behave under the pressures of climate change," said Ahmed Zayed, co-lead author of the study and microbiology doctoral student at The Ohio State University.
> 
> Researchers analyzed marine samples far and deep in an effort to understand the complexities of viruses, which are increasingly being recognized as important players in the oceans' role in tempering the effects of climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Nanoparticles take a fantastic, magnetic voyage



> Engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. The magnetic microrobots could help to overcome one of the biggest obstacles to delivering drugs with nanoparticles: getting them to exit blood vessels and accumulate in the right place.


----------



## ekim68

Minnesota May Be First State To Pass A Right To Repair Law



> Minnesota appears poised to be the first state to pass "right to repair" legislation taking aim at corporate efforts to monopolize repair. The grass-roots technology movement in support of these bills began in rural America, where the draconian DRM embedded in John Deere tractors made repairing them a costly nightmare for many farmers.


----------



## ekim68

China's quest for clean, limitless energy heats up



> A ground-breaking fusion reactor built by Chinese scientists is underscoring Beijing's determination to be at the core of clean energy technology, as it eyes a fully-functioning plant by 2050.
> 
> Sometimes called an "artificial sun" for the sheer heat and power it produces, the doughnut-shaped Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) that juts out on a spit of land into a lake in eastern Anhui province, has notched up a succession of firsts.
> 
> Most recently in November, it became the first facility in the world to generate 100 million degrees Celsius (212 million Fahrenheit)-six times as hot as the sun's core.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. measles outbreak hits 'completely avoidable' 25-year-high: officials



> NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of measles cases in the United States has reached a 25-year peak, propelled by the spread of misinformation about the vaccine that can prevent the disease, federal health officials said on Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Sizing Up Twitter Users



> U.S. adult Twitter users are younger and more likely to be Democrats than the general public. Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users


----------



## ekim68

The dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50 years



> New analysis by academics from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), part of the University of Oxford, predicts the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within fifty years, a trend that will have grave implications for how we treat our digital heritage in the future.
> 
> The analysis predicts that, based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members will die before 2100. In this scenario, the dead could outnumber the living by 2070. If the world's largest social network continues to expand at current rates, however, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century.


----------



## Bastiat

ekim68 said:


> The dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50 years


They already do, most just aren't aware they're dead.


----------



## ekim68

Indonesia Plans To Move Its Capital Out Of Jakarta, A City That's Sinking



> Indonesia has announced plans to build a new capital city as its current capital, Jakarta, struggles with pollution, traffic gridlock - and the fact that the city is sinking.
> 
> After a Cabinet meeting on Monday, planning minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said President Joko Widodo has decided to move the capital out of Indonesia's main island, Java.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists accidentally designed an incredibly accurate ozone detector



> April 30 (UPI) -- Researchers originally designed the ROZE instrument to detect hydroxyl, which rids the atmosphere of methane. But tests showed the instrument was surprisingly good at measuring ambient levels of ozone -- better than the best available commercial ozone detectors.
> 
> "When we started this development effort, ozone was the farthest thing from our minds," NASA research scientist Tom Hanisco said in a news release.


----------



## ekim68

Historic number of women elected to National Academy of Sciences



> WASHINGTON -- The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 100 new members and 25 foreign associates in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Forty percent of the newly elected members are women -- the most ever elected in any one year to date.


----------



## ekim68

Blender Developers Find Old Linux Drivers Are Better Maintained Than Windows



> To not a lot of surprise compared to the world of proprietary graphics drivers on Windows where once the support is retired the driver releases stop, old open-source Linux OpenGL drivers are found to be better maintained.


----------



## ekim68

Wildlife in British rivers test positive for cocaine, pharmaceuticals



> May 1 (UPI) -- An analysis of wildlife in British rivers has revealed the presence of trace amounts of cocaine and pharmaceuticals, raising fresh concerns about the proliferation and persistence of harmful chemicals in freshwater.
> 
> Scientists at the University of Suffolk in England tested freshwater species at 15 different sites in the county of Suffolk, the results of which were published this week in the journal Environmental International.


----------



## ekim68

Google says it's reviewed over 1M suspected terrorist videos on YouTube this year



> Google has reviewed more than 1 million suspected terrorist videos on YouTube in the first three months of 2019, according to a letter the tech giant sent to US lawmakers.
> 
> In the April 24 letter, made public Thursday as part of a press release from the House Committee on Homeland Security, Google said 90,000 of those videos violated its terrorism policy. Google, which owns YouTube, said it spends "hundreds of millions of dollars annually" on content review.


----------



## ekim68

A Rogue Coder Turned a Parking Spot into a Coworking Space and People Loved It



> It looked like yet another weird symptom of San Francisco tech culture: a cluster of people sitting on the side of a road, working at desks placed within the boundaries of a parking space.
> 
> But WePark-a project led by San Francisco-based web developer Victor Pontis-was actually a manifestation of an idea that has become more popular in the last few years: Cities use space inefficiently and prioritize cars over people. The people at the desks were attempting to reclaim a sliver of space for human use. "Car parking squanders space that can be used for the public good-bike lanes, larger sidewalks, retail, cafes, more housing," Pontis said. "Let's use city streets for people, not cars." (There are also WePark franchises in France as well as Santa Monica.)


----------



## ekim68

TurboTax and H&R Block Saw Free Tax Filing as a Threat - and Gutted It



> Despite signing a deal with the IRS that pledged they would help tens of millions of Americans file taxes for free, tax software giants Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block instead deliberately hid the free option and actively steered customers into paid products, according to an internal document and five current and former employees of the companies.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/heres-why-theres-a-whole-private-air-force-in-texas-1834427110']Here's Why There's a Whole Private Air Force in Texas[/URL]



> If you had to guess which state contains a private air force, you would guess Texas. You just would. Airborne Tactical Advantage, located near Fort Worth, Texas, has an inventory of more than 90 fighter and attack jets, contracting them to the U.S. military to role play as aggressor aircraft-including the U.S. Navy's world famous TOP GUN program.
> 
> Airborne Tactical Advantage is a subsidiary of U.S. defense contracting giant and/or Cessna parent company Textron, and the company's rise is part of a broader rise of Private Military Contractors (PMCs, a number of which, such as the infamous Blackwater, are more commonly known as "mercenaries") worldwide, and the military's increasing reliance on PMCs for aviation training.


----------



## ekim68

The fight for the bundle is the war for the future of TV



> Now, of course, we have many more choices about what we want to watch each evening, and the audience has splintered accordingly: This year, the top 10 broadcast TV shows average between 6.6 million and 11 million viewers on live TV.
> 
> That audience has been declining for years, but the people who made and sold TV shows didn't seem to worry about it, with good reason: Even if the audience for individual shows was dropping, people were still paying for the networks that delivered those shows, because they didn't have a choice. For most people, watching TV meant buying a bundle of channels from a pay TV distributor like Comcast. And pay TV distributors sold the same bundles to everyone, regardless of what they actually wanted to watch.
> 
> Now the bundle, the crucial piece of the TV business architecture, is going away, too, despite the best efforts of the Television Industrial Complex to keep it around.


----------



## ekim68

Beyond Meat's Shares More than Double With a Monumental IPO



> Investors have a big appetite for fake meat.
> 
> The shares of Beyond Meat, the purveyor of plant-based burgers and sausages, more than doubled Thursday in its Nasdaq debut. It's the first pure-play maker of vegan "meat" to go public, according to Renaissance Capital, which researches and tracks IPOs.
> 
> Beyond Meat raised about $240 million selling 9.6 million shares at $25 each. Those shares rose 163 percent to close at $65.75.


----------



## ekim68

New recyclable plastic can break its molecular bonds and start over



> Plastics are useful and ubiquitous - but that's not always a good combination. The vast majority of plastic waste can't be recycled, meaning it ends up in landfills at best or the ocean at worst. To help curb the problem, researchers at Berkeley Lab have now designed a new type of plastic that can apparently be reduced right back to its molecular parts, before being remade over and over.


----------



## ekim68

Bored and lonely? Blame your phone.



> A new book titled _Bored Lonely Angry Stupid_ tries to answer this question by looking at the past. The authors examined diaries, letters, and memoirs of a broad cross-section of Americans from the 19th and 20th centuries, trying to capture their inner lives as closely as possible. Then they conducted interviews with modern-day Americans in order to understand how their emotions are being transformed by technological change.
> 
> The idea was to see how our views of boredom, loneliness, selfhood, and community have evolved over time, and how technologies have sparked those evolutions. And what they found was striking: We don't merely develop new devices for expressing our emotions - our devices actually alter what emotions we express.


----------



## ekim68

Putin's Health-Care Cuts Spark Protests in Russian Heartland



> The country has 100 billionaires, and yet more than a third of Russians can't afford to buy two pairs of shoes a year.


----------



## ekim68

A Vision of the Dark Future of Advertising



> It's obvious that in 50 years the amount of data collected about us will be much, much larger than it is now. By the middle of the century, all of us will leave a comprehensive, high-definition, information-rich digital exhaust everywhere we go. As the cost of adding computer chips to objects falls, our baby monitors, coffee machines, Fitbits, energy meters, clothes, books, fridges, and facial expressions will all create data points. So will our public spaces, lampposts, storefronts, and traffic lights. A 70-year-old in 2069 will have had most of her life datafied. This is what most analysts complaining about Facebook or Google miss: The profiling and targeting of people has only just started.


----------



## ekim68

The FCC Hasn't Done A Thing To Seriously Police Wireless Location Data Scandals



> While Facebook (usually justly) gets the lion's share of privacy criticism, wireless carriers haven't been too far behind. In the last few years we've learned that they're frequently hoovering up your daily location data and then selling it to a long chain of often dubious companies. More recently they've been busted even selling access to E-911 location data, which is increasingly even more accurate in tracking users than traditional GPS. We've noted repeatedly that lax ethical standards result in this data often being abused by dubious third parties, or used illegally by law enforcement or those pretending to be law enforcement.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90339945/75-of-staff-at-this-succesful-it-company-are-on-the-autism-spectrum']75% of staff at this successful IT company are on the autism spectrum[/URL]

Ultra Testing is helping lead the way for companies embracing neurodiversity: "We're staffing these teams with fantastically capable talent who just haven't had a fair shot before."[/url]


----------



## ekim68

Is Conference Room Air Making You Dumber?



> You're holed up with colleagues in a meeting room for two hours, hashing out a plan. Risks are weighed, decisions are made. Then, as you emerge, you realize it was much, much warmer and stuffier in there than in the rest of the office.
> 
> Small rooms can build up heat and carbon dioxide from our breath - as well as other substances - to an extent that might surprise you. And as it happens, a small body of evidence suggests that when it comes to decision making, indoor air may matter more than we have realized.


----------



## ekim68

Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant To Close, Latest Symbol Of Struggling Industry



> 40 years after the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident, the remaining reactor still operating at Three Mile Island in South-central Pennsylvania is closing.
> 
> Exelon announced Wednesday that Three Mile Island Generating Station Unit 1 will shut down by September 30th.
> 
> The company says the plant has been losing money for years. The nuclear industry generally has struggled to compete with less expensive electricity generated from natural gas and renewable energy.


----------



## ekim68

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.



> In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and "premium" websites - i.e., established and legitimate publications - on which to host them.
> The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both.


----------



## ekim68

Elaphe focuses on efficiency with high-torquing electric hub motor



> At the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Technology expo in Hannover yesterday, Elaphe presented the latest generation of its monster in-wheel electric hub motors, which can now smash out as much as 1,500 Nm (1,106 lb-ft) of torque and more than 110 kW (147 hp) per wheel.
> 
> Hub motors have their positives and negatives - on the one hand, they place the torque right where the rubber meets the road, eliminating drivetrain efficiency losses and giving precise, instant control of the power that's going to each wheel. They also remove centrally-mounted motors, letting you use more space in the cabin on certain types of vehicles. On the other hand, they're significantly heavier than standard rims, which gives the car's suspension system a fair bit of extra unsprung weight and rotating mass to deal with.


----------



## ekim68

World's fastest supercomputer will heat up race to the exascale era



> Supercomputers will take a huge leap forward when the "exascale" era kicks off in 2021 with the launch of Aurora. But now it looks like that world-leading machine will be usurped before it's even set up. The just announced Frontier system will boast the power of over 1.5 exaflops - that's one and a half billion billion floating point operations per second.
> 
> Frontier is being developed as part of the US Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, and will be built by Cray Inc. using AMD processors and housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Interestingly, Aurora is a product of almost the exact same collaboration, only substituting Intel for the innards.


----------



## ekim68

2017 Tesla Model S P100D First Test: A New Record -- 0-60 MPH in 2.28 Seconds!



> We all understand acceleration. It's the rate of change of velocity. This 4,891-pound Tesla Model S P100D does it best, reaching 30, 40, 50, and 60 mph from a standstill more quickly than any other production vehicle we've ever tested, full stop. *In our testing, no production car has ever cracked 2.3 seconds from 0 to 60 mph. But Tesla has, in 2.275507139 seconds. *


----------



## ekim68

Many Hospitals Charge Double or Even Triple What Medicare Would Pay



> In Indiana, a local hospital system, Parkview Health, charged private insurance companies about four times what the federal Medicare program paid for the same care, according to a study of hospital prices in 25 states released on Thursday by the nonprofit RAND Corp.
> 
> Colorado employers were shocked to learn they were paying nearly eight times what the federal government did for outpatient services like an emergency room visit, an X-ray or a checkup with a specialist at Colorado Plains Medical Center, northeast of Denver.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft recommends using a separate device for administrative tasks



> In a rare article detailing insights about its staff's efforts in securing its own internal infrastructure, Microsoft has shared some very insightful advice on how companies could reduce the risk of having a security breach.
> 
> The central piece of this article is Microsoft's recommendation in regards to how companies should deal with administrator accounts.
> 
> Per Microsoft's Security Team, employees with administrative access should be *using a separate device*, dedicated only for administrative operations.


----------



## ekim68

Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion



> Delays in tackling climate change could cost companies about $1.2 trillion worldwide during the next 15 years, according to the United Nations.
> 
> That's the preliminary analysis of a UN Environment Finance Initiative project that brought together 20 global fund managers to measure the impact of climate change on 30,000 of the largest listed companies. The group has created a guide for investors to assess how their holdings would respond to different levels of global warming and policy making.


----------



## ekim68

Teacher with cancer has to pay for her substitute - and it's true across California



> The California law forcing a teacher with cancer to pay for her own substitute shocked parents and students - but it wasn't much of a surprise to teachers themselves.
> 
> "Parents were outraged and incredulous - like, this can't be," said Amanda Fried, a parent with kids at San Francisco's Glen Park Elementary, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. "There must be some mistake."
> 
> But according to the Chronicle, which first reported the teacher's story this month, the rule is part of state law and applies to educators across California. A district spokesperson said $195 is being taken from the teacher's daily wages to cover the cost of the substitute, NBC Bay Area reports.


----------



## ekim68

ABC, NBC, and MSNBC prime-time shows ignored landmark UN report on biodiversity



> The major broadcast and cable news networks largely neglected to cover a landmark United Nations report on a devastating decline in biodiversity. On the day the report was released, three of the networks -- ABC, NBC, and MSNBC -- aired no prime-time coverage of it, while the other three networks each aired one prime-time segment. Out of 26 total prime-time news programs on the networks, only three reported on the U.N. assessment.


----------



## ekim68

Japanese railway company starts testing 249mph bullet train speeds



> This week, Japanese railway company JR East showed off its new Alfa-X, a high-speed bullet train that is designed to achieve a top speed of 400kph, or 249mph, which would make it the fastest commercial train in the world. In day-to-day operations, the train would shuttle passengers at 360kph, or roughly 224mph.


----------



## ekim68

UK drones map Chernobyl's 'Red Forest'



> Chernobyl's "Red Forest" - one of the most radioactive locations on Earth - has just been surveyed by UK scientists using a suite of drones.
> 
> The robotic aircraft flew novel sensors that have given Ukrainian authorities more up-to-date information on the sites with the greatest contamination.
> 
> The Red Forest is just 500m from the Chernobyl nuclear complex.


----------



## ekim68

Genetically Modified Viruses Help Save A Patient With A 'Superbug' Infection



> For the first time, scientists have used genetically modified viruses to treat a patient fighting an antibiotic-resistant infection.
> 
> Isabelle Carnell-Holdaway, 17, began the experimental treatment after doctors lost all hope. She was struggling with a life-threatening infection after a lung transplant. With the new treatment*,* she has not been completely cured. But the Faversham, England, teenager has recovered so much that she has resumed a near-normal life.


----------



## ekim68

All Four Major Wireless Carriers Hit With Lawsuits Over Sharing, Selling Location Data



> We've noted repeatedly that if you're upset about Facebook's privacy scandals, you should be equally concerned about the wireless industry's ongoing location data scandals. Not only were the major carriers caught selling your location data to any nitwit with a checkbook, they were even found to be selling your E-911 location data, which provides even more granular detail about your data than GPS provides. This data was then found to have been widely abused from everybody from law enforcement to randos pretending to be law enforcement.


----------



## ekim68

The Tesla effect: Oil is slowly losing its best customer



> Between global warming, Elon Musk, and a worldwide crackdown on carbon, the future looks treacherous for Big Oil.
> 
> The rise of Tesla (TSLA) and electric vehicles broadly pose an existential threat to the oil industry. Passenger vehicles are the No. 1 source of demand for oil - and tomorrow's transportation system may no longer rely on the gas station.


----------



## ekim68

California is bringing law and order to big data. It could change the internet in the U.S.



> The law has numerous parts. It forces companies to reveal what data they collect. It gives users the right to delete that data and prevent its sale. And it will likely restrict how data can be used for online ads.


----------



## ekim68

Rimac teams up with Hyundai and Kia to build electric sportscars



> Rimac, maker of some of the most extreme electric sports cars the planet has ever seen, is about to get its fingers into the mass market pie through a US$90 million investment from Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia.
> 
> It'll be a far cry from building short-run 2,000-horsepower tire shredders like the eye-popping C_Two, but the Croatian hypercar company will bring its electric expertise to the masses thanks to a new partnership announced today.


----------



## ekim68

5G likely to mess with weather forecasts, but FCC auctions spectrum anyway



> A US Navy memo warns that 5G mobile networks are likely to interfere with weather satellites, and senators are urging the Federal Communications Commission to avoid issuing new spectrum licenses to wireless carriers until changes are made to prevent harms to weather forecasting.
> 
> The FCC has already begun an auction of 24GHz spectrum that would be used in 5G networks. But Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) today wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, asking him to avoid issuing licenses to winning bidders "until the FCC approves the passive band protection limits that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) determine are necessary to protect critical satellite‐based measurements of atmospheric water vapor needed to forecast the weather."


----------



## ekim68

San Francisco just banned facial-recognition technology



> San Francisco, long one of the most tech-friendly and tech-savvy cities in the world, is now the first in the United States to prohibit its government from using facial-recognition technology.The ban is part of a broader anti-surveillance ordinance that the city's Board of Supervisors approved on Tuesday.
> 
> The ordinance, which outlaws the use of facial-recognition technology by police and other government departments, could also spur other local governments to take similar action.


----------



## ekim68

The World's Biggest Electric Vehicle Company Looks Nothing Like Tesla



> Americans associate electric cars with the luxury of Tesla, the unrivaled conveyance of choice for the Sand Hill Road set. But these newly assembled vehicles, part of a family of SUVs called the Tang that retails from about 240,000 yuan ($35,700), are aimed squarely at middle-class drivers in the world's largest electric vehicle market, China. Their manufacturer, BYD Co., is in turn the No. 1 producer of plug-in vehicles globally, attracting a tiny fraction of the attention of Elon Musk's company while powering, to a significant extent, a transition to electrified mobility that's moving faster in China than in any other country. Founded in Shenzhen in the mid-1990s as a manufacturer of batteries for brick-size cellphones and digital cameras, BYD now has about a quarter-million employees and sells as many as 30,000 pure EVs or plug-in hybrids in China every month, most of them anything but status symbols. Its cheapest model, the e1, starts at 60,000 yuan ($8,950) after subsidies.


----------



## ekim68

Firms That Promised High-Tech Ransomware Solutions Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers




> As ransomware attacks crippled businesses and law enforcement agencies, two U.S. data recovery firms claimed to offer an ethical way out. Instead, they typically paid the ransom and charged victims extra.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. Has a Fleet of 300 Electric Buses. China Has 421,000



> Plodding down DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn is a bus moving under the power of an eerily quiet motor. It looks newer than most buses on the route, with a vivid digital display facing the driver and doors that part with a futuristic pneumatic swoosh. Commuters trundling aboard at rush hour don't seem to realize this is one of the few electric buses-300 last year, to be exact-in America.
> 
> In China, an electric bus wouldn't be unusual at all. Out of almost 425,000 e-buses worldwide at the end of last year, some 421,000 were in China. The global e-bus fleet grew about 32% in 2018, according to a BloombergNEF report released Wednesday, with the vast majority hitting the road in China. Europe had only 2,250 electric buses, by BNEF's count.


----------



## ekim68

Drone laws: Japan prepares to ban flying unmanned aerial vehicles under the influence of alcohol



> Drinking and droning? It could soon cost you up to a year in jail in Japan, where an amendment to the country's civil aeronautics law being debated in the Diet would make it illegal to operate unmanned aerial vehicles while under the influence of alcohol.
> 
> According to the transport ministry, there were 79 incidents involving drones in the last financial year. None of them involved a drunk operator but tighter restrictions were nonetheless regarded as a necessary pre-emptive move.


----------



## ekim68

Driverless electric truck starts deliveries on Swedish public road



> JONKOPING, Sweden (Reuters) - Resembling the helmet of a Star Wars stormtrooper, a driverless electric truck began daily freight deliveries on a public road in Sweden on Wednesday, in what developer Einride and logistics customer DB Schenker described as a world first.
> 
> Robert Falck, the CEO of Swedish start-up Einride, said the company was in partnership talks with major suppliers to help scale production and deliver orders, and the firm did not rule out future tie-ups with large truckmakers.
> 
> "This public road permit is a major milestone ... and it is a step to commercializing autonomous technology on roads," the former Volvo executive told Reuters.


----------



## ekim68

Consensus Quietly Builds That 5G Was Overhyped, Rushed To Market



> Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.


----------



## ekim68

Event Camera Helps Drone Dodge Thrown Objects



> This drone uses an event camera, which responds to changes in a scene on a per-pixel basis in microseconds, to nimbly avoid obstacles.


----------



## ekim68

Lilium's full-sized electric jet flies for the first time



> Lilium first emerged in 2016 as an aviation startup with some very lofty ambitions, revealing plans to develop a five-seat electric aircraft that can take off vertically, switch to horizontal flight in mid-air and cover some sizable distances on each charge. The company has now taken a significant step toward achieving this goal, completing a flight of a full-scale prototype of its Lilium Jet for the very first time.


----------



## ekim68

Cars will change more in the next decade than they have in the past century



> While the look and feel of our cars has changed in the past 100 years, the way we drive them hasn't. But fundamental change is coming. In the next decade, not only will the way they're powered and wired have shifted dramatically, but we won't be the ones driving them anymore.
> 
> Some cars already have basic automation features, but the automotive experiments currently being undertaken by the likes of Uber and Google make up a minuscule proportion of the vehicles on our roads. By 2030, the standard car will evolve from merely assisting the driver to taking full control of all aspects of driving in most driving conditions.


----------



## ekim68

A Major Coal Company Went Bust. Its Bankruptcy Filing Shows That It Was Funding Climate Change Denialism.




> The bankruptcy of





> one of the largest domestic coal producers in the country has revealed that the company maintains financial ties to many of the leading groups that have sowed doubt over the human causes of global warming.
> 
> The disclosures are from Cloud Peak Energy, a Wyoming-based coal mining corporation that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 10. The company had been battered by low coal prices, including in international markets cultivated by the firm.


----------



## ekim68

Reaching Challenger Deep, American Businessman Completes Deepest Submarine Dive in History



> A private equity investor from Dallas, Texas and his team of explorers have completed a series of record-breaking dives to Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, commonly known as the deepest place on earth.
> 
> The initial record-setting dive took took place on April 28 when American, Victor Vescovo, a retired U.S. Navy officer, made a solo dive to the bottom of the 'Eastern Pool' of the Challenger Deep, reaching a depth of 10,928 meters (35,853 feet deep) and setting a new world record for the deepest dive by any human in history. Vescovo spent four hours (248 minutes) exploring the basin, setting another new record for the longest period of time ever spent on the bottom of the ocean by an individual.
> 
> The 10,928-meter depth beats the previous manned dive record by 16 meters (52 feet).


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90349201/heres-how-radioshack-sold-its-breakthrough-laptop-circa-1983']Here's how RadioShack sold its breakthrough laptop circa 1983[/URL]



> Radio Shack's TRS-80 Model 100 computer-the first successful laptop, introduced in 1983-is both respected and loved. But it's an even more important computer than it generally gets credit for.
> 
> Before the Model 100's arrival, portable computing was defined by the Osborne 1, a 24-pound beast that sported a handle and could be hauled from place to place, then plugged into AC power. The Model 100 weighed less than a sixth as much, fit in a briefcase, and ran off AA batteries. Though not the first notebook computer, it was the first one that caught on and the one that introduced people to mind-bending ideas such as using a PC on an airplane.


----------



## ekim68

Inside Google's Civil War



> Some employees say Google is losing touch with its "Don't be evil" motto. What happens when an empowered tech workforce rebels?


----------



## ekim68

UN chief concerned nuclear 'coffin' leaking in Pacific



> UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres raised concerns Thursday that a concrete dome built last century to contain waste from atomic bomb tests is leaking radioactive material into the Pacific.
> 
> Speaking to students in Fiji, Guterres described the structure on Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands as "a kind of coffin" and said it was a legacy of Cold War-era nuclear tests in the Pacific


----------



## ekim68

Google Glass gets a surprise upgrade and new frames



> It's 2019, and guess what? Google just unveiled its newest version of Glass. It's not made to be a widespread consumer product, but there are business users who will care. And the latest Glass Enterprise Edition 2, with key upgraded specs, shows where most smartglasses are at.
> 
> You might remember Glass as a strange 2013 footnote, but Glass has stuck around: it became an enterprise-targeted device in 2017, and has been used in a variety of other assistive ways.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Gigafactory 3's rise shows that it's too early to dismiss Elon Musk's 'sci-fi projects'



> A drone flyover of Gigafactory 3 on Monday has revealed that the factory shell of Tesla's China-based electric car production facility is all but complete. Only a few small sections of the massive general assembly building do not have roofing yet, and the same is true for Gigafactory 3's walls. Around the facility's grounds, workers continued their activities, and cement trucks were seen heading inside the massive factory, hinting at the work being started inside.


----------



## ekim68

Cable TV customer satisfaction falls even further behind streaming video



> Netflix and other online video services have expanded their customer-satisfaction lead over cable and satellite TV, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) found in its annual telecommunications report released today.
> 
> Streaming-video services averaged a score of 76 on the ACSI's 100-point scale, up from 75 last year. Meanwhile, the traditional subscription-TV industry's score remained unchanged at 62.
> 
> "For the past six years, customer satisfaction with subscription TV has languished in the mid-to-low 60s, not recovering enough to effectively compete with streaming services," the ACSI report said. "In 2018, subscription sales declined 3 percent to $103.4 billion. Customer service remains poor, and cord cutting is accelerating. As video-streaming services gain traction, a growing number of households may never subscribe to pay TV in the first place."


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft announces Xbox content moderation to cut back on toxic comments



> As Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social platforms come under fire for enabling hateful speech, Microsoft is stepping up to thwart toxic comments among its 63 million Xbox live users.
> 
> Gaming is not Microsoft's highest-priority market - cloud infrastructure and productivity applications are more crucial to its business - but the segment generated 10% of the Microsoft's revenue last quarter. And the company is continuing to invest in its Xbox business as it moves away from other consumer markets, like wearables and music streaming. Microsoft needs to make sure Xbox players don't hear or see content that might turn off users, or scare younger players away.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/hackers-are-holding-baltimores-government-computers-hos-1834948639']Hackers Are Holding Baltimore's Government Computers Hostage, and It's Not Even Close to Over[/URL]



> On May 7, hackers infected about 10,000 of Baltimore city government's computers with an aggressive form of ransomware called RobbinHood, and insisted the city pay 13 bitcoin (then $76,280, today $102,310) to cut the computers loose. The hackers claimed the price would go up every day after four days, and after the tenth day, the affected files would be lost forever.


----------



## ekim68

Online identification is getting more and more intrusive



> MOST ONLINE fraud involves identity theft, which is why businesses that operate on the web have a keen interest in distinguishing impersonators from genuine customers. Passwords help. But many can be guessed or are jotted down imprudently. Newer phones, tablets, and laptop and desktop computers often have beefed-up security with fingerprint and facial recognition. But these can be spoofed. To overcome these shortcomings the next level of security is likely to identify people using things which are harder to copy, such as the way they walk.


----------



## ekim68

DoD awards contracts to create robotic suit that autonomously delivers trauma care



> In an effort to treat wounded soldiers as fast as possible, the US Department of Defense has awarded four-year contracts worth a total of US$7.2 million to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (UPMC) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to develop an autonomous trauma care system that can fit in a rucksack. Called TRAuma Care In a Rucksack (TRACIR), it will use advanced sensors, robotics, and artificial intelligence to autonomously treat battlefield casualties almost immediately.


----------



## ekim68

America's newest stock exchange wants to fix one of capitalism's fundamental challenges



> What if the problem with capitalism wasn't income inequality or an education gap but the stock market itself? And what if that problem couldn't be fixed by a wealth tax, billionaire philanthropy, or other sweeping cultural and political pivots but by simply slowing down?
> 
> That's the intriguing idea at the core of something that began as a bit of a loony, never-gonna-happen proposal that has become a very real consideration in Silicon Valley. It's called the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and its goal is to reshape the incentives for the next generation of public companies so that they can focus on the long term. And if - a big if - it is attractive enough to dislodge incumbents like the New York Stock Exchange, then maybe it's going to reshape how corporations think about their objectives and our approach to capitalism itself.


----------



## ekim68

How the World's First Digital Circuit Breaker Could Completely Change Our Powered World



> This week the world's first and only digital circuit breaker was certified for commercial use. The technology, invented by Atom Power, has been listed by Underwriters Laboratories (UL), the global standard for consumer safety. This new breaker makes power easier to manage and 3000 times faster than the fastest mechanical breaker, marking the most radical advancement in power distribution since Thomas Edison.
> 
> Picture the fuse box in your basement, each switch assigned to different electrical components of your home. These switches are designed to break a circuit to prevent the overloaded wires in your wall from overheating and causing a fire. When this happens, you plod down to your mechanical room and flick the switches on again.


----------



## ekim68

https://newatlas.com/sugary-gel-vaccine-warm-temperature-transport/59829/

Las Vegas bets $48m on Elon Musk's tunnel vision



> The Boring Company, the tunnelling firm of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has won a $48.6 million contract to design and build the city's planned loop of underground tunnels for moving people in autonomous electric vehicles.
> 
> The contract is for three underground passenger stations, a pedestrian tunnel and two tunnels for vehicles that would measure about one mile in length.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast does so much lobbying that it says disclosing it all is too hard



> Comcast may be harming its reputation by failing to reveal all of its lobbying activities, including its involvement in trade associations and lobbying at the state level, a group of shareholders says in a proposal that asks for more lobbying disclosures.


----------



## ekim68

China unveils 600km/h maglev train prototype



> A new floating bullet train capable of hitting speeds of 600 kilometers per hour (about 372 miles/hour) is one step closer to reality in China.
> On Thursday, the body prototype for the country's latest high-speed magnetic-levitation (maglev) train project rolled off the assembly line in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao.


----------



## ekim68

Let It Grow: The Appification of Plants Is Helping Owners Keep Them Alive



> As the houseplant trend rises, tech startups are providing everything from delivery to watering reminders to analysis of your home's lighting conditions-all so your greenery doesn't die.


----------



## ekim68

World Health Organization deems 'gaming disorder' an official illness



> Your Fortnite addiction might just be an official illness.
> 
> The World Health Organization on Saturday adopted the latest update to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which adds "gaming disorder" to its list of modern diseases.
> 
> The organization last June added gaming addiction under its section of potentially harmful technology-related behaviors, including too much use of "the internet, computers, smartphones" and more.


----------



## ekim68

Al Gore's environmental-sustainability fund has raised $1 billion to pump into new markets focused on health and wealth inequality



> Venture investing will look a lot different in five years if  Generation Investment Management has any say in the matter.
> 
> The  sustainability-focused firm was started 15 years ago by former US Vice President Al Gore and former Goldman Sachs Asset Management co-CEO David Blood. On Tuesday, the London-based firm announced it had closed a $1 billion growth equity fund, its largest fund to date.
> 
> "Ultimately we have a very high conviction that the world is going to transition to a much more sustainable economy," Generation's growth equity partner Joy Tuffield told Business Insider. "It's going to be fairer. It's going to be more equitable. It's going to have a lower environmental impact. It will be sustainable and kind of like an environmental practice."


----------



## ekim68

In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc



> For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services.
> 
> But here is what frustrated city employees and residents do not know: A key component of the malware that cybercriminals used in the attack was developed at taxpayer expense a short drive down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at the National Security Agency, according to security experts briefed on the case.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese developers fear losing open source tech to trade war



> Restricted access to US technology is shaping up to have a big impact on Huawei. Now some Chinese software developers are wondering if the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China might soon affect them.
> 
> It all revolves around US-based GitHub, the world's largest code hosting platform. Countless open source code projects are based on GitHub, allowing people from around the world to view and collaborate on projects. And as of last year, GitHub is now owned by Microsoft.


----------



## ekim68

Caltech reactor could convert CO2 into breathable oxygen for space trips



> The team says the reactor works in a similar fashion to a particle accelerator. The CO2 molecules are first ionized and then accelerated using an electric field, before being slammed into the gold surface. In its current form the yield is pretty low - only creating about one or two oxygen molecules for every 100 CO2 molecules fired - but it's an intriguing proof of concept that could be scaled up in the future.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese military to replace Windows OS amid fears of US hacking



> Amidst an escalating trade war and political tensions with the US, Beijing officials have decided to develop a custom operating system that will replace the Windows OS on computers used by the Chinese military.


----------



## ekim68

Antibiotics found in world's rivers at levels up to 300 times above safe levels



> In a massive global study, led by researchers at the University of York, hundreds of rivers around the world have been tested for levels of common antibiotics. The study found 65 percent of all samples contained some concentration of antibiotics, with the worst cases showing levels more than 300 times higher than the generally accepted safe threshold.
> 
> The study is the first to coordinate such a broad global survey of the world's rivers, examining levels of 14 common antibiotics from 711 sites across 72 countries. John Wilkinson, one of the researchers coordinating this large project, suggests that alongside many regions never before monitored, this is the largest antibiotic survey ever conducted.


----------



## ekim68

How virtual reality can help diagnose early Alzheimer's disease



> An exciting new study from the University of Cambridge is demonstrating how a novel virtual reality navigation test can better predict which patients are in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease compared to other currently used "gold standard" cognitive tests.
> 
> For some time researchers have known that one of the earliest parts of the brain to suffer from neurodegeneration related to Alzheimer's disease is the entorhinal cortex, a region of the brain particularly involved in matters of spatial navigation. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is also often one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease. However, MCI does not always lead to Alzheimer's as it can just be a simple byproduct of aging, treated effectively with straightforward physical exercise.


----------



## ekim68

The World Economic Forum wants to develop global rules for AI



> This week, AI experts, politicians, and CEOs will gather to ask an important question: Can the United States, China, or anyone else agree on how artificial intelligence should be used and controlled?
> 
> The World Economic Forum, the international organization that brings together the world's rich and powerful to discuss global issues at Davos each year, will host the event in San Francisco.


----------



## ekim68

Hyundai launches its first electric double-decker bus



> Back in 2016, Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD rolled out a 10.2 meter-long electric double-decker bus in London. Now transit companies have got a new emissions-free people carrier to help ease inner city air pollution and traffic congestion thanks to Hyundai Motor.
> 
> Hyundai's 12.9 m (42.3 ft) long and 3.99 m (13.1 ft) high electric double-decker was launched at Korea's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Technology Fair yesterday, after spending 18 months in the making.


----------



## ekim68

US Universities And Retirees Are Funding The Technology Behind China's Surveillance State



> HONG KONG - Princeton University and the US's largest public pension plan are among a number of stateside organizations funding technology behind the Chinese government's unprecedented surveillance of some 11 million people of Muslim ethnic minorities.
> 
> Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in political reeducation camps in the country's northwest region of Xinjiang, identifying them, in part, with facial recognition software created by two companies: SenseTime, based in Hong Kong, and Beijing's Megvii.


----------



## valis

Another mass shooting, up to 11 dead, and CNN spends 10 minutes explaining why it looks like a handgun was used. Paraphrased quote; "If it wasnt a handgun, then there would be many more dead, so this is a good thing."

This nation is falling to pieces faster than a turd from a tall ox.


----------



## ekim68

There's a lot of hate going on that needs to be brought down a couple of notches.. And the Evening News hasn't been any help...


----------



## valis

If anything, they are propogating it.


----------



## ekim68

DOJ Floats A Truly Stupid Idea To Salvage The Sprint, T-Mobile Merger



> While the Pai FCC is chomping at the bit to approve T-Mobile and Sprint's competition and job killing megaunion, rumors are that DOJ staffers remain highly skeptical about the purported benefits of the deal. The sticking point remains the same: that the merger would reduce overall competition in the space by 25%, a move that historically almost always results in higher consumer prices, and less effort and innovation overall.


----------



## ekim68

Apple will shut down iTunes, ending the download era, report says



> The iTunes store is a dead service walking.
> 
> On Friday afternoon, social media erupted after Bloomberg News reported that Apple was set to announce the end of its iTunes store, which transformed the music business when it was launched in 2003.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter is eroding your intelligence: Study



> WASHINGTON (WASHINGTON POST) - Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate.
> 
> But new evidence shows that the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless.
> 
> The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that's a question for neuroscientists, they said.
> 
> Rather, Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it, the economists said in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.


----------



## ekim68

How America's Business Leaders Lost Their Way




> They once cared about promoting social welfare. Now they only care about making bigger profits.


----------



## ekim68

Twice as Many Fishing Vessels Are Chasing Fewer Fish on the World's Oceans




> Since 1950, the number of boats has gone from 1.7 million to 3.7 million, even though fish stocks have crumbled


----------



## ekim68

Twitter buys tech start-up that claims to quickly spot fake news




> Twitter





> has acquired a start-up that claims to identify "fake news" quickly.
> 
> The company announced on Monday that it was acquiring Fabula AI, a London-based company that uses algorithms and machine learning to identify so-called fake news, the popular term for information that isn't real or verified. The term typically envelops misleading or complete made-up news that is both deliberately and accidentally circulated.


----------



## ekim68

The Growing Inequality Between America's Superstar Cities, and the Rest



> By selecting the New York and Washington, D.C., metros, Amazon's HQ2 process is a telling reminder of the growing gap between a few superstar cities and the rest of the nation. A new Brookings Institution study released today documents this growing divide. The analysis by Clara Hendrickson, Mark Muro, and William Galston shows the deepening economic divergence and worsening spatial inequality that carves America into two separate and distinct nations, shaping the populist backlash. The researchers offer a series of strategies for addressing the gap and beginning to knit the nation back together.
> 
> The nation's 53 large metros (those with more than 1 million people) represent just 2 percent of all places across America, yet accounted for nearly three-quarters of employment growth since the economic crash of 2008. Meanwhile, smaller places across the nation have fallen further and further behind.


----------



## ekim68

No ban: IEEE gives Huawei employees the all-clear



> "IEEE complies with US government regulations which restrict the ability of the listed Huawei companies and their employees to participate in certain activities that are not generally open to the public," it said at the time.
> 
> "This includes certain aspects of the publication peer review and editorial process."
> 
> However, on Sunday, the organisation said it had received clarification from the US Department of Commerce that it could lift the ban.
> 
> "Based on this new information, employees of Huawei and its affiliates may participate as peer reviewers and editors in our publication process. All IEEE members, regardless of employer, can continue to participate in all of the activities of the IEEE," it said.


----------



## ekim68

A 'Bridge' to China, and Her Family's Business, in the Trump Cabinet



> Elaine Chao has boosted the profile of her family's shipping company, which benefits from industrial policies in China that are roiling the Trump administration.


----------



## ekim68

Flying cars are almost here, but they don't look like cars



> BLACKFLY IS ONE of the strangest flying machines yet built. Its body resembles a small whale-though, when flying, the whale is facing backwards. Attached to its nose and tail are two wings, angled to the horizontal. Each wing sports four propellers. Seen from below when airborne, the thing resembles a slightly flattened letter H (pictured). Its inventor, Marcus Leng, and its sponsor, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, hope it will spawn a transport revolution.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90356487/luxury-cinemas-are-fighting-netflix-with-steak-tartare-expensive-booze-and-gourmet-popcorn']Luxury cinemas are fighting Netflix with steak tartare, expensive booze, and gourmet popcorn[/URL]




> The phenomenon of a luxe night out with a brew and a view extends from the big city to big sky country.


----------



## ekim68

Will Microsoft Save America's Elections?



> Three voting-machine vendors - Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion Voting Systems - make up roughly 90 percent of the US market. And all three lack transparency as well as dependability, as voters throughout the US experienced as recently as the 2018 midterms.
> 
> Now tech giant Microsoft has announced ElectionGuard, an open-source software development kit (SDK) that promises to make "voting secure, more accessible and more efficient anywhere it's used in the US or in democratic nations around the world." One thing is certain: it will shake up the status quo.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube Is Finally Banning Nazis, Holocaust Denial, and Sandy Hook Truthers



> YouTube announced it will ban Holocaust denial videos and other content that tries to deny otherwise proven events, in a significant revamp of its hate speech and misleading content policies.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon shows off new all-electric Prime Air drone that will start delivering packages 'within months'



> LAS VEGAS - Amazon's drone ambitions took another step forward today as the tech giant revealed its latest delivery drone design.
> 
> At Amazon's re:MARS conference, Amazon's Worldwide Consumer CEO, Jeff Wilke, showed off a fully-electric drone that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under 5 pounds in less than 30 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Apple is building a major defense against spam calls into iOS 13



> Apple is taking a new step to combat spam calls in iOS 13. Today, you can already install third-party spam call screeners on your iPhone, but if that's not good enough (or something you don't want to do), iOS 13 will add a new solution this fall: it will be able to automatically silence any calls coming in from an unknown number. Even better, it'll automatically send them to voicemail.


----------



## ekim68

Cryptocurrency startup hacks itself before hacker gets a chance to steal users funds



> If you're a cryptocurrency startup, would you face a huge backlash by hacking your own customers to keep their funds safe if you know that a hacker is about to launch an attack and steal their funds?
> 
> This is exactly what happened yesterday when the Komodo Platform learned about a backdoor in one of its older wallet apps named Agama.
> 
> Knowing they had little time to act, the Komodo team said it used the same backdoor to extract users' funds from all impacted wallets and move them to a safe location, out of the hacker's reach.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90359254/michelins-ingenious-new-tires-ensure-youll-never-get-a-flat-again']Michelin's ingenious new tires ensure you'll never get a flat again[/URL]



> Michelin is developing a tire called the Uptis (or Unique Puncture-proof Tire System), which is a tire that cannot ever go flat or blow out because it doesn't require oxygen to stay rigid. Instead, the Uptis features an internal system of flexible spokes that support the tire.
> 
> The Uptis is a working prototytpe that will begin testing on some Chevy Bolt models this year in Michigan. By 2024, the two companies hope to release the Uptis on a commercially available vehicle.


----------



## ekim68

Veal Calves: The End of Teen America's Romance With Cars



> You have probably read about the younger crowd being more interested in their cell phones than in cars. The statistic most often cited in support of this claim - which is true - is that about a fourth of those in the 18-30 bracket don't even have a driver's license.
> 
> Which is also true.


----------



## ekim68

The $500m smiley face business



> The Smiley Company office in London, England, is a wonder to behold.
> 
> Smiley paintings line the walls. Smiley push pillows adorn the couches. There are smiley backpacks, smiley t-shirts, smiley exercise balls, smiley toys, smiley chocolates, and even smiley chicken nuggets.
> 
> This simple icon - a yellow circle, two dots, a smile - retained relevancy through 50 years of cultural movements, from free love to raves to the digital revolution.
> 
> And in the process, it became a family-owned global licensing empire worth more than $500m per year.


----------



## ekim68

Really?


Robocalls can now get blocked by your carrier by default



> The FCC voted unanimously today to allow carriers to block robocalls by default, setting the stage for the major carriers to take action against the surge of unwanted automated calls that basically everyone hates. The agency also voted to move forward on a proposed rule that would require carriers to adopt the SHAKEN / STIR caller ID authentication system if they don't do it themselves by year-end.


----------



## ekim68

https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-zen-2-architecture-explained

BP: Carbon emissions grew 2 percent in 2018



> June 11 (UPI) -- Carbon emissions rose at their fastest rate in seven years in 2018, according to a new report by oil and gas giant British Petroleum.
> 
> Emissions rose as a result of increased energy demands around the world. According to the survey of global energy use, China, India and the United States were responsible for two-thirds of the 2.9 percent consumption increase. It was the largest increase in energy consumption since 2010.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/popular-soccer-app-spied-on-fans-through-phone-micropho-1835448306']Popular Soccer App Spied on Fans Through Phone Microphone to Catch Bars Pirating Game Streams[/URL]



> Spain's data protection agency has fined La Liga, the nation's top professional soccer league, 250,000 euros ($283,000 USD) for using the league's phone app to spy on its fans. With millions of downloads, the app was reportedly being used to surveil bars in an effort to catch establishments playing matches on television without a license.


----------



## ekim68

CERN Ditches Microsoft to 'Take Back Control' with Open Source Software



> The _European Organisation for Nuclear Research_, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible.
> 
> Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees.
> 
> Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.


----------



## ekim68

Scottish Power to build vast battery to improve wind energy supply



> The company will connect an industrial-scale battery, the size of half a football pitch, to the Whitelee onshore windfarm early next year to capture more power from its 215 turbines.
> 
> The first major onshore wind power storage project will lead the way for a string of similar projects across at least six of Scottish Power's largest renewable energy sites over the following 18 months.
> 
> It claims the 50MW battery systems promise a "significant step" on the road towards renewable energy, providing baseload, or continuous electricity supply, for the UK energy system.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2019/06/11/hydrogen-station-explodes-toyota-halts-sales-fuel-cell-cars/']Hydrogen station explodes, Toyota halts sales of fuel cell cars, is this the end?[/URL]



> A hydrogen refueling station exploded in Norway on Monday and the company operating the station has suspended operation at its other locations following the explosion.
> 
> Now, Toyota and Hyundai are both halting sales of fuel cell vehicles in the country.
> 
> Does this spell the end of fuel cell hydrogen vehicles as a "zero-emission" alternative?


----------



## ekim68

Medicine needs to embrace open source



> The expensive and abusive pharmaceutical industry needs to open up to improve everyone's health.


----------



## ekim68

Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day



> Since becoming fully operational in 1995, Global Positioning System technology has become widely adopted in the United States and abroad. The concept of satellite-based navigation has become so essential that other world powers, including China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Japan, have all started building their own regional or global systems.
> 
> Now, one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject has assessed the value of this GPS technology to the US economy and examined what effect a 30-day outage would have-whether it's due to a severe space weather event or "nefarious activity by a bad actor." The study was sponsored by the US government's National Institutes of Standards and Technology and performed by a North Carolina-based research organization named RTI International.


----------



## ekim68

Cotton waste finds new life as eco-friendly plastic



> When a cotton gin is used to separate cotton fibers from their seeds, a _lot_ of lint is produced as a waste product. Currently, much of that cotton lint is just burned or put in landfills. Thanks to recent research out of Australia, however, it may soon be converted into biodegradable plastic.


----------



## ekim68

The bankers that define the decades: Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase



> Has any individual ever dominated an industry as Jamie Dimon does banking today? The long-serving chief executive of JPMorgan Chase is often the loudest and most outspoken voice in finance. And people listen when he talks. That might be because he has a rare mix of charisma and intelligence. But it's mostly because he has earned the right to be listened to, having made JPMorgan Chase not just the most successful and powerful bank in the world but also one of the most successful global companies.


----------



## ekim68

Cybersecurity: These are the Internet of Things devices that are most targeted by hackers



> Internet-connected security cameras account for almost half of the Internet of Things devices that are compromised by hackers even as homes and businesses continue to add these and other connected devices to their networks.


----------



## ekim68

Cellebrite Says It Can Unlock Any iPhone for Cops



> Not so long ago, companies that cracked personal devices on behalf of governments did so in secret, closely guarding even the descriptions of their capabilities. Now, it seems, they proudly tweet about their updated abilities to hack into new iPhones, like a videogame firm offering an expansion pack.
> 
> On Friday afternoon, the Israeli forensics firm and law enforcement contractor Cellebrite publicly announced a new version of its product known as a Universal Forensic Extraction Device or UFED, one that it's calling UFED Premium. In marketing that update, it says that the tool can now unlock any iOS device cops can lay their hands on, including those running iOS 12.3, released just a month ago.


----------



## ekim68

The 2020 census is coming.
Will Native Americans be counted?



> As the 2020 census nears, concern about an undercount of Native Americans is gaining traction here and across the country.
> 
> Approximately 600,000 Native Americans live on tribal reservations, semi-sovereign entities governed by elected indigenous leaders. Here on the Navajo Nation - the country's largest reservation, spanning portions of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah - roughly 175,000 people live in a mostly rural high desert area bigger than West Virginia.


----------



## ekim68

Uber plans to start delivering McDonald's hamburgers by drone this summer



> In just over a decade, Uber has fundamentally transformed the way people get from one place to another, unleashing both chaos and convenience.
> 
> Now the global ride-hailing behemoth is hoping to revolutionize how people get their food.


----------



## ekim68

Tim Cook: Tech companies need to take responsibility for the 'chaos' they create



> Apple CEO Tim Cook said Sunday in a commencement address at Stanford University that technology companies need to take responsibility for the "chaos" they create.
> 
> He did not name specific companies in his speech, but referenced several reasons that tech firms, particularly social media platforms, have come under scrutiny in recent months. He also made an apparent reference to embattled health startup Theranos.
> 
> "Lately it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation - the belief you can claim credit without accepting responsibility," Cook said, according to videos posted online of his speech.


----------



## ekim68

Adobe's experimental AI tool can tell if something's been Photoshopped



> THANKS TO PHOTOSHOP, convincingly editing pictures has never been easier if you have the time and patience. At _INQ_, we prefer to cut corners and use MS-Paint with solid results, but more professional jobs could soon be easier to smoke out, thanks to a joint project between Adobe and UC Berkeley researchers.
> 
> A bunch of images were created using Photoshop's "Face Aware Liquify" tool, and mixed with a set of expertly human-doctored photographs. When humans were shown the original image and the doctored version, they spotted the fakes 53 per cent of the time, but the artificial intelligence hit 99 per cent.


----------



## ekim68

Google CEO: YouTube is too big to fix completely




> Google





> CEO Sundar Pichai says YouTube is too big to completely fix the site's problems with harmful content.
> 
> YouTube, which is owned by Google, has come under fire in the last couple of years, as content ranging from deniers of the Sandy Hook massacre to supremacist content has continued to show up on the site despite the company's attempts to filter it out.


----------



## ekim68

Big ISP Customer Service Still at the Bottom



> This time each year we get a peek at how customers view the telecom industry, and for many years running it's not been a pretty story. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) was recently published and shows ISPs still ranked at the bottom of all industries in terms of customer satisfaction.
> 
> The survey to create the ACSI rankings is huge and involves over 300,000 households and looks at services that households use the most, considering 400 companies in 46 different industries across 10 economic sectors.


----------



## ekim68

Boaty McBoatface makes significant climate change discovery on first mission



> The British research submarine Boaty McBoatface has made an impressive debut in the scientific arena, discovering a significant link between Antarctic winds and rising sea temperatures on its maiden outing.
> The unmanned submarine, whose moniker won a landslide victory in a public poll to name a $300 million British polar research ship, undertook its inaugural mission in April 2017.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T Lays Off Thousands After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks And Regulatory Favors



> Back in November of 2017 AT&T promised that if it received a tax break from the Trump administration, it would invest an additional $1 billion back into its network and employees. At the time, CEO Randall Stephenson proclaimed that "every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs." Not "entry-level jobs," AT&T promised, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year."
> 
> Yeah, about that.


----------



## ekim68

Engineers boost output of solar desalination system by 50%



> Rice University's solar-powered approach for purifying salt water with sunlight and nanoparticles is even more efficient than its creators first believed.
> 
> Researchers in Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) this week showed they could boost the efficiency of their solar-powered desalination system by more than 50% simply by adding inexpensive plastic lenses to concentrate sunlight into "hot spots." The results are available online in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_.


----------



## ekim68

House lawmakers demand end to warrantless collection of Americans' data



> Two House lawmakers are pushing an amendment that would effectively defund a massive data collection program run by the National Security Agency  unless the government promises to not intentionally collect data of Americans.
> 
> The bipartisan amendment - just 15 lines in length - would compel the government to not knowingly collect communications - like emails, messages and browsing data - on Americans without a warrant.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. Loses Over $1.5 Trillion in a Decade of Data Breaches



> A decade's collection of data breaches shows a bleak picture with billions of records exposed in this type of incidents and financial damages of more than $1.6 trillion.
> 
> Data collected from public sources reveal that since 2008 there were close to 9,700 breach events in the U.S., involving more than 10.7 billion records, with an average cost calculated in 2018 at $148 per record.


----------



## ekim68

New York to Enact One of the Most Aggressive Climate Bills in the U.S.



> New York could achieve a net-zero economy - the gold standard of environmental advocates, in which all energy is drawn from carbon-free sources - by 2050, if the state is able to live up to the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that lawmakers and Governor Andrew Cuomo are working on this week. The bill would require New York to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and by 2050, the state would have to cut emissions by at least 85 percent below 1990 levels. To offset the remainder, the state would enact measures to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, like mass tree-planting and the restoration of wetlands.


----------



## ekim68

USA gains ground in supercomputer world rankings



> The USA has gained ground in the world supercomputer rankings, with 116 supercomputers listed among the top 500 most powerful in the world. This is up from 109 in November 2018.
> 
> China continues to dominate the list in terms of the number of installed supercomputers, with 219 top-500 supercomputers, though this is down from 227.


----------



## ekim68

Betting Against Tesla Is Betting Against Yourself



> Despite what you may have seen or heard in the news, Tesla has already changed the way we view the auto industry. There are quite a few cases where Autopilot has saved lives, Sentry Mode has caught thieves or vandals, and let's not forget how Tesla owners continue to reduce our carbon impact.
> 
> And that isn't all. Tesla's energy division has done a lot for our world, too. In 2017 Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Tesla sent a team equipped with PowerPacks and solar panels to make sure the Children's Hospital had power.


----------



## ekim68

Behavioural advertising is out of control, warns UK watchdog



> The online behavioural advertising industry is illegally profiling internet users.
> 
> That's the damning assessment of the U.K.'s data protection regulator in an update report published today, in which it sets out major concerns about the programmatic advertising process known as real-time bidding (RTB), which makes up a large chunk of online advertising.


----------



## ekim68

People keep spotting Teslas with snoozing drivers on the freeway



> In the last week, two different people have captured video of Tesla vehicles traveling down a freeway with an apparently sleeping driver behind the wheel.
> 
> Both incidents happened in California. Last week, local television stations in Los Angeles aired footage from viewer Shawn Miladinovich of a Tesla vehicle driving on LA's 405 freeway. The driver "was just fully sleeping, eyes were shut, hands nowhere near the steering wheel," said Miladinovich, who was a passenger in a nearby car, in an interview with NBC Channel 4.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon patents 'surveillance as a service' tech for its delivery drones



> Amazon's delivery drones are not yet dropping off packages, but the company is already envisioning how else that might be used - including by offering "surveillance as a service." Amazon was recently granted a patent that outlines how its UAVs could keep an eye on customers' property between deliveries while supposedly maintaining their privacy.
> 
> The patent was originally filed in June 2015 and became public earlier this month. It describes how the company's drones could be hired to look out for open garage doors, broken windows, graffiti, or even a fire, before alerting the owner of the property.


----------



## ekim68

How Owning A Tesla Model 3 For 1 Year Has Changed My Life



> I've owned the Model 3 for exactly one year now. What I like most about the car is that it's 100% electric, burns no gas, and has zero emissions. There's so much to the car that I love, and I mean it when I say that the car has changed my life. I realize that's a big statement to make so I'd like to explain what I mean by that.
> 
> Here are five ways that the car has changed my life and why I love it so much:


----------



## ekim68

US air quality is slipping after years of improvement



> After decades of improvement, America's air may not be getting any cleaner.
> 
> Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it's troubling to see air quality progress stagnate.


----------



## ekim68

Robocalls Swamp Hospitals As The Trump FCC Pretends To Fix The Problem



> Despite endless government initiatives and countless promises from the telecom sector, our national robocall hell continues. Robocalls from telemarketers continue to be the subject the FCC receives the most complaints about (200,000 complaints annually, making up 60% of all FCC complaints), and recent data from the Robocall Index indicates that the problem is only getting worse.


----------



## ekim68

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc



> Verizon sent a big chunk of the internet down a black hole this morning - and caused outages at Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others - after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA.
> 
> For nearly three hours, web traffic that was supposed to go to some of the biggest names online was instead accidentally rerouted through a steel giant based in Pittsburgh.


----------



## ekim68

Facial Recognition Coming To Delta Gates At MSP



> Delta Air Lines announced it will give passengers who fly out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport the option to use facial recognition to board their flight instead of a standard boarding pass.
> 
> The facial scanners will be installed this week at 16 gates, with availability on all international flights through Delta beginning in July. The airline is working with Customs and Border Protection on the process.


----------



## ekim68

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs unveils its high-tech 'city-within-a-city' plan for Toronto



> Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's smart city subsidiary, released its massive plan Monday to transform a slice of Toronto's waterfront into a high-tech utopia. Eighteen months in the making and clocking in at 1,524 pages, the plan represents Alphabet's first, high-stakes effort to realize Alphabet CEO Larry Page's long-held dream of a city within a city to experiment with innovations like self-driving cars, public Wi-Fi, new health care delivery solutions, and other city planning advances that modern technology makes possible.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: In a world first, Facebook to give data on hate speech suspects to French courts



> In a world first, Facebook has agreed to hand over the identification data of French users suspected of hate speech on its platform to judges, France's minister for digital affairs Cedric O said on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Firefox Will Give You a Fake Browsing History to Fool Advertisers




> Security through obscurity





> is out, security through tomfoolery is in.
> 
> That's the basic philosophy sold by Track THIS, "a new kind of incognito" browsing project, which opens up 100 tabs crafted to fit a specific character-a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer. The idea is that your browsing history will be depersonalized and poisoned, so advertisers won't know how to target ads to you. It was developed as a collaboration between mschf (pronounced "mischief") internet studios and Mozilla's Firefox as a way of promoting Firefox Quantum, the newest Firefox browser.


----------



## ekim68

Rerun: Last TV plant in U.S. again faces tariff extinction



> NEW YORK (Reuters) - America's trade war with China is once again poised to switch off the nation's last television factory.
> 
> The United States had 150 television manufacturers in the 1950s, with factories and suppliers employing hundreds of thousands of workers across the country.
> 
> Those sets had hundreds of parts and were often sold in wooden cases the size of kitchen stoves. A modern flat screen, by contrast, has 70% of its value packed into the glass panel, and production is now almost entirely in Asia.
> 
> Today, there is only one U.S. assembly plant and it is more symbolic than substantive.


----------



## ekim68

Google Maps can now predict how crowded your bus or train will be




> Google





> Maps just got a lot more useful for commuters. The company today announced a pair of updates for its mapping application - one that will offer live traffic delays for buses in the cities where it didn't already provide real-time updates, and another that will tell you how crowded your bus, train, or subway car will be.


----------



## ekim68

House votes to block Ajit Pai's plan to kill San Francisco broadband law



> The US House of Representatives has voted to block Ajit Pai's attempt to kill a San Francisco ordinance designed to promote broadband competition in apartment buildings.


----------



## ekim68

The Rise of Junk Science



> In early 2017, Eduardo Franco, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University, sent an email to his colleagues, warning them of a global "epidemic" of scams by academic journals that was corrupting research and, in effect, endangering the public. As head of the oncology department, where he oversees approximately 230 people, Franco promised to comb through every CV and annual evaluation in the department to flag any colleagues' resumés that listed journals and conferences that weren't reputable or, in some cases, even real. He didn't spell out the consequences, but the implication was clear: the faculty members would be held accountable.


----------



## ekim68

Google announces new subsea cable 'Equiano', connecting Africa and Europe



> (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google on Friday announced a new subsea cable dubbed "Equiano" that will connect Africa with Europe, as it boosts its cloud computing infrastructure.
> 
> Equiano, fully funded by Google, is the company's third private international cable.
> 
> The search engine giant, which has invested $47 billion in improving its global technology infrastructure over the last three years, said Equiano is the company's 14th subsea cable investment globally.


----------



## ekim68

CEOs made 287 times more money last year than their workers did



> After years of kicking and screaming, corporate executives have finally released pay data on what their CEO makes versus their median worker.
> 
> Unsurprisingly, the gap is obscene. The average chief executive of an S&P 500 company earned 287 times more than their median employee last year, according to an analysis of the new federal data released Tuesday by the AFL-CIO labor federation. America's CEOs earned a staggering $14.5 million in 2018, on average, compared to the average $39,888 that rank-and-file workers made. And CEOs got a $500,000 bump compared to the previous year, while the average US worker barely got more than $1,000.


----------



## ekim68

Manipulating gut microbes in livestock could cut their methane emissions



> Fossil fuels cop the brunt of attention for reducing climate-changing emissions, but they're far from the only culprit - livestock like sheep and cows are responsible for huge amounts of methane being released into the atmosphere. Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed the gut microbes of different sheep and found clues that may help us curb the problem.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX reports milestone for Starlink satellite links



> In the wake of last month's launch of 60 Starlink broadband data satellites, SpaceX says all but three of them are in communication with the company's network of ground stations, including the satellite operation's home base in Redmond, Wash.
> 
> In an emailed update, SpaceX said Starlink is ready to go into a testing phase that involves streaming videos and playing video games via satellite.
> 
> Forty-five of the satellites have used their onboard krypton ion thrusters to reach their intended 550-kilometer (342-mile) altitude. Five satellites are in the process of raising their altitude from the 440-kilometer-high (273-mile-high) orbits into which they were launched, and five more are undergoing checkouts in preparation for raising their orbits, SpaceX said.


----------



## ekim68

Met Museum celebrates Apollo 11 anniversary with moon exhibit



> July 1 (UPI) -- New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday debuted a new exhibiting celebrating all things moon to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
> 
> The exhibit, _Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography_, explores ways in which the groundbreaking lunar landing influenced art. The show includes photographs, drawings, paintings and films, as well as astronomical artifacts and instruments.


----------



## ekim68

40 years ago, the Sony Walkman changed how we listen to music



> The world changed on July 1st, 1979: the day that Sony released the iconic Walkman TPS-L2, the first real portable music player that would revolutionize the way we listened to music in a way that no other device really had ever done before. Boomboxes and portable radios had been around for a while, but the Walkman made portable music _private_, ushering in a whole new era of people listening to music away from home.


----------



## ekim68

Florida city fires IT employee after paying ransom demand last week



> Officials from Lake City, Florida, have fired an IT employee last week after the city was forced to approve a gigantic ransomware payment of nearly $500,000 last Monday.
> 
> The employee, whose name was not released, was fired on Friday, according to local media reports [1, 2], who cited the Lake City mayor.
> 
> The city's IT manager is also planning to revamp the town's entire IT department to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future.


----------



## ekim68

Algorithms Help Turbines Share the Wind



> "Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." So declares Spock, Star Trek's Vulcan hero, as he sacrifices himself to save the Starship Enterprise and its crew in the 1982 film Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Today Stanford University researchers presented the clearest proof to date that self-sacrifice can also benefit wind farms. In their demonstration at an Alberta wind farm, one turbine sacrifices a fifth of its generating potential to enable better performance by neighboring turbines, boosting the group's collective output.
> 
> And while Spock's heroics necessitated a major plot twist to revive his character for the next Star Trek sequel, teaching turbines to behave altruistically requires just a small (but intelligent) tweak to their control systems. What they learn is how to share the wind.


----------



## ekim68

Over One-Tenth of Global Population Could Lack Drinking Water by 2030



> As civilization faces existential threats, Trump is trying to end long-term climate studies. Meanwhile, the global water crisis spurred by climate disruption continues to unfold dramatically.


----------



## ekim68

In an astonishing turn, George Soros and Charles Koch team up to end US 'forever war' policy



> BESIDES BEING BILLIONAIRES and spending much of their fortunes to promote pet causes, the leftist financier George Soros and the right-wing Koch brothers have little in common. They could be seen as polar opposites. Soros is an old-fashioned New Deal liberal. The Koch brothers are fire-breathing right-wingers who dream of cutting taxes and dismantling government. Now they have found something to agree on: the United States must end its "forever war" and adopt an entirely new foreign policy.


----------



## ekim68

Old Money vs New Money...


US retail group offers to help antitrust investigators in going after Amazon and Google



> A leading U.S. retail group, whose members include Walmart,  Target, Best Buy and others, has penned a letter to the Federal Trade Commission that details its concerns over big tech companies' dominance. The letter specifically calls out Amazon and Google for their control over the majority of internet product searches, how price and product information reaches consumers and other concerns.


----------



## ekim68

Google Earth Ported to Browsers with WebAssembly



> The Google Earth team recently released a beta preview of a WebAssembly port of Google Earth. The new port runs in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, including Edge (Canary version) and Opera, as well as Firefox. The port thus brings cross-browser support to the existing Earth For Web version, which uses the native C++ codebase and Chrome's Native Client (NaCl) technology. Difference in multi-threading support between browsers leads to varying performance.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo self-driving cars get green light to carry passengers in California



> Waymo's self-driving cars have been awarded a permit to carry passengers in California.
> 
> The state's Public Utilities Commission on Tuesday gave permission for the unit of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +0.93% GOOG, +0.93% to take part in California's Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot program, though it may not charge riders and an operator must be behind the wheel.
> 
> Waymo is the fourth autonomous-vehicle company to participate in the program, along with Zoox Inc., Autox Technologies Inc. and Pony.ai Inc. The permit is good for three years, and is separate from one allowing companies to test self-driving cars in the state - about 60 companies have won Department of Motor Vehicles approval for that.


----------



## ekim68

Sinclair Faces Expanded Probe For Shady Behavior During Tribune Merger



> Back when Sinclair was trying to acquire Tribune Broadcasting, you might recall the company was accused of some highly unethical behavior in order to get the deal done. Despite the FCC doing its best to neuter most media consolidation protections to help move the deal forward, the union would have still resulted in the merged company violating media ownership limits and dominating local broadcasting in a huge number of new markets.
> 
> To get around those limits, Sinclair allegedly got, uh, creative. Consumer groups accused Sinclair of trying to offload several of its companies to Sinclair-owned shell companies to pretend the deal would remain under the government's ownership cap. The company also tried something similar in trying to offload some stations to friends and other partner companies at highly discounted rates, allowing it to technically not "own" -- but still control -- those stations.


----------



## ekim68

Hybrid cruise ship powers through the water on battery-power in world first



> Traditional cruise ships pose all kinds of air quality problems for the cities that they frequent, especially in hotspots like Barcelona and Venice where locals regularly protest against the toxic particles they pump out at berth and when passing by. But Norwegian operator Hurtigruten is eyeing a greener future for its fleet, and recently achieved a maritime first by powering its hybrid MS Roald Amundsen ship through the water on battery power alone.


----------



## ekim68

Happy Fourth of July! 5 reasons millions of Americans have no reason to celebrate



> The economy is doing great, according to most estimates.
> 
> Initial jobless claims, a rough way to measure layoffs, fell by 8,000 to 221,000 in the week ending June 29, the Labor Department said Wednesday. However, the more stable monthly average of new claims rose by just 500 to 222,250. Still, that was not enough to put a dent in the strong labor market or break the record for the longest expansion on record. Mortgage rates have hit their lowest level this year.
> 
> But not everyone is A-OK. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell to 121.5 in June from 131.3 in May, the lowest level since September 2017. "Many adults are financially vulnerable," according to a recent report from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. "In addition, volatile income and low savings can turn common experiences - such as waiting a few days for a bank deposit to be available - into a problem for some." As a result, people supplement income through gig work and seek financial support from family members.


----------



## ekim68

Wealthy Hampton Homeowners Are Trying to Suppress Tribal Sovereignty



> Wealthy, white homeowners are outraged that the Shinnecock Nation has decided to erect two blazing 60-foot electronic billboards on their tiny patch of sovereign lands at the gateway to the Hamptons, a tony retreat for the rich and famous. Members anticipate that advertising income from the billboards will generate income for the Nation that will help pay for health and dental clinics as well as a community daycare facility.


----------



## ekim68

Top VPNs secretly owned by Chinese firms



> Almost a third (30%) of the world's top virtual private network (VPN) providers are secretly owned by six Chinese companies, according to a study by privacy and security research firm VPNpro.
> 
> The study shows that the top 97 VPNs are run by just 23 parent companies, many of which are based in countries with lax privacy laws.
> 
> Six of these companies are based in China and collectively offer 29 VPN services, but in many cases, information on the parent company is hidden to consumers.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613922/london-polices-face-recognition-system-gets-it-wrong-81-of-the-time/']London police's face recognition system gets it wrong 81% of the time[/URL]

*



The news:

Click to expand...

*


> London's police force has conducted 10 trials of face recognition since 2016, using Japanese company NEC's Neoface technology. It commissioned academics from the University of Essex to independently assess the scheme, and they concluded that the system is 81% inaccurate (in other words, the vast majority of people it flags for the police are not on a wanted list). They found that of 42 matches, only eight were confirmed to be correct, Sky News reports.


----------



## ekim68

Jaguar Land Rover to build electric cars at UK plant



> LONDON (Reuters) - Jaguar Land Rover (TAMO.NS) is making a multi-million pound investment to build electric vehicles in Britain, in a major boost for the UK government and a sector hit by the slump in diesel sales and Brexit uncertainty.
> 
> Britain's biggest car company, which built 30 percent of the UK's 1.5 million cars last year, will make a range of electrified vehicles at its Castle Bromwich plant in central England, beginning with its luxury sedan, the XJ.
> 
> "The future of mobility is electric and, as a visionary British company, we are committed to making our next generation of zero-emission vehicles in the UK," Chief Executive Ralf Speth said on Friday.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 Breaks World EV Distance Record - 2,781 km (1,728 miles) Travelled In 24 Hours



> The distance travelled exceeded the previous record (2,644 km, also set by a Tesla Model 3) by some 5%. The new record, livestreamed on Youtube, took place on a circular route along the A20 autobahn in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region of northern Germany. The route was chosen partly due to the high driving speeds allowed on the autobahn, and partly due to proximity to a high power Ionity CCS charger (at Demminer Land), capable of refilling the Tesla Model 3 relatively quickly.


----------



## ekim68

DNA Data Storage Is Closer Than You Think



> An alternative to hard drives is progressing: DNA-based data storage. DNA-which consists of long chains of the nucleotides A, T, C and G-is life's information-storage material. Data can be stored in the sequence of these letters, turning DNA into a new form of information technology. It is already routinely sequenced (read), synthesized (written to) and accurately copied with ease. DNA is also incredibly stable, as has been demonstrated by the complete genome sequencing of a fossil horse that lived more than 500,000 years ago. And storing it does not require much energy.


----------



## ekim68

Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis



> Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.


----------



## ekim68

Abu Dhabi throws the switch on world's largest single-site solar project



> Abu Dhabi is claiming the title of the world's largest single-site solar project, having hit the go-button on the Noor Abu Dhabi project this week, with a reported capacity of 1.177 gigawatts, eclipsing Dubai's Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park - for now at least. The United Arab Emirates doesn't have a great record when it comes to per-capita carbon footprint, but projects like this show that it's serious about addressing the issue head-on.
> 
> Rivalry between nation states can often be a driver of progress, and this is particularly evident when observing Abu Dhabi and Dubai's efforts to trump each other in the field of solar power. By kicking the world's largest single-site solar project into full commercial operation this week, Abu Dhabi looks to have scored a decisive goal against its neighbor.


----------



## ekim68

Carbon dioxide could be converted into graphene



> Carbon dioxide is kind of painted as the villain of the 21st century, and it's not enough to just reduce our emissions now - we need to remove some of what's already in the atmosphere. Now, researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a simple way to turn the troublesome gas into a useful resource by converting it into the "wonder" material graphene.
> 
> For all its use as a superconducting, flexible and strong material, graphene is deceptively basic - essentially, it's just a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms. Early on, it was made by peeling layers off of graphite with sticky tape, but in recent years scientists have managed to make it in a range of different ways, like laser-etching it from wood or even food, or chemically reducing it from soy beans or eucalyptus leaves.


----------



## ekim68

Mozilla blocks UAE bid to become an internet security guardian after hacking reports



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Firefox browser maker Mozilla is blocking the United Arab Emirates' government from serving as one of its internet security gatekeepers, citing Reuters reports on a UAE cyber espionage program.


----------



## ekim68

Brazil to add digital data protection to fundamental rights



> A proposal has been approved to put protection of personal information in digital platforms in the individual guarantees secured by the constitution.


----------



## ekim68

Cybersecurity incidents cost businesses $45B last year



> Ransomware, cryptojacking, and business email compromise attacks all ramped up the financial losses due to cyber breaches, according to the Online Trust Alliance.


----------



## ekim68

The comeback state of 2019: Kansas economy rebounds from tax-cutting disaster



> Residents of one midwestern state can be forgiven if they have a feeling they are not in Kansas anymore. The Sunflower State finishes a respectable No. 19 overall in this year's CNBC America's Top States for Business rankings. That is a 16-place jump from 2018, making Kansas this year's most improved state.
> 
> One year ago Kansas was still nursing a hangover from a disastrous tax-cutting experiment by former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, who slashed individual income-tax rates and eliminated taxes on "pass-through" income from certain businesses.


----------



## ekim68

Jet lands in Florida, claiming new aviation records for circling the globe



> ORLANDO, Fla., July 11 (UPI) -- A team of aviators including retired astronaut Terry Virts landed at Kennedy Space Center Thursday morning, claiming to have set three global flying records for circling the Earth over the North and South poles.
> 
> The mission, called One More Orbit, touched down in Florida at 8:12 a.m. EDT, hours ahead of its tentative schedule. Its recorded flight time was 46 hours, 39 minutes, 38 seconds. The average speed was clocked at 534 mph.
> 
> That would break the official record for average speed of 511 mph set in 2008, and for total minimum time of just over 54 hours. According to One More Orbit, a third record was set because two women on board, film director Jannicke Mikkelsen and flight attendant Magdalena Starowicz, are apparently the first women to complete a polar circumnavigation of the world.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making 'Friends' Exclusive



> Last year AT&T defeated the DOJ's challenge to the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner thanks to a comically narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. At no point in his original 172-page ruling (which approved the deal without a single condition) did Leon show the faintest understanding that AT&T intends to use vertical integration synergistically with the death of net neutrality and neutered FCC oversight to dominate smaller competitors and tilt the entire internet ecosystem in its favor.


----------



## ekim68

US mayors group adopts resolution not to pay any more ransoms to hackers



> The US Conference of Mayors unanimously adopted yesterday a resolution not to pay any more ransom demands to hackers following ransomware infections.
> 
> "Paying ransomware attackers encourages continued attacks on other government systems, as perpetrators financially benefit," the adopted resolution reads.
> 
> "The United States Conference of Mayors has a vested interest in de-incentivizing these attacks to prevent further harm," it said.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen and Ford team up on self-driving and electric cars



> Volkswagen and Ford have said they will work together on developing self-driving and electric cars in an attempt to reduce costs on new technologies.
> 
> VW plans to invest $2.6bn (£2.1bn) in Ford's self-driving unit, which is valued at $7bn.
> 
> The move comes after the duo said in March they would build vans together.


----------



## ekim68

Revealed: This Is Palantir's Top-Secret User Manual for Cops



> Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It's been described by scholars as a "secondary surveillance network," since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren't suspected of a crime.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous shuttle bus begins Australian trial



> EasyMile's EZ10 self-driving shuttle buses have already been trialled in Singapore, California, Switzerland, and Finland. Now, one has also entered use in what is being called regional Australia's first automated vehicle trial.
> 
> The EZ10 is being utilized in the government of New South Wales' BusBot program, which is taking place in that state's city of Coffs Harbour. That program began with the vehicle taking passengers along a stretch of road at the Coffs Harbour Marina. As of April 8th, the second phase of the trial began, in which the shuttle is being used to ferry passengers around the Marian Grove Retirement Village.


----------



## ekim68

15 States Have Already Taken Steps to Make the Electoral College Obsolete



> Last week, presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders touted his support for abolishing the Electoral College, telling a town hall hosted by the League of United Latin American Citizens that, "It is hard to defend a system in which we have a president who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes."


----------



## ekim68

New technique uses satellite photos to spot worrisome shifts in a bridge's structure - as tiny as the thickness of a dime.



> Scientists have come up with what they say is a way to spot bridges at risk of collapsing that other methods might miss - and none too soon. In the United States alone, more than 200,000 bridges are 50 years or older and 56,000-plus have been deemed structurally deficient - not necessarily unsafe at this point, but all competing for costly and time-consuming repairs.
> 
> The new technique uses computer modeling and high-resolution satellite images to detect subtle shifts in a bridge's structure that could indicate that it's starting to fail. Some of the changes are so tiny that they could be undetectable during traditional visual inspections, the scientists say.


----------



## ekim68

Scotland just produced enough wind energy to power all its homes twice over



> Wind turbines in Scotland generated 9,831,320 megawatt hours between January and June 2019, WWF Scotland said Monday. *
> *
> The numbers, which were supplied by WeatherEnergy, mean that Scottish wind generated enough electricity to power the equivalent of 4.47 million homes for six months. That is almost double the number of homes in Scotland, according to WWF Scotland.


----------



## ekim68

Ajit Pai's new gift to cable companies would kill local fees and rules



> Ajit Pai is continuing his multi-year battle against local broadband regulation with a plan that would stop cities and towns from using their authority over cable TV networks to regulate Internet access.
> 
> Chairman Pai's proposal, scheduled for a vote at the Federal Communications Commission's August 1 meeting, would also limit the fees that municipalities can charge cable companies. Cable industry lobbyists have urged the FCC to stop cities and towns from assessing fees on the revenue cable companies make from broadband.


----------



## ekim68

US mobile speeds are super slow. Here's what we can do about it.



> It's no secret that US internet connectivity speeds pale in comparison to those in much of the developed world. But a new report shows that we're falling even further behind - and the advent of new, faster wireless technology that would need to build off of existing, suboptimal infrastructure could further hinder US technological dominance and amplify the country's digital divide.
> 
> Currently, the US ranks 40th in the world for mean mobile download speeds - up a mere three spots from last year, according to a new report from internet speed measurement company Ookla. More dismally, the country ranked 94th in mean mobile upload speeds, falling 21 spots from 2018.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2019/07/17/california-electric-school-buses/']California replacing 200 polluting diesel school buses with all-electric buses[/URL]



> The California Energy Commission has awarded nearly $70 million to state schools to replace more than 200 diesel school buses with new, all-electric school buses.
> 
> The commission approved the funding this week. A total of $89.8 million has now been earmarked for new electric buses at schools in 26 California counties, as the commission's School Bus Replacement Program works toward this goal.


----------



## ekim68

'Just a matter of when': the $20bn plan to power Singapore with Australian solar



> The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep in the Northern Territory, is not the most obvious place to build and transmit Singapore's future electricity supply. Though few in the southern states are yet to take notice, a group of Australian developers are betting that will change.
> 
> If they are right, it could have far-reaching consequences for Australia's energy industry and what the country sells to the world.
> 
> Known as Sun Cable, it is promised to be the world's largest solar farm. If developed as planned, a 10-gigawatt-capacity array of panels will be spread across 15,000 hectares and be backed by battery storage to ensure it can supply power around the clock.


----------



## ekim68

Berkeley becomes first U.S. city to ban natural gas in new homes



> Berkeley has become the first city in the nation to ban the installation of natural gas lines in new homes.
> 
> The City Council on Tuesday night unanimously voted to ban gas from new low-rise residential buildings starting Jan. 1.
> 
> It's not the first time Berkeley has passed pioneering health or environmental legislation. In 1977, Berkeley was the first in the country to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. In January the city banned single-use disposables, requiring restaurants to use to-go foodware that is compostable.


----------



## ekim68

343 NYC firefighters died on 9/11. Since then, 200 have died from Ground Zero-related illnesses



> The 200th New York City firefighter has died from ailments stemming from working at the toxic World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, according to city officials.
> 
> Richard Driscoll, 73, died one day after the death of fellow firefighter Kevin Nolan.
> 
> Driscoll, who was cited for bravery five times during his firefighting career, rushed to Ground Zero and "worked tirelessly in the rescue and recovery efforts that followed," the Fire Department of New York said.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla opens solar-topped V3 Supercharger station on the Vegas strip



> Tesla has cut the ribbon on a new charging station made to showcase what its full suite of sustainable technologies can achieve when they work together. Located onsite at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, the facility features the company's latest charging technology, promising to get cars back onto the streets of Sin City dramatically quicker.





> With solar panels overhead and Tesla Powerpacks onsite to store their energy, Tesla is hoping to lean less on the grid and much more on renewables. The station features 24 Superchargers in all, which can add 180 miles (290 km) of range to its Model 3 Long Range in 15 minutes. All up, Tesla says the site has capacity to charge 1,500 cars a day.


----------



## ekim68

Chrome 76 prevents NYT and other news sites from detecting Incognito Mode




> In Chrome 76, websites can no longer check FileSystem API to detect private mode.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines



> ASPEN, Colo. - Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle.
> 
> The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists: Let's just spray trillions of tons of snow on Antarctica?



> Human-made snow isn't just good for allowing mediocre skiing conditions to continue well into May. It could save coastal cities around the world, like Hong Kong and New York City, from sea level rise, a new study found.
> 
> In Western Antarctica, ice is breaking off into the sea faster than it's naturally replenished by snowfall due to warming ocean currents. The proposal: build tens of thousands of wind turbines in the volatile Antarctic region, which would be used to power machines to desalinate and heat ocean water. They'd make and spray trillions of tons of snow onto the West Antarctic ice sheet, destroying a unique marine ecosystem in the process, but preventing the loss of the ice sheet, which is essential to preventing sea level rise. The researchers found that spraying snow "at a rate of several hundred billion tons per year over a few decades" over an area roughly the size of Scotland would indeed stabilize the area and prevent future ice loss.
> 
> Does this sound practical? Not at all. And that's kind of the point.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://lifehacker.com/uninstall-these-eight-browser-extensions-that-stole-dat-1836539093']Uninstall These Eight Browser Extensions That Stole Data from Millions[/URL]



> A massive data leak was recently discovered by cybersecurity researcher Sam Jidali, revealing private information for 45 major companies and millions of individuals. Dubbed "DataSpii" by Jidali and his team, the leak was perpetrated by innocent-looking Chrome and Firefox browser extensions that collected and distributed users' browsing data-URLs that revealed private information about users and a long list of companies, including Apple, Walmart, Amazon, 23AndMe, SpaceX, Skype, and many more.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperloop hits record speeds at SpaceX's 2019 Pod competition



> Now in its fourth instalment, SpaceX's Hyperloop Pod competition continues to bring out the very best in student engineering teams from all around the world, with the 2019 edition again pushing the boundaries of the experimental transport technology. The reigning champions from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) returned to fend off their challengers, setting a new speed record in the process.





> Forty-two teams took part in this year's contest, with the team from TUM again outstripping them all. Going by the name of WARR Hyperloop last year, the team set a record at the 2018 event when pushing its pod to an official top speed of 284 mph (457 km/h). It has bested that this time around by reaching a top speed of 288 mph (463 km/h).


----------



## ekim68

Cool stuff.. 

Glorious shapes, patterns and textures in the 2019 Minimalist Photography Awards


----------



## ekim68

Hackers Stole 7.5TB Of Secret Data From Russia's Intelligence Agency



> It appears that the hackers got hacked this time! According to BBC Russia, hackers have managed to steal data from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
> 
> The attackers managed to steal about 7.5 terabytes of data from a major FSB contractor, thus exposing the secret projects the agency was working on to de-anonymize Tor browsing, scrape data from social media, and cut off Russia's internet from the rest of the world.


----------



## ekim68

During deadly heat wave, New York utility cut power to high-risk neighborhoods



> Almost half Americans spent the weekend trying to beat record-breaking temperatures. But for a large swath of New Yorkers, staying home and turning on the air conditioning was not an option, as utility company Con Edison cut cooling power for several hours in several of the heat-strangled city's most diverse and low-income neighborhoods.


----------



## ekim68

Facial recognition may be banned from public housing thanks to proposed law



> Facial recognition doesn't belong in the home, lawmakers will propose in landmark legislation in Congress this week. As landlords across the country continue to install smart home technology and tenants worry about unchecked surveillance, there's been growing concern about facial recognition arriving at people's doorsteps.
> 
> Reps. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York; Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat from Massachusetts; and Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, are expected to introduce the No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act this week.
> 
> The proposed bill would prohibit all public housing units that receive funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from using technology like facial recognition, according to a person familiar with the legislation.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/guy-who-built-twitters-retweet-button-admits-maybe-that-1836649613']Guy Who Built Twitter's Retweet Button Admits Maybe That Was a Really Bad Idea[/URL]



> The man behind Twitter's "Retweet" button-which is pretty much the foundation of the whole site-now thinks he screwed up big time, telling BuzzFeed News in an interview that he recalled thinking, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon."


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://twocents.lifehacker.com/how-to-find-out-if-equifax-owes-you-money-1836662442']How to Find Out If Equifax Owes You Money[/URL]



> If you were affected by Equifax's massive data breach in 2017, you can finally request compensation. The Federal Trade Commission has announced a settlement with the credit bureau that includes $425 million for the 147 million people who had their data compromised.


----------



## ekim68

The Large Hadron Collider will soon help heat nearby homes



> Particle accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have made some groundbreaking discoveries for physics, like measuring the spectrum of antimatter or discovering the Higgs boson - but it's hard to tell how exactly that benefits the average Joe/Jill. Now CERN has announced that the LHC will soon be more directly beneficial to local communities, by diverting some of the waste heat from the collider to help heat thousands of nearby homes.
> 
> The Large Hadron Collider is the largest machine in the world and needs to operate at temperatures colder than outer space. Needless to say, it produces a huge amount of waste heat. Normally vented away, this excess energy could be an untapped gold mine.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://kotaku.com/the-video-game-industry-cant-go-on-like-this-1836606033']The Video Game Industry Can't Go On Like This[/URL]



> At about this time next year, we'll have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of video games will look like. New consoles will likely be shown off, bold new streaming initiatives will begin to launch, and we'll see all the wonderful kinds of games they will bring us. All these new things will come, and we'll close the book on a generation that saw the industry that makes games come under greater scrutiny than ever before, as studios shuttered, developers burned out, and toxic work culture fostered environments hostile to marginalized people.
> 
> These are not problems that have been resolved, but the wheels of the games industry keep turning, in spite of the strain. So how much bigger can video games get? Video games are only getting more costly, in more ways than one. And it doesn't seem like they're sustainable.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T loses nearly 1 million TV customers after raising DirecTV prices



> AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019, a loss that the company attributed to price increases, competition, and other factors.


----------



## ekim68

The Death Industry Is Getting Away With Murder




> How funeral providers are ripping off grieving American families.


----------



## ekim68

No More Ransom project has prevented ransomware profits of at least $108 million



> On the three-year anniversary of the No More Ransom project, Europol announced today that users who downloaded and decrypted files using free tools made available through the No More Ransom portal have prevented ransomware gangs from making profits estimated at at least $108 million.


----------



## ekim68

Mammoth 3 year electric road trip ends in New Zealand



> Back in January we told you about the exploits of Dutchman Wiebe Wakker, who set out in March, 2016, on an electric car journey from the Netherlands to Australia. The actual route was determined by folks offering charge stops along the way, and now the journey has come to an end - with another country thrown in for good measure.
> 
> The original project plan was to finish the epic EV adventure in Sydney, Australia, and Wakker achieved that back in April (with 50 electric cars joining him for the last stretch). Over three years on the road, 33 countries visited, over 1,700 offers of help along the way and 95,460 kilometers traveled.


----------



## ekim68

Robot cage fights and flying taxis: leaked documents reveal Saudi Arabia's plans for its next megacity



> The riches of Silicon Valley have enabled some extravagant and quixotic projects, but they've got nothing on what oil money can do.
> 
> A new report from _The Wall Street Journal_ shares some of the proposals for Saudi Arabia's biggest megaproject yet: a city built in the desert named Neom, where robots will outnumber humans and hologram teachers will educate genetically-enhanced students.


----------



## ekim68

The YouTubers Union Is Not Messing Around




> The YouTubers Union has joined forces with Europe's largest trade union to fight for a fairer platform.


----------



## ekim68

The burger battle: The lawsuits challenging restrictions on plant-based meat labels



> For the last few years a cold war has been brewing in the world of food-labeling. Sensing the oncoming market disruption from alternative and plant-based meat substitutes, traditional meat-producing industries have been lobbying to pass laws regulating what can, or cannot, be called meat. The mission has so far been reasonably successful, with a number of US states passing laws limiting certain terminology to highly specific sources.


----------



## ekim68

Sony is crowdfunding a wearable air conditioner for personal climate control



> For those times when the outdoors is too hot or too cold, the easiest way to find respite is to dash inside. But what if that's not an option? Sony thinks it has the answer with the Reon Pocket air conditioner, which it's crowdfunding through its own First Flight acceleration program.
> 
> The Reon Pocket can't work magic and keep you in a perfectly chilled or heated bubble all day, but it might make a noticeable difference on the hottest and coldest days. Designed to fit inside the back of a specially designed t-shirt, it can lower your personal temperature by 13° C (23° F), or raise it by a little over 8° C (14° F).
> 
> It does this through what's known as the Peltier effect, where an electric current can be used to heat or cool something when combined with specific materials.


----------



## ekim68

BAE's autonomous patrol boat packs 12.7-mm heat and offers 10-day mission range



> Targeted at anti-piracy, border control, intelligence gathering and maritime security missions, the Pacific 950 is an autonomous boat that can operate alone for up to 10 days, or cover 300 nautical miles (556 km) at pursuit speed. Its built-in stabilized 12.7-mm weapons system, however, is human-operated.
> 
> The British Royal Navy has been experimenting for the last few years with integrating more and more autonomous vehicles into its fleets and mission planning, both as solo operators and as part of co-ordinated missions. We first saw the Pacific 950 unmanned rigid inflatable boat (RIB) as part of the Unmanned Warrior 2016 exercises off the coast of Scotland.


----------



## ekim68

5 Programming Languages That Are Probably Doomed



> Not all programming languages endure forever. In fact, even the most popular ones inevitably crumble away, as new generations of developers embrace other languages and frameworks they find easier to work with.
> 
> In order to determine which programming languages are likely doomed in the medium- to long-term, we looked at the popularity rankings by TIOBE and RedMonk, as well as Dice's own database of job postings.


----------



## ekim68

It's clean, powerful and available: Are you ready for hydrogen energy?



> As the world responds to climate change, energy systems are evolving, and fast. The past 10 years have seen the rise (and dramatic cost reduction) of renewables such as wind and solar, to the extent that they are no longer considered 'alternative' energy.





> The Hydrogen Council, a global initiative of energy, transport and industry companies, envisages that by 2050 hydrogen may power more than 400 million passenger cars worldwide and up to 20 million trucks and 5 million buses. It expects hydrogen technologies to provide 18% of the world's total energy needs by that time, with the annual sales generated from the hydrogen fuel cell market reaching $2.5 trillion and creating 30 million jobs globally. The broader "hydrogen economy" could be much larger.


----------



## ekim68

Discovery of liver cell with stem cell-like properties could eliminate need for organ transplants



> An exciting new study, led by scientists from King's College London, has discovered a new type of cell in the liver. The research describes the cell as having "stem cell-like properties," with the potential to regenerate damaged liver cells and treat disease in the organ without the need for a transplant.


----------



## ekim68

Gigantic, mysterious radiation leak traced to facility in Russia



> The source of a gigantic, mysterious leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy.
> 
> The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe.


----------



## ekim68

Rural Hospitals Are Shutting Down in States That Didn't Expand Medicaid



> Hospitals in rural areas are losing money and sometimes closing down, taking away jobs and limiting health care options for some of the nation's poorest citizens, according to a study published earlier this week by the Pittsburg_ Morning Sun_ and _GateHouse Media_. And the decision to reject a key part of Obamacare by Republican politicians in red states is exacerbating the problem.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90384625/india-is-set-to-become-home-to-the-worlds-first-hyperloop-system']India is set to become home to the world's first hyperloop system[/URL]



> Officially pulling the hyperloop out of science-fiction territory and into the real world, the government of Maharashtra in west India has officially declared that it will pursue construction of the high-speed transit technology between Mumbai and Pune.
> 
> Virgin Hyperloop One and the shipping company DP World are teaming up to bring the project to life in India.


----------



## ekim68

Impossible Foods gets FDA approval to sell fake meat in grocery stores



> Fake meat is coming to a barbecue near you. Impossible Foods has been granted approval by the FDA to sell its plant-based meat in US grocery stores this fall, reported _Bloomberg_. After expressing some initial doubts, the agency formally ruled that soy leghemoglobin -- the additive in Impossible Burgers that gives it a meat-like flavor and makes it "bleed" -- is safe for consumers to eat. If no objections are raised, the FDA rule change becomes effective on September 4th.


[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

Comcast's "unlimited" mobile plan now costs $20 extra for HD video



> Comcast's mobile division is now charging $20 a month extra to watch HD video on unlimited data plans.


----------



## ekim68

California Wildfire




> Decades of greed, neglect, corruption, and bad politics led to last year's Paradise fire, the worst in California history. It should never have happened. It will happen again.


----------



## ekim68

What Is 'Hot Lightning'? Satellites Reveal Which Strikes Are Most Likely to Start Wildfires



> In the time it takes to read this sentence, lightning will strike somewhere in the world. In fact, lightning strikes are thought to occur between 50 and 100 times every second. Most of the time, lightning just puts on a pretty show. But sometimes, it kills people. And then there are the times when it ignites wildfires or damages electrical equipment.
> 
> With new tools, researchers can now distinguish the most damaging lightning strikes from the many millions of others that occur every year. All lightning is dangerous-but if we can tell which strikes are more likely to actually inflict harm, that information might help us react more quickly during a storm.


----------



## ekim68

Google pledges carbon-neutral shipping, recycled plastic for all devices



> SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google on Monday announced that it would neutralize carbon emissions from delivering consumer hardware by next year and include recycled plastic in each of its products by 2022.
> 
> The new commitments step up the competition among tech companies aiming to show consumers and governments that they are curbing the environmental toll from their widening arrays of gadgets.


----------



## ekim68

Even fixing Wisconsin's Foxconn deal won't fix it, says state-requested report



> In 2017, Wisconsin offered Foxconn a record-breaking subsidy to build an LCD factory in the state, only to see the promised factory fall behind schedule and grow progressively smaller. Now, the Wisconsin Department of Administration has requested a reassessment of the costs and benefits to the state regarding the far-tinier facility.
> 
> The report, which was conducted by Tim Bartik of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, finds that the smaller facility raises the already unusually high cost per job even further. If the subsidy levels in the current contract are kept, each Foxconn job would cost taxpayers about $290,000, Bartik found, compared to $172,000 if Foxconn built the original $10 billion, 13,000-job facility.


----------



## ekim68

Electric Car Models Set To Triple In Europe By 2021



> The number of electric vehicles available to customers across Europe is expected to triple by 2021. That's according to research from the European Federation for Transport and Environment who have forecast that 98 fully electric and plug-in hybrid models will be available at the end of this year, a number that is expected to grow to 214 models by 2021.
> 
> One of the driving forces behind the trend is going to be affordability with cheaper electric models expected to result in increasing numbers of consumers making the switch from petrol and diesel. In 2021, the Volkswagen Group is expected to have the most models on offer, 41, followed by Daimler (23) and BMW (21).[/url]


----------



## ekim68

Auto supplier Continental shifts gears - and its capital - to an electric future



> Continental AG, a global auto-parts supplier, will no longer invest in parts used in internal combustion engines, the latest sign that the automotive industry is being forced to respond to increasingly strict emissions laws.
> 
> Instead, the company said it will put more focus and capital on the electric powertrain, which it believes is the "future of mobility."


----------



## ekim68

Why We Hate Taxes, and Why Some People Want Us To



> Tax season may be behind us, but with the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, the word "tax" looks set to remain central to U.S. political debates in the weeks and months ahead. And for most Americans, there are few words they dread more; nothing unites Americans like their collective dislike of taxation. The funny thing is, this hatred of taxes is particularly acute in the United States-other countries have taxes too, but it seems as though non-Americans don't dislike paying them quite as much. What is it about America that drives this aversion to taxes?
> 
> We can find some answers in the behavioral science of taxation.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials




> The top voting machine company in the country insists that its election systems are never connected to the internet. But researchers found 35 of the systems have been connected to the internet for months and possibly years, including in some swing states.


----------



## ekim68

HET electric motor massively boosts power, torque and efficiency, reduces weight and complexity



> A Texas-based startup has raised US$4.5 million in seed funding to develop and commercialize a remarkable electric motor technology. The father/son team claims the design can massively reduce the size and complexity of electric powertrains while also significantly boosting efficiency and doubling the torque output.


----------



## ekim68

Why Berlin's Approach to Car Bans Is a Little Different



> Berlin is finally getting a fuller taste of the car-free trend that's taking hold in other European cities.
> 
> This summer, the German capital has announced plans to pedestrianize some vital central streets starting in October. One experiment will ban cars from the main section of Friedrichstrasse, a long, store-filled thoroughfare that, before World War II, was considered the city's main shopping street. Another will test daily closures on Tauentzienstrasse, another key retail street, with a view toward going permanently car-free in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Column: Global economy is probably in recession



> LONDON (Reuters) - The global economy is probably in recession, with most cyclical indicators showing business activity is flat or falling.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T employees took bribes to plant malware on the company's network



> DOJ charges Pakistani man with bribing AT&T employees more than $1 million to install malware on the company's network, unlock more than 2 million devices.


----------



## ekim68

Between gun massacres, a routine, deadly seven days of U.S. shootings



> (Reuters) - A boy accidentally killed by his father during a fishing trip in Montana. A woman dead and her husband behind bars after a single gunshot in a Dallas hotel room. A teenager cut down on his porch on a warm day in Washington state.
> 
> During the week bookended by mass shootings in Gilroy, California; El Paso, Texas; and Dayton, Ohio, in which gunmen killed 34 people, hundreds of others were shot to death across 47 U.S. states, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that uses local news and police reports to track gun incidents.


----------



## ekim68

The abrogation of Kashmir's special status: Why now?



> On August 5, the Indian government announced it was scrapping Article 370 of the constitution, which effectively abrogated the autonomy of the disputed region of Kashmir. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this was the most politically opportune time to make the move and secure Kashmir's "complete integration" into the Indian Union.


----------



## ekim68

US Navy: We're ditching touchscreens for physical throttles on destroyer fleet



> The US Navy has announced it will replace the touchscreen control system on its destroyer fleets with mechanical controls after an investigation found that the touchscreen system had contributed to sailors losing control of a ship.
> 
> The USS John S McCain's collided with the tanker Alnic MC in 2017 in the Singapore Strait, killing 10 sailors, injuring 48 and causing $100m in damage to the Navy ship.


----------



## ekim68

New Zealand gun buyback: 10,000 firearms returned after Christchurch attack



> More than 10,000 firearms have been bought by New Zealand's government in less than a month as part of its gun buyback scheme following the Christchurch mosque shootings in March.
> 
> Following the killing of 51 people in two inner-city Christchurch mosques by an Australian white supremacist, prime minister Jacinda Ardern's government rushed through legislation to ban military-style semi-automatic weapons and set aside NZ$150m to buy firearms that were now illegal.
> 
> A bill outlawing most automatic and semi-automatic weapons, and components that modify existing weapons, was passed by a vote of 119 to 1 in April.


----------



## ekim68

How an unarmed 65-year-old stopped a gunman from attacking a Norwegian mosque



> BERLIN - A 65-year-old former Pakistani military officer is being credited with thwarting an attack at a mosque in Norway, after he tackled a heavily armed gunman who allegedly stormed into the house of worship with the intention of carrying out a mass shooting motivated by hatred of Muslims.


----------



## Brigham

Hatred of muslims is growing. To kerb the growth muslims must stop the causes of the hatred. I must admit that I have quite a dislike of them because of the indiscriminate killings perpetuated by their fundamentalists.


----------



## ekim68

Science and engineering hit worst as Euroboffins do a little Brexit of their own from British universities



> Newly analysed recruitment figures from British Russell Group universities show a slowing of recruitment of European academics and increasing departures.
> 
> The number of EU academics in all disciplines working in the UK is still growing, but much more slowly than it was. In 2017/2018 there was a 4 per cent increase, compared to 8 per cent in 2014/2015 and 12 per cent in 2013/2014. During the same period, growth in UK academics continued to increase.
> 
> There has been an increase in the numbers of EU academics leaving Russell Group universities - up 11 per cent between 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 from 3,865 to 4,280.


----------



## ekim68

From Hong Kong to Kashmir to the US, Authoritarianism Is Rising



> Over the past couple weeks, the global pattern of authoritarianism has become particularly visible, and particularly gut-wrenching. Global politics is changing quickly, with political discourse becoming increasingly degraded and dangerous in one country after the next.


----------



## ekim68

Who will pay for the huge costs of holding back rising seas?



> For cities in the United States, the price of infrastructure projects to combat rising seas and intensifying storms is coming into focus - and so is the sticker shock.
> 
> In Boston, where many neighborhoods have been built and recently expanded in low-lying areas, an estimated $2.4 billion will be needed over the next several decades to protect the city from flooding, one study says. That report came as the city abandoned plans to build a harbor barrier that would have cost between $6 billion and $12 billion, which researchers concluded was economically unfeasible.


----------



## ekim68

* [URL='https://www.neatorama.com/2019/08/15/To-Save-Money-American-Patients-And-Surgeons-Meet-In-Cancun/']To Save Money, American Patients And Surgeons Meet In Cancun*[/URL]



> Donna Ferguson went from Mississippi to Cancun, Mexico, to get knee replacement surgery. This is an example of "medical tourism," which Americans are familiar with, as medical procedures are much less expensive in other countries.


----------



## ekim68

The New Servant Class



> In an age of persistently high inequality, work in high-cost metros catering to the whims of the wealthy-grooming them, stretching them, feeding them, driving them-has become one of the fastest-growing industries.
> 
> The MIT economist David Autor calls it "wealth work."
> 
> Low-skill, low-pay, and disproportionately done by women, these jobs congregate near dense urban labor markets, multiplying in neighborhoods with soaring disposable income.


----------



## ekim68

Hip-high soft exosuit provides walk or run assist



> Wearable robot mobility helpers can be heavy and cumbersome, but they have the potential to help those who can't move to walk again or make light work of heavy objects. For a number of years, researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute have been working on a soft exosuit that's lightweight and portable, and the latest version can provide both walking and running assistance.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/ups-has-been-delivering-cargo-in-self-driving-trucks-fo-1837272680']UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months And No One Knew[/URL]



> The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks.
> 
> UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple. The announcement also revealed that since May TuSimple autonomous trucks have been hauling UPS loads on a 115-mile route between Phoenix and Tucson.


----------



## ekim68

The Navy Is Dropping Bean-Bag Messages onto Ships Like It Did to Evade WWII Enemies



> With China and Russia threatening to remove competitive advantages the U.S. military is used to having on the battlefield, the Navy is resurrecting tricks sailors used almost 80 years ago to outsmart their enemies.
> 
> MH-60HS Sea Hawk pilots recently delivered a message to an officer aboard the amphibious assault ship Boxer using a unique communication method: a bean bag dropped out of a helicopter.


----------



## ekim68

Brexit Is Not the Holy Grail Its Supporters Are Imagining



> Boris Johnson, who has now been the U.K.'s prime minister for a little over three weeks, has pledged to take Britain out of the EU, "No ifs or buts," by October 31. He says he wants to negotiate a new deal with the EU on the terms of exit but has also committed his government to leaping into the abyss with a "no deal" exit if a negotiated divorce can't be arranged. That would mean Britain would, suddenly, have no trading arrangements in place with Europe, no political structure in place to keep British universities and health care delivery systems linked to those on the continent, and no protections guaranteed for EU residents currently living in Britain and U.K. residents living in the EU.


----------



## ekim68

Did you hear the one about the Russian billionaire selling an NBA team to the Chinese billionaire? 


Prokhorov agrees to sell Nets, Barclays to Tsai


----------



## ekim68

And Now the Really _Big_ Coal Plants Begin to Close



> When the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona shuts down later this year, it will be one of the largest carbon emitters to ever close in American history.
> 
> The giant coal plant on Arizona's high desert emitted almost 135 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2017, according to an E&E News review of federal figures.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/ups-has-been-delivering-cargo-in-self-driving-trucks-fo-1837272680']UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months And No One Knew[/URL]



> The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks.
> 
> UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple. The announcement also revealed that since May TuSimple autonomous trucks have been hauling UPS loads on a 115-mile route between Phoenix and Tucson.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter blocks state-controlled media outlets from advertising on its social network




> Twitter





> is now blocking state-run media outlets from advertising on its platform.
> 
> The new policy was announced just hours after the company identified an information operation involving hundreds of accounts linked to China as part of an effort to "sow political discord" around events in Hong Kong after weeks of protests in the region. Over the weekend more than 1 million Hong Kong residents took to the streets to protest what they see as an encroachment by the mainland Chinese government over their rights.


----------



## ekim68

Cerebras Systems unveils a record 1.2 trillion transistor chip for AI



> New artificial intelligence company Cerebras Systems is unveiling the largest semiconductor chip ever built.
> 
> The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine has 1.2 trillion transistors, the basic on-off electronic switches that are the building blocks of silicon chips. Intel's first 4004 processor in 1971 had 2,300 transistors, and a recent Advanced Micro Devices processor has 32 billion transistors.


----------



## ekim68

Solar Power Is Now as Inexpensive as Grid Electricity in China



> Solar power now costs the same as, or less than, electricity from the grid in many of China's cities, a new study finds. This research may encourage broader adoption of industrial and commercial solar power there.


----------



## Dasher47

ekim68 said:


> Did you hear the one about the Russian billionaire selling an NBA team to the Chinese billionaire?
> 
> 
> Prokhorov agrees to sell Nets, Barclays to Tsai


Whoah that's a part of an invasion.


----------



## ekim68

DoorDash is still pocketing workers' tips, almost a month after it promised to stop



> It's been almost a month since DoorDash, the leading food delivery app in the US, finally caved to public pressure and announced it would stop pocketing its workers' tips.
> 
> At the time, CEO Tony Xu announced in a series of tweets that DoorDash would institute a new model to ensure workers' earnings would "increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order." Xu promised to provide "specific details in the coming days." The next day, Xu sent out a note to DoorDash workers, broadly outlining changes and letting them know "what to expect in the days ahead."
> 
> But 27 days later, current DoorDash workers tell Recode that the company's pay and tipping policies have stayed the same.


----------



## ekim68

Volocopter introduces its most powerful flying taxi yet



> Built to carry two people and their luggage, the VoloCity aircraft, as it is now known, has been designed to meet the certification standards laid out by the European Aviation Safety Agency. It uses 18 rotors and onboard batteries to quietly move through the air, with redundancies built into the critical systems to ensure safety.
> 
> The company says the redesign was guided by insights from over 1,000 test flights of earlier models, resulting in more aerodynamic rotor beams, a new flight stabilizer and greater lifting capacity. As a result of this more efficient design, range has increased from under 30 km to 35 km (18 to 21 mi), while top speed has been been upped from 100 km/h to 110 km/h (62 to 68 mph).


----------



## ekim68

Cleared for takeoff: Saudi women start exercising their newest right



> RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's international airports are the scene of the latest "first" for women citizens, who can now leave the country without permission from a male relative as the kingdom chips away at its heavily criticized guardianship system.
> 
> Salma, a 40-year-old mother of three, travels abroad regularly with authorization from her legal guardian - formerly her then-husband and now her father. But those rules were canceled this month, so when she went to Riyadh airport on Thursday, she crossed passport control on her own authority.


----------



## Dasher47

ekim68 said:


> Volocopter introduces its most powerful flying taxi yet


And it got more safety features to deal with. It could fly are the normal environment but when the unpredictable wind surge took place, it got to have a high level of safety measures .


----------



## ekim68

2019 Consumer Credit Card Report



> Credit card interest rates have increased 35% over the past five years, and it's costing Americans: Nearly half of consumers are paying less than their full credit card bill each month. See how small APR increases can add up to thousands of dollars in interest charges and learn how to pay your debt off faster when rates go down.


----------



## ekim68

The case for retreat in the battle against climate change



> With sea levels rising rapidly, researchers advocate for a managed pull back from coastlines


----------



## ekim68

World's largest all-electric ferry completes maiden voyage



> We've seen a few all-electric ferries quietly and cleanly moving people, cars and goods between ports in northern Europe, but Ellen is reported to be the world's largest. It made its first commercial trip earlier this month between two Danish islands.
> 
> The battery-electric ferry has taken over from the diesel-powered MF Skjoldnæs to carry passengers and vehicles between Søby on Ærø island and Fynshav on Als island. Named Ellen, the electric ferry made its inaugural voyage on August 15 before she goes into service in the beginning of September. MF Skjoldnæs is not being retired, but will take on another route.


----------



## ekim68

Kabul: 'I want to break the tradition that women can't drive'

*



Kabul, Afghanistan -

Click to expand...

*


> Smiles, cheers and expressions of shock - these are the reactions, says Mahjabin, when people in Afghanistan's capital see women like her behind the steering wheel.
> 
> "Someone is looking at us smiling; someone else is clapping hands or blowing the horn to felicitate us; some others are just shocked!" said the 24-year-old.
> 
> She is one of four women chosen from 100 candidates to become the drivers of the Pink Shuttle, a project by the Nove Onlus NGO billed "as the first and only service in Afghanistan driven uniquely by female drivers for female passengers".


----------



## ekim68

Americans are waiting three years to replace their phones, study finds



> New phones' features aren't enough to convince consumers to get yearly upgrades.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube says it will now remove 'violent' and 'mature' videos pretending to be kid-friendly



> Earlier this week, YouTube quietly announced a policy change to its treatment of videos targeted toward minors and young children. The video platform says it will now remove all content that contains "violent" or "mature" themes if it is targeted toward kids, either through the title of the video, its description, or the accompanying tags.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-planet-needs-a-new-internet-1837101745']The Planet Needs a New Internet[/URL]



> When climate change comes for our coffee and our wine, we'll moan about it on Twitter, read about it on our favorite websites, and watch diverting videos on YouTube to fill the icy hole in our hearts. We'll do all this until the websites go dark and the networks go down because eventually, climate change will come for our internet, too.
> 
> That is, unless we can get the web ready for the coming storms.
> 
> Huge changes will be needed because right now, the internet is unsustainable. On the one hand, rising sea levels threaten to swamp the cables and stations that transmit the web to our homes; rising temperatures could make it more costly to run the data centers handling ever-increasing web traffic; wildfires could burn it all down.


----------



## ekim68

Russia's floating nuclear plant sails to its destination



> MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's first floating nuclear power plant sailed Friday to its destination on the nation's Arctic coast, a project that environmentalists have criticized as unsafe.
> 
> The Akademik Lomonosov is a 140-meter (459-foot) long towed platform that carries two 35-megawatt nuclear reactors. On Friday, it set out from the Arctic port of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula on a three-week journey to Pevek on the Chukotka Peninsula more than 4,900 kilometers (about 2,650 nautical miles) east.


----------



## ekim68

Bezos and Musk's satellite internet could save Americans $30B a year



> Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for broadband internet access are beginning to display signs of real potential. Recently, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin pulled back the curtain on its space intentions by announcing Project Kuiper, a 3,236-satellite constellation. Additionally, Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink recently launched a rocket containing 60 satellites from Florida's Cape Canaveral.
> 
> The fight for space internet supremacy is on. Both players, alongside others like OneWeb, are spending billions in space in hopes of making further billions annually once the satellites go into service for consumers in the US and around the globe.


----------



## ekim68

'Incredible': Man's solo paddleboard trip from San Francisco to Honolulu breaks record



> Seventy-six days. Five hours. Twenty-two minutes. That's how long it took for Spanish endurance athlete Antonio de la Rosa to voyage across the winds and currents of the Pacific Ocean, with only the help of his 24-foot long trusty stand-up paddle board, The Ocean Defender.
> 
> His journey of self-described "absolute loneliness and self-sufficiency" began in San Francisco on June 4. De la Rosa embarked from the docks of Sea Trek, a Sausalito-based kayaking business that hosted him before he left on the expedition.
> 
> He paddled just over 2,900 miles to his Honolulu destination with the aim of raising awareness about protecting the ocean from man-made pollution.


----------



## Dasher47

ekim68 said:


> 'Incredible': Man's solo paddleboard trip from San Francisco to Honolulu breaks record


That's one tough and incredible guy.


----------



## ekim68

US companies tell Apple and Amazon to put planet before profits



> The bosses of some of the world's biggest companies, including Apple and Amazon, have been told to put the planet before profits - not by environmental campaigners but by other multinationals, including Danone's US arm, and a unit of Unilever.
> 
> A group of more than 30 American business leaders, including the heads of outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, The Body Shop owner Natura, Ben & Jerry's (part of Unilever) and Danone's US business, have taken the extraordinary step of taking out a full-page ad in Sunday's edition of the New York Times to champion a more ethical way of doing business. The advert is aimed at members of the influential Business Roundtable (BRT) lobby group, which represents 181 of the US's biggest companies.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/australia-plans-to-block-domains-that-host-terrorist-ma-1837560178']Australia Plans to Block Domains That Host Terrorist Material During Crisis Situations[/URL]



> Australia laid out some of the country's first concrete steps to make good on its promise of combating the spread of extremism online at this year's G7 leader's forum, Reuters reported Sunday. Officials said the government intends to cut off all access to any internet domain that fails to block terrorist material during a crisis event, and legislation requiring online platforms to upgrade their safety measures is also being considered.
> 
> "We are doing everything we can to deny terrorists the opportunity to glorify their crimes," said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, per Reuters.


----------



## ekim68

Wi-Fi 6 will upgrade your workhorse wireless network



> 5G is great, but it's a big Wi-Fi upgrade that'll likely help you out sooner with faster speeds and longer range at home, school and work.


----------



## ekim68

Insiders are selling stock like it's 2007



> The leaders of Corporate America are cashing in their chips as doubts grow about the sustainability of the longest bull market in American history.
> 
> Corporate insiders have sold an average of $600 million of stock per day in August, according to TrimTabs Investment Research, which tracks stock market liquidity.
> 
> August is on track to be the fifth month of the year in which insider selling tops $10 billion. The only other times that has happened was 2006 and 2007, the period before the last bear market in stocks, TrimTabs said.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla promises up to 30% lower rates with new car insurance play




> Tesla





> said Wednesday it has launched an insurance product, promising owners of its electric vehicles to deliver rates 20% and even as high as 30% lower than other insurance providers.


----------



## ekim68

Hong Kong ISPs oppose any government plans to restrict internet network



> The Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (HKISPA) released a statement on Wednesday, decrying any plans that would restrict Hong Kong's open internet network.
> 
> "HKISPA would like to warn that, imposing any insensible restrictions on the open Internet would only result in more restrictions, as the original restrictions wouldn't be effective, and ultimately the result is putting Hong Kong's Internet behind a big firewall," the organisation said.
> 
> "Therefore, any such restrictions, however slight originally, would start the end of the open internet of Hong Kong, and would immediately and permanently deter international businesses from positing their businesses and investments in Hong Kong."


----------



## ekim68

Aptera returns, promising a 1,000-mile hyper-aerodynamic EV



> After two previous efforts to get this incredibly aerodynamic, insanely efficient and wild-looking electric car off the ground, Aptera's founders are back in the saddle and preparing for a third attempt. The company is raising funds for a new model it hopes to launch in 2022 that it claims can squeeze 1,000 miles (1,600 km) out of its biggest battery option, a 100-kWh pack.


----------



## ekim68

Over 1,100 Congregations Have Agreed to Provide Sanctuary to Migrants



> Indeed, as the right wing's anti-immigrant fervor gains steam, entire denominations and individual congregations - Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Quaker - have been mobilizing to support immigrants in a variety of ways, from protesting at the border and at local ICE offices, to visiting detention camps in witness to the atrocities unfolding there, to offering physical sanctuary and protection to those at risk of deportation. Religious activists have also signed countless petitions, written letters and visited lawmakers, attempted to get law enforcers to sever ties with ICE, and helped the newly arrived acclimate to U.S. life.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2019/08/30/tesla-model-3-police-cost-performance-dodge-charger/']Tesla Model 3 gets the nod from police over cost and performance, bye-bye Dodge Charger[/URL]



> The Bargersville, Indiana, Police Department is updating its fleet to Tesla Model 3s after they figured out that they will save a lot of money on gas, and that the Tesla Model 3s don't compromise performance compared to the Dodge Chargers.
> 
> We are starting to see Tesla vehicles becoming quite popular with police departments all over the world.


----------



## ekim68

Can we trust CEOs' shock conversion to corporate benevolence?



> For four decades, the prevailing doctrine in the US has been that corporations should maximise shareholder value - meaning profits and share prices - here and now, come what may, regardless of the consequences to workers, customers, suppliers and communities. So the statement endorsing stakeholder capitalism, signed earlier this month by virtually all the members of the US Business Roundtable, has caused quite a stir. After all, these are the CEOs of the US's most powerful corporations, telling Americans and the world that business is about more than the bottom line. That is quite an about-face. Or is it?
> 
> The free-market ideologue and Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman was influential not only in spreading the doctrine of shareholder primacy, but also in getting it written into US legislation. He went so far as to say: "There is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits."
> 
> The irony was that shortly after Friedman promulgated these ideas, and around the time they were popularised and then enshrined in corporate governance laws - as if they were based on sound economic theory - Sandy Grossman and I, in a series of papers in the late 1970s, showed that shareholder capitalism did not maximise societal welfare.


----------



## ekim68

Forget single genes: CRISPR now cuts and splices whole chromosomes



> Imagine a word processor that allowed you to change letters or words but balked when you tried to cut or rearrange whole paragraphs. Biologists have faced such constraints for decades. They could add or disable genes in a cell or even-with the genome-editing technology CRISPR-make precise changes within genes. Those capabilities have led to recombinant DNA technology, genetically modified organisms, and gene therapies. But a long-sought goal remained out of reach: manipulating much larger chunks of chromosomes in _Escherichia coli_, the workhorse bacterium. Now, researchers report they've adapted CRISPR and combined it with other tools to cut and splice large genome fragments with ease.


----------



## ekim68

Why Teens Are Creating Their Own News Outlets



> Teens care about the news. They just don't like traditional media.


----------



## ekim68

China's Spies Are on the Offensive



> China's spies are waging an intensifying espionage offensive against the United States. Does America have what it takes to stop them?


----------



## Dasher47

ekim68 said:


> Tesla Model 3 gets the nod from police over cost and performance, bye-bye Dodge Charger


Hope that excites more the officers to perform better.


----------



## ekim68

The Limits of Private Action: What the Past 40 Years Taught Us About the Perils of Unregulated Markets



> Since the end of World War II, two big ideas have animated American public policy. Employer-sponsored social benefits dominated from the late 1940s through the 1970s. Neoliberalism, prominent from the 1980s through the 2000s, turned to markets and private actors to achieve social goods.
> 
> Both of these models have now failed, albeit for different reasons. Sea changes in work and family life mean that virtually no one anymore has a lifetime job with union protections and secure benefits. And the financial turmoil of the early 2000s, culminating in the Great Recession, taught us hard lessons about the dangers of relying on unregulated markets. The financial crash triggered mass unemployment and mass foreclosures that ruined lives and still echo today, a decade later. No longer can anyone suppose that the unregulated market will provide a secure platform on which ordinary people can build their lives.


----------



## ekim68

What Happens When You Don't Pay a Hospital Bill



> As Americans sink under medical expenses, debt collectors go to great-and sometimes strange-lengths to collect.


----------



## ekim68

NASA's Multiple Views of Hurricane Dorian from Space


----------



## ekim68

Airport security: 3D baggage scanners could end liquid restrictions



> All major UK airports must introduce 3D baggage screening equipment before the end of 2022, the government says.
> 
> Ministers say the technology will boost security, speed up pre-boarding checks, and could end the restrictions on travelling with liquids and laptops.


----------



## ekim68

One Day After Mass Shooting, New Laws in Texas That Expand Gun Access Go Into Effect



> Texas' new gun laws, which expands where Texans can bring their guns, goes into affect on Sunday, just one day after a gunman killed 7 people and wounded 20 others in Midland and Odessa.
> 
> The nearly dozen new laws, championed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, vastly expands where individuals can bring their guns-including school parking lots, foster homes, churches, and rental properties.


----------



## ekim68

Feds ordered Google location dragnet to solve Wisconsin bank robbery



> On October 13th, 2018, two men walked into a Great Midwest Bank in a suburban strip mall outside Milwaukee. They were the first two customers when the bank opened, barely recognizable behind sunglasses and heavy beards - but it soon became clear what they were after. One man jumped onto the teller counter and pulled out a handgun, throwing down a garbage bag for the tellers to fill with money. They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself.
> 
> In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank's security cameras, but it produced no leads. Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers' phones.


----------



## ekim68

China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating 'Monster' Shows 98% Kill Rate



> An army of drones deployed to fight a crop-devouring pest in a southern area of China has recorded a mortality rate of as high as 98%, according to the manufacturer.
> 
> XAG, a Guangzhou-based drone maker, teamed up with Germany's Bayer Crop Science in a drone swarm operation to kill the fall armyworm in China's Guangxi region. The autonomous devices, loaded with low-toxicity insecticide, have also successfully managed the pests in a government-led operation in the southwest province of Yunnan, XAG said.


----------



## ekim68

Apple patents Watch band that could ID you from your wrist skin



> Unlike most of Apple's other devices, the Apple Watch doesn't currently have any sort of built-in biometrics for unlocking - there's no thumbprint sensor for Touch ID, or camera for Face ID. Unlocking your Apple Watch means poking at the screen to punch in a PIN (or, if you've configured it to unlock when you unlock your phone, doing that). A sensor setup like this could make the unlocking process automatic without the need to unlock your phone.


----------



## ekim68

Electric Car Charge Posts To Be Installed In Every New Home In England



> What comes to your mind when buying a new home? Or even renting a new home? Location is definitely important. Do you want to be in the city or in the country? Near airports where there is constantly noise from air traffic? Maybe just off the Interstate so you can have quick access?
> 
> Also, what type of home do you want to have? A traditional brick house? A cob cottage? Either way, everyone knows there is a lot that goes into buying a house.
> 
> Perhaps you are on the lookout for a home that has an electric car charging post already installed. When it comes to this idea, England is making it easier for owners of EVs as well as future EV owners by introducing a mandatory electric car charging point for each newly built home.


----------



## ekim68

FBI Warns Students to Think Before They Post Online Threats



> The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked students not to make hoax threats via social media, emails, or text messages, in a warning published as part of its 'Think Before You Post' campaign.


----------



## ekim68

Streaming makes up 80 percent of the music industry's revenue



> More people are streaming music through services like Apple Music and Spotify, and the record industry is seeing a major lift.
> 
> Revenue made from streaming services in the United States grew by 26 percent in the first six months of the year, according to trade group Recording Industry Association of America, as reported by _The_ _Wall Street Journal_. That makes for a revenue of $4.3 billion, according to research conducted by the group, which represents approximately 80 percent of the music industry's overall revenue.


----------



## ekim68

Johnson & Johnson Was on Trial for the Opioid Crisis. 33 Lawmakers Took Its Money Anyway.



> Nearly three dozen members of Congress accepted campaign contributions from Johnson & Johnson during the embattled company's trial in Oklahoma earlier this year for its role in causing the opioid epidemic, an analysis of federal campaign filing data reveals. The money has gone to Democrats and Republicans, party leaders and back-benchers, freshmen members and long-time incumbents. Two Oklahoma lawmakers-Sen. James Lankford and Rep. Markwayne Mullin, both Republicans-accepted donations from the company, despite the enormous publicity the trial generated in their state. So far, none of the lawmakers has announced plans to return the donations.


----------



## ekim68

Genetic regions associated with left-handedness identified



> New research identifies regions of the genome associated with left-handedness in the general population and links their effects with brain architecture. Scientists linked these genetic differences with the connections between areas of the brain related to language.


----------



## Brigham

Although I am right handed, when I played football (soccer) I was naturally left footed. Any brain areas noted for that?


----------



## ekim68

Hong Kong Protestors Using Mesh Messaging App China Can't Block: Usage Up 3685%



> How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn't use the internet.
> 
> That's exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Fransisco startup Bridgefy's Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other - and the public - using no persistent managed network.


----------



## ekim68

Presidential hopeful Bill de Blasio wants a tax on robots



> New York Mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio says American workers need to be protected from automation. In an opinion article published last week on Wired, he said as president he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation.


----------



## ekim68

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly support 'red flag' laws, expanded background checks for gun buyers, Washington Post-ABC News poll finds



> Americans across party and demographic lines overwhelmingly support expanded background checks for gun buyers and allowing law enforcement to temporarily seize weapons from troubled individuals, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, as President Trump and Republicans face fresh pressure to act.


----------



## ekim68

California passes law that prevents cities from taxing energy generated by solar rooftop projects



> California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law last week financial protections for consumer investments in rooftop solar energy. The law, AB 1208 authored by Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), extends a prohibition on cities and counties taxing the energy generated by rooftop solar panels for use by homeowners and businesses.
> 
> "We applaud Governor Newsom and Assemblymember Ting for protecting consumers' right to generate their own energy from the sun without unfair taxes," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, Executive Director of the California Solar & Storage Association, sponsor of AB 1208. "Reducing costs, eliminating red tape, and encouraging consumers to go solar are all critical components of meeting California's ambitious clean energy goals."


----------



## ekim68

San Francisco makes $2.5 billion bid for PG&E's electric system



> NEW YORK (Reuters) - The city of San Francisco has offered to buy PG&E Corp's (PCG.N) power lines and other electrical system infrastructure serving the city for $2.5 billion, according to the utility, which sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January.


----------



## ekim68

Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain



> A coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to everyone. The people behind the effort are now hoping to upload these books to the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital archives on the internet.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/homepage/']Court let Merck hide secrets about a popular drug's risks[/URL]



> Lawsuits claim baldness drug Propecia causes sexual problems and depression. The judge sealed evidence - uncovered by Reuters - suggesting the maker downplayed the side effects. A widow wants the truth out.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.theroot.com/trump-administration-officials-arrested-for-scamming-pu-1838044256']Trump Administration Officials Arrested for Scamming Puerto Rico Out of $1.8 Billion in Hurricane Relief Funds[/URL]



> Remember when Trump blasted Puerto Rico's government for their corruption and thievery, explaining that he was the best thing that ever happened to that foreign country whose president's name he couldn't quite remember?
> 
> Well, it turned out, it was his own people who were actually doing the scamming.


----------



## ekim68

New prostate cancer blood test promises "paradigm shift" for future treatment and detection



> Scientists at Queen Mary University of London have developed a new prostate cancer blood test that promises a significant increase in accuracy compared to current blood tests. If verified in larger samples the test should be available to men within three to five years.


----------



## ekim68

In Push for Brexit, UK's Conservative Party Shifts to the Far Right



> More than three years after British voters narrowly supported pulling the U.K. out of the European Union (EU), everything is coming to a head. After winning the Conservative Party's leadership contest in July - a contest triggered by former Prime Minister Theresa May's inability to get Parliament to support her negotiated exit agreement with the EU - current Prime Minister Boris Johnson's strategy regarding Brexit this summer has been to bluster and threaten to storm out of the EU with no deal in place come October 31 unless the EU rewrites the deal it crafted with May. His hope seems to be that the EU, more out of impatience than anything else, will pony up enough concessions that Johnson can claim victory and sign on to a divorce agreement that doesn't destroy the British economy.


----------



## ekim68

These 10 technologies are most likely to help save planet Earth



> In an uncertain future, these technologies can be a force for progress. Of course, number one could also spell our doom.


----------



## ekim68

And there's this...


Shut Up, Franzen



> Climate change is real and things will get worse-but because we understand the driver of potential doom, it's a choice, not a foregone conclusion


----------



## ekim68

London's Hidden Cable Tunnels Could Warm Thousands of Homes



> Underneath London's bustling streets lie several kilometers of 2.5-meter-wide concrete tunnels lined with power distribution cables that can reach blistering temperatures. To cool the tunnels, vertical shafts spaced out every kilometer or two supply fresh air and eject hot air out into the open.
> 
> Researchers at London South Bank University (LSBU) want to put that waste heat to use. A typical 1.8-km tunnel stretch between ventilation shafts produces 400 kilowatts of heat, enough to heat 100 homes or a small commercial office, they have found in a preliminary analysis done with the city's electricity network operator UK Power Networks.


----------



## ekim68

JPMorgan's Athena has 35 million lines of Python code, and won't be updated to Python 3 in time



> Support for Python 2 is ending on January 1, 2020, just over 11 years following the introduction of Python 3-a major restructuring of the language that eliminated duplicate structures and modules in the pursuit of modernization. Given Python's popularity and ubiquity, the amount of business logic hinging on Python is quite vast, presenting an issue for organizations still clinging to Python 2.
> 
> JPMorgan's Athena trading platform is one of those applications-while access has only been available directly to clients since 2018, the Athena platform is used internally at JPMorgan for pricing, trading, risk management, and analytics, with tools for data science and machine learning. This extensive feature set utilizes over 150,000 Python modules, over 500 open source packages, and 35 million lines of Python code contributed by over 1,500 developers, according to data presented by Misha Tselman, executive director at J.P. Morgan Chase in a talk at PyData 2017.


----------



## ekim68

Robocalls Keep Pouring In As Hijacking Threat Emerges - How To Stop



> A new report highlights how nimble scammers and spammers are in the face efforts to combat robocalls.
> 
> Despite new initiatives by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and carriers, robocalls aren't on the wane. Americans are still facing a scourge of 200 million unwanted robocalls a day, according to a report from Transaction Network Services (TNS), a major telecommunications network and services company.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's Model 3 earns insurance industry's top safety rating



> (Reuters) - Tesla Inc's (TSLA.O) Model 3 electric sedan has earned the top safety rating from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS), becoming the first Tesla to do so.
> 
> The IIHS has given the Model 3 its highest rating, top safety pick+. It said the Model 3 earned good ratings across the board for crashworthiness.


----------



## ekim68

IBM's new 53-qubit quantum computer is its biggest yet




> IBM's





> 14th quantum computer is its most powerful so far, a model with 53 of the qubits that form the fundamental data-processing element at the heart of the system. The system, available online to quantum computing customers in October, is a big step up from the last IBM Q machine with 20 qubits and should help advance the marriage of classical computers with the crazy realm of quantum physics.
> 
> Quantum computing remains a highly experimental field, limited by the difficult physics of the ultra-small and by the need to keep the machines refrigerated to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero to keep outside disturbances from ruining any calculations.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon buys 100,000 Rivian electric trucks in pursuit of carbon neutrality



> Electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian has landed itself a new customer, and a monumental one at that. The world's largest retailer, Amazon, has signed on to buy 100,000 of Rivian's zero-emission trucks as part of a wider push to clean up its business operations, which includes a commitment to be completely carbon neutral by 2040.


----------



## ekim68

Three Mile Island, where a meltdown forever changed nuclear energy in America, shuts down Friday



> At noon on Friday, the remaining reactor (Unit 1) will generate its last kilowatt of energy and close, a victim not of the anti-nuclear movement but rather of simple economics. Even though the plant is licensed to operate until 2034, Exelon Generation is ceasing operations after the state of Pennsylvania earlier this year refused to throw the company a financial lifeline that would have kept it open.


----------



## ekim68

Developer takes down Ruby library after he finds out ICE was using it



> A software engineer pulled a personal project down after he found out that one of the companies using it had recently signed a contract with the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
> 
> The engineer, Seth Vargo, cited the ICE's "inhumane treatment, denial of basic human rights, and detaining children in cages," as the reason for taking down his library.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial Intelligence Takes On Earthquake Prediction



> After successfully predicting laboratory earthquakes, a team of geophysicists has applied a machine learning algorithm to quakes in the Pacific Northwest.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing's aircraft refueling drone flies for the first time



> An advanced unmanned aircraft designed to refuel the US Navy's fighter jets in mid-air has taken to the skies for the first time. Boeing unleashed an early version of its MQ-25 autonomous drone at an airfield in St Louis for a short test jaunt to demonstrate some basic functions, as the aerospace company prepares to deliver the military its first prototypes in the next couple of years.
> 
> Boeing's MQ-25 Stingray program has been in development, in various forms, since 2006. Last September the company beat out competing proposals from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems to earn an US$805-million contract with the US Navy. The military hopes to use it as an airborne refueling platform to extend the range of its F/A-18 Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler, and F-35C Lightning II aircraft.


----------



## ekim68

The world's most-surveilled cities



> Cities in China are under the heaviest CCTV surveillance in the world, according to a new analysis by Comparitech. However, some residents living in cities across the US, UK, UAE, Australia, and India will also find themselves surrounded by a large number of watchful eyes, as our look at the number of public CCTV cameras in 120 cities worldwide found.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/new-research-promises-electric-car-batteries-that-last-1838357663']New Research Promises Electric Car Batteries That Last For a Million Miles[/URL]



> Electric motors guzzle electricity, which can be especially hard on a rechargeable battery. The power cells used in electric vehicles, like Teslas, have an expected lifespan of around 300,000 to 500,000 miles, but a team of battery researchers believes it has come up with a recipe that can double that, leading to batteries that could potentially outlast the electric car itself.


----------



## ekim68

As Thomas Cook customers return home, blame game begins



> LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prime Minister Boris Johnson and unions questioned the part played by Thomas Cook's richly rewarded bosses in the company's demise on Tuesday, and asked why the state had to foot the bill for bringing tens of thousands of tourists home.


----------



## ekim68

A new way to turn heat into useful energy



> Scientists have figured out how to capture heat and turn it into electricity. The discovery could create more efficient energy generation from heat in things like car exhaust, interplanetary space probes and industrial processes.


----------



## ekim68

GE, NASA Partner to advance the future of electric flight



> Aerospace heavyweights have a plan to reinvent this crucial component, which is holding back electric flight.


----------



## ekim68

Utilities' Big Promises on CO2 Questioned by Analysts



> Though coal is declining as a power source, it is often being replaced by natural gas, another fossil fuel


----------



## ekim68

Internet sector contributes $2.1 trillion to U.S. economy: industry group



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The rapidly growing internet sector accounted for $2.1 trillion of the U.S. economy in 2018, or about 10% of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), an industry group said on Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

A new iPhone feature poses a threat to opinion pollsters



> Advanced call-blocking will make Americans harder to survey


----------



## ekim68

Researchers easily breached voting machines for the 2020 election



> The 'ethical hackers' bought a bunch of the machines on eBay and broke into every one.


----------



## ekim68

Study Proves The FCC's Core Justification for Killing Net Neutrality Was False




> The biggest study yet finds Ajit Pai's repeated claims that net neutrality hurt broadband investment have never been true.


----------



## ekim68

First fully rechargeable carbon dioxide battery lasts 500 cycles



> The search for advanced materials that can take battery technology to the next level has led scientists to some imaginative places, including designs inspired by the human spine and others that fashion key components into nanochain structures. Another example concerns an element we're producing too much of in carbon dioxide, which scientists have now worked into a high-potential battery with the ability to recharge 500 times.
> 
> Promising more than seven times the energy density of today's typical lithium-ion designs, there is considerable interest in the development of lithium-carbon dioxide batteries. And research has turned up some promising results in the past, with a breakthrough we looked at last year from MIT one recent example.


----------



## ekim68

Documentary Exposes Wall Street Power Behind Global Gentrification Boom

_



PUSH

Click to expand...

_


> , a new documentary that had its world premiere at the CPHOX film festival in Copenhagen in March, where it won the festival's Audience Award, is coming to the U.S., and not a moment too soon. With a large majority of Americans in favor of making the issue of affordable housing a priority and multiple Democratic presidential candidates laying out detailed plans for 2020, _PUSH_ offers important insight into why it seems to be getting harder and harder for city dwellers around the world to find and keep a decent place to live.
> 
> Since the global financial crisis in 2008, urban housing prices have skyrocketed and luxury apartments continue to spread, forcing people out of their homes as multigenerational communities unravel. But rather than critique gentrification, _PUSH_ sets its sights on a lesser known culprit: the modern marriage of private equity and real estate, a ruthless enterprise that too often leads to housing insecurity, homelessness and human rights violations. Such devastating consequences have been inspiring local social movements and, increasingly, responsible government action.


----------



## ekim68

EU brings in 'right to repair' rules for appliances



> Household appliances will become easier to repair thanks to new standards being adopted across the European Union.
> 
> From 2021, firms will have to make appliances longer-lasting, and they will have to supply spare parts for machines for up to 10 years.
> 
> The rules apply to lighting, washing machines, dishwashers and fridges.


----------



## ekim68

UPS gets FAA approval to operate an entire drone delivery airline



> UPS announced today that it is the first to receive the official nod from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate a full "drone airline," which will allow it to expand its current small drone delivery service pilots into a country-wide network.


----------



## ekim68

CRISPR might be the banana's only hope against a deadly fungus



> Researchers are using the gene-editing tool to boost the fruit's defences and prevent the extinction of a major commercial variety.


----------



## ekim68

FBI investigating alleged hacking attempt into mobile voting app during 2018 midterms



> (CNN)The FBI is investigating after someone allegedly tried to hack into West Virginia's mobile voting app during the 2018 midterm elections.
> 
> One or more people allegedly attempted to hack into Voatz, an experimental app that lets voters who are active military or registered to vote abroad cast their votes from their phones, Mike Stuart, the US attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, announced Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Ditching Platinum for the Ocean Could Make Hydrogen Cheap



> Testing a molybdenum-phosphide (MoP) catalyst with wastewater in a small reactor called a microbial electrolysis cell (MEC), scientists found that the MoP worked better than platinum.
> 
> The most frequently used method of producing hydrogen is known as electrolysis. Bringing together chemicals called electrolytes with electricity, a catalyst triggers a reaction that creates hydrogen. Platinum is currently the best of these catalysts, although its high price is a big drawback. If platinum could be discarded, that could bring hydrogen production costs down rapidly.
> 
> And that's not all. The MoP catalyst excelled at working with another abundant source: seawater.


----------



## ekim68

Brain-controlled exoskeleton allows quadriplegic man to walk and manipulate items



> Scientists from the University of Grenoble have spent two years teaching a quadriplegic man to move his arms and legs, and even walk, using a brain-controlled AI exoskeleton. The 28-year-old patient, who had suffered from a cervical spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down, came into the study with the ability to move only his biceps and right wrist, enabling him to use a joystick-controlled wheelchair.
> 
> The researchers implanted a 64-electrode sensor on each side of his head, between the brain and skin, with the ability to read brain activity in the sensorimotor cortex and transmit them. Then, they began training the patient to move virtual limbs and videogame sprites, using deep learning AI to identify, learn and reinforce the brain activity the patient was using for each motion and command.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90413126/oil-industry-money-fuels-opponents-of-californias-auto-emissions-standards']Oil industry money fuels opponents of California's auto emissions standards[/URL]



> Senators who have refused to cosponsor a resolution affirming California's ability to enforce vehicle fuel economy standards to limit greenhouse gas emissions have received almost 15 times more campaign money from major oil and gas interests than lawmakers supporting the measure, according to a MapLight analysis.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing rejected 737 MAX safety upgrades before fatal crashes, whistleblower says



> Seven weeks after the second fatal crash of a 737 MAX in March, a Boeing engineer submitted a scathing internal ethics complaint alleging that management - determined to keep down costs for airline customers - had blocked significant safety improvements during the jet's development.


----------



## ekim68

Kitty Hawk's new electric aircraft is quieter than a dishwasher



> Kitty Hawk, the aviation startup backed by Google co-founder Larry Page and Boeing, has today lifted the lid on another electrically-powered aircraft, the third in its lineup. Details are scarce on the technical capabilities of the newly announced Heaviside, but the company is very keen to emphasize how little noise it makes during flight.
> 
> The Heaviside follows in the footsteps of the Flyer, which emerged in 2017, and last year's Cora, a two-seat electric aircraft designed with short trips in mind. Like the Flyer, Kitty Hawk's newest aircraft is a single seater but appears far more passenger-ready than that earlier prototype, which amounted to rotors fixed to an open-air pipe structure and a pair of pontoons for landing and taking off on water.


----------



## ekim68

Political Operatives Are Faking Voter Outrage With Millions Of Made-Up Comments To Benefit The Rich And Powerful



> A fierce battle over the regulation of the internet was riddled with millions of fake comments in the most prolific known instance of political impersonation in US history.


----------



## ekim68

Health Insurance That Doesn't Cover the Bills Has Flooded the Market Under Trump



> The administration's moves to weaken the Affordable Care Act have taken hold, and companies are cashing in.


----------



## ekim68

Why big ISPs aren't happy about Google's plans for encrypted DNS



> When you visit a new website, your computer probably submits a request to the domain name system (DNS) to translate the domain name (like arstechnica.com) to an IP address. Currently, most DNS queries are unencrypted, which raises privacy and security concerns. Google and Mozilla are trying to address these concerns by adding support in their browsers for sending DNS queries over the encrypted HTTPS protocol.
> 
> But major Internet service providers have cried foul. In a September 19 letter to Congress, Big Cable and other telecom industry groups warned that Google's support for DNS over HTTPS (DoH) "could interfere on a mass scale with critical Internet functions, as well as raise data-competition issues."


----------



## ekim68

Just Hours After Trump Bends to Erdoğan, Reports Indicate Turkey's Bombing of Kurdish Forces Has Begun



> "The Turkish threats mean that the situation in this region will return to point zero," warned the SDF on Monday. "There will be chaos once again."


----------



## ekim68

Electrified graphene filters trap and zap airborne microbes



> Airborne bacteria and other pathogens can be a real hazard, particularly in environments like hospitals. Now, researchers at Rice University have developed a new air filter made of graphene foam, which can kill captured microbes with small zaps of electricity.
> 
> The device is made using a type of graphene previously created at Rice called laser-induced graphene (LIG). As the name suggests, this material is made by zapping a sheet of polyimide with a laser, which causes it to puff out into a foamy form of graphene.


----------



## ekim68

Da Vinci bridge design holds up even after 500 years, MIT proves



> It's 1502 A.D. and Sultan Bayezid II sends out a request for bids: He wants someone to build an enormous bridge, spanning the Golden Horn and connecting Istanbul to neighboring Galata. If you're Leonardo da Vinci, you don't have modern rebar or asphalt to rely on. Forgoing wood planks and even mortar joints, your design uses only three geometrically daring principals: the pressed-bow, the parabolic curve and the keystone arch. With these, you design what at the time would have been the world's longest bridge, with an unprecedented single span of 790 feet.
> 
> And after the sultan's rejection, you would have to wait more than 500 years for your bridge design to be tested by a team of ambitious MIT engineers and their handy 3D printer.


----------



## ekim68

Should Cameras Replace Car Mirrors? U.S. Regulators Want to Know



> Drivers in the U.S. may one day no longer have to crane their necks to check their blind spots if regulators agree to let high-tech cameras and screens replace the humble side-view mirror.
> 
> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice on Wednesday that is is seeking public and industry input on whether to allow so-called camera monitoring systems to replace rear- and side-view mirrors mandated by a longstanding U.S. auto safety standard.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T raises prices 7% by making its customers pay AT&T's property taxes




> AT&T tacks on fee after locking customer into contract, raises it from 3% to 7%.


----------



## ekim68

White-hat hacks Muhstik ransomware gang and releases decryption keys



> Annoyed victim hacks back ransomware gang and releases all their decryption keys, along with a free decrypter.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla reduces Solar + home battery pricing following California blackouts



> Pacific Gas & Electric's (PG&E) shutoff of electric supply to residents in California's Bay Area has caught the attention of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has announced that he would be offering a price reduction of approximately 10% for a solar panel and Tesla Powerwall battery installation. The discount will be available to anyone interested in powering their homes with solar energy, not just the 800,000 affected homes in the Bay Area.


----------



## ekim68

Chrome now uses AI to describe images for users with vision impairment



> Google is looking to improve the web-browsing experience for those with vision conditions by introducing a feature into its Chrome browser that uses machine learning to recognize and describe images. The image description will be generated automatically using the same technology that drives Google Lens.


----------



## ekim68

Internet Archive releases 2,500 MS-DOS games so you can relive the '90s



> If you loved playing retro MS-DOS games from the '90s like 3D Bomber, Zool and Alien Rampage, you can now replay those, and many more, with the latest update from Internet Archive.
> 
> On Sunday, Internet Archive released 2,500 MS-DOS games that includes action, strategy and adventure titles. Some of the games are Vor Terra, Spooky Kooky Monster Maker, Princess Maker 2 and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft wants to use AI to bleep out bad words in Xbox Live party chat



> Today, Microsoft announced that it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturity tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." That's a long-overdue feature for a major communication platform that's well over a decade old now, but not really anything new in terms of online content moderation writ large.


----------



## ekim68

This Isn't the First Time the US Has Abandoned the Kurds



> President Trump's decision to give a green light for a Turkish invasion of Kurdish-populated regions of northern Syria has been faced with swift bipartisan opposition. Apparently, no one in the diplomatic, military or intelligence community - much less the leadership of the self-governing Kurdish enclave the U.S. has armed and supported and is now under siege - was consulted beforehand.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial meat is now made in space, coming to a supermarket near you



> Creating meat from cells is no longer the realm of science fiction: a Russian cosmonaut did it aboard the International Space Station, and it is just a matter of time before these products arrive in supermarkets.
> 
> Tests carried out in space in September led to the production of beef, rabbit and fish tissue using a 3D printer.


----------



## ekim68

A 125-year-old dime just sold for $1.32 million



> A Utah businessman paid $1.32 million for a dime last week at a Chicago coin auction.


----------



## ekim68

Shooting drones out of the sky with Phasers



> When a mixed formation of cruise missiles and small drone aircraft rained explosive charges on the Saudi Arabian state oil group Aramco sites at Abqaiq and Khurais on 14 September they halved national oil output, cutting 5.7 million barrels of crude per day from the company's production.
> 
> But they did more than economic damage. This attack has had a huge impact on how nations think about protecting their airspace.
> 
> Companies are now developing and deploying sophisticated new defences, from frying the electronic circuits with powerful beams of microwave radiation, to precise jamming systems.


----------



## ekim68

Helping Farmers Adapt to Climate Change?



> This is pretty amazing:


----------



## ekim68

Reddit-born engineering group buys leftovers of failed hyperloop startup Arrivo



> Reddit-born hyperloop and engineering collective rLoop has bought the intellectual property of Arrivo, a fellow hyperloop startup that went out of business last December, _The Verge_ has learned. rLoop co-founder Brent Lessard confirmed the sale, but he would not disclose how much the group paid.
> 
> Lessard said rLoop might try to revive some of the deals that Arrivo had been working on, like a test track outside of Denver, Colorado, and that it may hire back some of Arrivo's former employees. But, Lessard said, rLoop is still only in the "final stages" of assessing the progress Arrivo's employees had made toward developing a type of hyperloop that relies on magnetic levitation (as opposed to the vacuum-based solution that was originally proposed by Elon Musk when he introduced the hyperloop idea in a 2013 white paper).


----------



## ekim68

Malware That Spits Cash Out of ATMs Has Spread Across the World



> A joint investigation between Motherboard and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) has uncovered new details about a spate of so-called "jackpotting" attacks on ATMs in Germany in 2017 that saw thieves make off with more than a million Euros. Jackpotting is a technique where cybercriminals use malware or a piece of hardware to trick an ATM into ejecting all of its cash, no stolen credit card required. Hackers typically install the malware onto an ATM by physically opening a panel on the machine to reveal a USB port.


----------



## ekim68

DeepMind AI beats humans at deciphering damaged ancient Greek tablets




> Artificial intelligence





> is learning to decipher damaged ancient Greek engravings. The AI seems to be better than humans at filling in missing words, but may be most useful as a collaborative tool, where researchers use it to narrow down the options.
> 
> There are thousands of ancient inscriptions we already know about, with dozens more discovered every year. Unfortunately, many have become eroded or damaged over the centuries, resulting in segments of text being lost. Figuring out what the gaps could be is a difficult task, involving looking at the rest of the inscription and other similar texts.


----------



## ekim68

Everyone In California Will Now Receive Earthquake Alerts On Their Phones Seconds Before The Ground Begins To Shake



> The nation's first statewide system will send emergency alerts to cellphones, giving residents up to 20 seconds of warning before shaking begins.


----------



## ekim68

The voice from our Nest camera threatened to steal our baby




> A father Googled "Nest + camera + hacked" and found out that this happens frequently


----------



## ekim68

Alphabet's Wing Begins First Commercial Drone Delivery Service in U.S., Beating Amazon, Uber



> Wing, an offshoot of Google parent company Alphabet, officially launched its drone delivery service Friday, delivering a FedEx package-a birthday gift for Susie Sensmeier from her husband, Paul-through the air from a distribution center to the couple's home in Christiansburg, Virginia, according to the company's blog.
> 
> Wing was the first company to receive Federal Aviation Authority approval for door-to-door drone delivery, Business Wire reported Friday, beating Amazon's Prime Air, which is scheduled to begin deliveries on December 7, and Uber Eats' drone delivery program to market.


----------



## ekim68

The Most Important Right-to-Repair Hearing Yet Is on Monday




> Massachusetts is vying to become the first state to protect consumers' right to repair their electronics.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2019/10/19/tesla-vandal-seeing-sentry-mode-video-online/']Tesla vandal turns himself in after seeing Sentry Mode video online[/URL]



> Another Tesla vandal has turned himself in after a Sentry Mode video of the act of vandalism went viral online.
> 
> He said that it was 'stupid' and he has nothing against Tesla.
> 
> Tesla's Sentry Mode, which is an integrated surveillance system inside Tesla's vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car, has been changing the game when it comes to vandalizing parked cars.


----------



## ekim68

Apple CEO Tim Cook joins influential Beijing university board as company's China woes continue



> Apple CEO Tim Cook has been appointed chairman of the advisory board at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing, a role that could provide access to top Chinese leaders at a time the iPhone manufacturer is facing mounting challenges in the world's second largest economy.


----------



## ekim68

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket



> A Swedish engineer's umbrage at a traffic ticket has led to a six-year legal fight and now a global change in the speed with which traffic light signals are timed.
> 
> After Mats Järlström lost an initial legal challenge in 2014, a federal judge in January this year ruled Oregon's rules prohibiting people from representing themselves as engineers without a professional license from the state are unconstitutional.
> 
> And now Järlström's calculations and advocacy have led the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) to revisit its guidelines [PDF] for the timing of traffic signals. As a result, yellow lights around the globe could burn for longer - ITE is an international advisory group with members in 90 countries.


----------



## ekim68

Ex-Nazi Bunker Will Soon House Hotel Guests



> A former Nazi bunker in Hamburg, built by forced laborers to shelter tens of thousands of Germans during Allied air raids in World War II, will soon house hotel guests.
> 
> The 136-room nhow Hamburg, which is being designed by the NH Hotel Group, will open in mid-2021 on top of the Bunker St. Pauli, one of thousands of air raid shelters built across the country by the Third Reich.


----------



## ekim68

Honda brings forward goal to be fully electrified in Europe to 2022



> AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Japanese carmaker Honda has brought forward a goal to only sell electric and hybrid cars in Europe by three years to 2022, a leading company executive said on Wednesday.
> 
> Last month, Honda said it would phase out all diesel vehicle sales in Europe by 2021 in favor of electrified vehicles.
> 
> The carmaker had said in March it intended "to move 100% of its European sales to electrified powertrains by 2025."


----------



## ekim68

Top 10 technology trends for 2020 include hyperautomation, human augmentation and distributed cloud



> Gartner identified the top strategic technology trends likely to reach tipping points in the near future.


----------



## ekim68

Ajit Pai Whines About The Numerous State-Level Net Neutrality Laws He Just Helped Create



> A common misconception is that the FCC's net neutrality rule *just* killed net neutrality. In reality, the "Restoring Internet Freedom" order eliminated most of the FCC's authority over broadband providers, shoveling remaining oversight to an FTC that lacks either the attention span or authority to police giants like AT&T and Comcast. The order also attempted to ban states from protecting consumers in the wake of the FCC's apathy to industry issues. This accountability vacuum was, if you're a slow learner, the entire point of the plan.
> 
> But a recent court ruling was a mixed outcome for the FCC. While the court supported much of the FCC's repeal (despite the obvious fraud that occurred), it ruled the FCC lacked the authority to block states from protecting consumers. As a result, while federal net neutrality protections are gone, a flood of states are now passing their own laws.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla overtakes GM as most valuable U.S. automaker, short sellers burned



> (Reuters) - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) shares soared 17% on Thursday after the electric carmaker surprised Wall Street by delivering on Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk's promise of a profit in the third quarter, even as doubts remained about its long-term prospects.
> 
> Trading at $298, Tesla's market capitalization was $53 billion, surpassing General Motors Co's (GM.N) $51 billion stock market value and making it the United States' most valuable car company. It has been the No. 1 U.S. car company by market cap before, but recently GM has had a substantial lead.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Tesla overtakes GM as most valuable U.S. automaker, short sellers burned


And more on this...


Opinion: Tesla's road gets easier from here


----------



## ekim68

US Air Force gets drone-killing laser



> The US Air Force has taken delivery of its first high-energy laser for shooting down Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Built by Raytheon, it will be used in overseas deployments as part of a year-long experiment to test the laser weapon and to train operators in real-world scenarios.


----------



## ekim68

Religious Corporations Are Interfering in Doctor-Patient Relationships



> Faith-based health facilities are increasingly imposing their biases on the medical decision-making process.


----------



## ekim68

Fast, affordable internet from the sky is almost here



> Today, if you want fast internet, your choices are, well, your cable provider, and that's about it. Things are about to change. SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said she's sure SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service can start offering broadband service in the US by mid-2020.


----------



## ekim68

Air Force spaceplane returns to Earth after 780-day mission



> An unpiloted Air Force X-37B spaceplane, one of two winged orbiters used to carry out classified research, made a surprise landing at the Kennedy Space Center early Sunday to close out a record 780-day mission. It was the fifth flight in the secretive Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) program, pushing total time aloft to 2,865 days.


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court permits Baltimore suit against energy companies to continue



> A court case between the city of Baltimore and a group of energy companies will be permitted to continue after the Supreme Court earlier this week rejected the latter's attempt to freeze the case. The litigation, which the city initiated in 2018, alleges that the energy companies are liable "for their direct emissions of greenhouse gases" and the damages they've caused the city and its residents.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Insists It's An Innocent Little Daisy On Consumer Privacy



> Both Mozilla and Google have begun pushing encrypted DNS via their respective browsers, making it more difficult for outsiders to monitor and/or monetize your daily browsing habits. Not too surprisingly the broadband industry, which has a long, proud history of covertly collecting and selling this data, isn't particularly happy about this evolution. With the help of unskeptical news outlets, telecom lobbyists have been trying to convince the government that what Mozilla and Google are up to is somehow nefarious, going so far as to (incorrectly) claim the move is even an antitrust violation.


----------



## ekim68

Happy 50th Birthday Internet... 


Lo and Behold



> On October 29, 1969, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Leonard Kleinrock and student programmer Charley Kline '70, M.S. '71, Ph.D. '80 gave birth to the Internet. UCLA was the first "node" on the ARPANET, a research network that was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. At 10:30 p.m., in 3420 Boelter Hall, the two men attempted to connect to a computer at Stanford Research Institute, the second node. If they could type LOG, they were in. They sent "L" and "O," but the SRI computer crashed before the "G." "The first message ever on the ARPANET/ Internet was 'LO,' as in 'lo and behold,'" Kleinrock says. "We didn't plan it, but we couldn't have come up with a better message: short and prophetic."


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## ekim68

Researchers transmit energy with laser in 'historic' power-beaming demonstration



> It was the second day of a three-day-long tech demonstration at the David Taylor Model Basin at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where attendees had gathered to stand around in the dark to look at something they mostly couldn't see.
> 
> It was a long-range, free-space power beaming system - the first of its kind. Attendees that day, May 23, could see the system itself-the two 13-foot-high towers, one a 2-kilowatt laser transmitter, the other a receiver of specially designed photovoltaics. But the important part, the laser that was beaming 400 watts of power across 325 meters, from the transmitter to the receiver, was invisible to the naked eye.


----------



## ekim68

MIT Taught Self-Driving Cars to See Around Corners with Shadows



> We're inching ever-closer to a world where cars can drive themselves. The most advanced autonomous vehicles in testing by companies like Alphabet's Waymo can drive in many situations as well as a human, but the hope is to make cars _better_ than human drivers. Ideally, a self-driving car would be able to use all its processing might to avoid an accident, but to do that, they need data. Researchers from MIT have developed a system that could help cars prevent collisions by, essentially, looking around corners. They call it ShadowCam.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook accused of being 'megaphone for hate' in northeastern India



> Facebook's pathetically low number of content moderators, as well as the total incapability of its artificial intelligence in throttling hate speech on its platform, means that a human rights disaster of epic proportions may be just around the corner.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft is replacing MSDN and TechNet forums with Microsoft Q&A



> Microsoft has released a preview of a new Microsoft Q&A service meant to help users find answers to technical questions.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T Loses Another 1.36 Million Pay TV Subscribers Thanks To Relentless Price Hikes



> This wasn't how it was supposed to go for AT&T. In AT&T executives heads, the 2015, $67 billion acquisition of DirecTV and the 2018 $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner were supposed to be the cornerstones of the company's efforts to dominate video and online video advertising. Instead, the megadeals made AT&T possibly one of the most heavily indebted companies in the world. To recoup that debt, AT&T has increased its efforts to nickel-and-dime users at every opportunity, recently imposing the second rate hike in just a year on its streaming TV subscribers.
> 
> Not too surprisingly, these price hikes are now driving subscribers to the exits.


----------



## ekim68

California Wildfire Cellular Outages Could Have Been Easily Avoided



> As rolling blackouts and wildfires rattle California this week, many impacted residents are unable to use their cell phones. According to FCC data (pdf), 874 of the state's 26,000 cell tower sites were out of commission on Monday, up from 630 on Sunday. Of that 874, 702 were caused by a loss of power to the cell site, 88 inoperable towers were due to cut fiber lines leading to the tower, and just 60 were caused by actual wind or fire damage.
> 
> It's a problem that could have been avoided. After Hurricane Katrina, in 2008 the FCC passed rules mandating that cellular towers be upgraded to include battery backups or generators capable of delivering at least 8 hours of backup power, if not 24 or more. But the US cellular industry, you know, the one whose rates are some of the highest in the developed world, cried like a petulant child about the requirement and sued to scuttle the rules.


----------



## ekim68

What the mass resignations at Deadspin tell us about work in America



> One by one, Deadspin staff writers announced their resignations on Twitter on Wednesday.
> 
> By the end of the day, at least 10 writers had quit their jobs - a sign of protest and solidarity with their interim editor-in-chief, Barry Petchesky, who defied a mandate from the company's new owners to "stick to sports."


----------



## ekim68

Illegal loggers kill Amazon indigenous warrior who guarded forest, wound another



> BRASILIA (Reuters) - Illegal loggers in the Amazon ambushed an indigenous group that was formed to protect the forest and shot dead a young warrior and wounded another, leaders of the Guajajara tribe in northern Brazil said on Saturday.


----------



## ekim68

Welcome to "Cancer Alley," Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse




> Air quality has improved for decades across the U.S., but Louisiana is backsliding. Our analysis found that a crush of new industrial plants will increase concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in predominantly black and poor communities.


----------



## ekim68

Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School



> Gaggle monitors the work and communications of almost 5 million students in the US, and schools are paying big money for its services. Hundreds of company documents unveil a sprawling surveillance industrial complex that targets kids who can't opt out.


----------



## ekim68

ISPs lied to Congress to spread confusion about encrypted DNS, Mozilla says




> ISPs lobby against DNS encryption, but Mozilla tells Congress not to trust them.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft's 4-day work week test in Japan boosts productivity by 40% - other studies show it can also make you happier



> It turns out that working less is more.
> 
> Microsoft MSFT, -0.01% tested a four-day work week in August - and, the company said, productivity jumped 40%. (Employees took Summer Fridays off.) The program, called "Work Life Choice Challenge," also encouraged staff to reduce the time they spent at meetings and responding to work emails, CNN reported.


----------



## ekim68

More than 11,000 scientists from around the world declare a 'climate emergency'



> A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet "clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency," and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.
> 
> The analysis is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in that it does not couch its conclusions in the language of uncertainties, and it does prescribe policies.


----------



## ekim68

As debt grows, more Indian women farmers taking their lives



> Amravati, India - More female farmers are committing suicide in the western Indian state of Maharashtra where a decades-long agrarian crisis has reportedly driven more than 30,000 farmers to end their lives.


----------



## ekim68

How Russian Hackers Conquered the World




> A new book tracks Sandstorm, an elite unit behind blackouts, bankruptcies, and breaches.


----------



## ekim68

Now Googlers Are Protesting Company's Deals With Big Oil



> Activists inside Google are calling on management to ditch deals with oil and gas companies, the latest flare-up inside the technology giant.
> 
> In a letter published on Monday, more than 1,100 workers asked Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat to release a "company-wide climate plan" that commits to cutting carbon emissions entirely. The letter also asks Google to drop contracts that "enable or accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels."


----------



## ekim68

Google asks three mobile security firms to help scan Play Store apps




> Google announced today





> that it partnered with three private cyber-security firms -- ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium -- to start a new project called the App Defense Alliance.
> 
> The purpose of this new project, Google said, was to unify malware and threat detection engines and improve the security scans that Android apps go through before being published on the Play Store.



[/URL]


----------



## ekim68

OpenAI has published the text-generating AI it said was too dangerous to share



> The research lab OpenAI has released the full version of a text-generating AI system that experts warned could be used for malicious purposes.
> 
> The institute originally announced the system, GPT-2, in February this year, but withheld the full version of the program out of fear it would be used to spread fake news, spam, and disinformation. Since then it's released smaller, less complex versions of GPT-2 and studied their reception. Others also replicated the work. In a blog post this week, OpenAI now says it's seen "no strong evidence of misuse" and has released the model in full.


----------



## ekim68

Israeli farmers lament the end of Jordan land deal



> NAHARAYIM (Reuters) - It has been a bitter harvest for some Israeli farmers on the border with Jordan. On Sunday, a 25-year-old deal between the two countries that has allowed them to cultivate land there formally expires.
> 
> Under the deal, part of the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty, two territories straddling the border were recognized as under Jordanian sovereignty but with special provisions allowing Israeli farmers to work the land and visitors to tour the Isle of Peace park in the area.


----------



## ekim68

America's biggest restaurant chains scored on their antibiotic use



> (CNN) -- Many of our favorite fast food and restaurant chains continue to contribute to the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, according to a report released Thursday by advocacy groups.
> 
> The World Health Organization calls the development of bacteria that can't be killed by some of our current medicines "one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today."
> 
> Fifteen of America's favorites received an "F" for their lack of action in reducing the use of beef raised with antibiotics, including Burger King, DQ, Jack In the Box, Pizza Hut, Olive Garden, Chili's, Sonic, Applebee's and the pizza chains of Domino's, Little Caesars and Pizza Hut.


----------



## ekim68

Ultra-dense lithium-sulfur battery doubles range of electric planes



> British company Oxis Energy believes its high capacity lithium-sulfur batteries, which hold up to five times more energy per weight than lithium-ion cells, are ready to vastly increase the range of electric aircraft.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk picks Berlin for Tesla's Europe Gigafactory



> Elon Musk said Tuesday during an awards ceremony in Germany that Tesla's European gigafactory will be built in the Berlin area.
> 
> Musk was on stage to receive a Golden Steering Wheel Award given by BILD.
> 
> "There's not enough time tonight to tell all the details," Musk said during an on stage interview with Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess. "But it's in the Berlin area, and it's near the new airport."


----------



## ekim68

As GitHub's Conference Begins, Five Employees Resign Over ICE Contract



> At least five GitHub employees have quit their jobs in response to the software development platform's $200,000 contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to three sources close to the company.
> 
> The resignations come on the eve of GitHub Universe, the Microsoft-owned software development platform's annual marquee event in San Francisco. Wednesday and Thursday, more than 1,700 engineers, developers, data scientists, product managers, engineering students, and executives from around the world will file into the Palace of Fine Arts to network and talk about the future of software.
> 
> Another topic of discussion will likely be the company's refusal to end its business with ICE.


----------



## ekim68

Windows & Linux get options to disable Intel TSX to prevent Zombieload v2 attacks



> Both Microsoft and the Linux kernel teams have added ways to disable support for Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX).
> 
> TSX is the Intel technology that opens the company's CPUs to attacks via the Zombieload v2 vulnerability.


----------



## ekim68

Wikipedia's co-founder takes on Facebook with ad-free social network



> Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks he can create a better social network. Called WT:Social, the network has no financial association with Wikipedia, but operates on a similar business model: donations, not advertising.
> 
> WT:Social went live last month and is currently nearing 50,000 users. The company is rolling out access slowly; when I signed up, I was approximately number 28,000 on the waitlist. Alternatively, you can pay 13 bucks a month or 100 a year to get access right away.


----------



## ekim68

Experts unlock key to photosynthesis, a find that could help us meet food security demands



> Scientists have solved the structure of one of the key components of photosynthesis, a discovery that could lead to photosynthesis being 'redesigned' to achieve higher yields and meet urgent food security needs.


----------



## ekim68

The USPTO wants to know if artificial intelligence can own the content it creates



> The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it's asking the public for opinions on the topic. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the _Federal Register_ last month saying it's seeking comments, as spotted by _TorrentFreak__._
> 
> The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it's legal to feed an AI copyrighted material.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus-backed tournament unveils first electric racing aircraft



> (Reuters) - An Airbus-backed air racing tournament unveiled an electric-powered sports aircraft on Sunday, billed as the world's first, as the European planemaker seeks to boost its green aerospace technology.


----------



## ekim68

General election 2019: Labour pledges free broadband for all



> Labour has promised to give every home and business in the UK free full-fibre broadband by 2030, if it wins the general election.
> 
> The party would nationalise part of BT to deliver the policy and introduce a tax on tech giants to help pay for it.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing abandons its failed fuselage robots on the 777X, handing the job back to machinists



> After enduring a manufacturing mess that spanned six years and cost millions of dollars as it implemented a large-scale robotic system for automated assembly of the 777 fuselage, Boeing has abandoned the robots and will go back to relying more on its human machinists.


----------



## ekim68

Welcome to China. You Probably Can't Buy Anything, Though.



> BEIJING -- On her first trip to China, 30-year-old Courtney Newnham from Portland, Ore., eagerly lined up at a street pushcart to buy a skewer of candied hawthorn berries, a traditional snack.
> 
> Then she realized nobody was giving the pushcart guy money. "Everyone was just scanning and walking away, and I was like, 'Wait, what?' " she said. She left empty-handed.
> 
> China was never an easy place for tourists, but lately just about everything seems to have gone square-shaped -- as in the payment-app QR code needed to unlock much of the Middle Kingdom.


----------



## ekim68

Climate change: Firms failing to tackle crisis will be delisted from stock exchange, Labour says



> Companies that fail to act on the climate change they cause will be axed from the stock exchange, under radical Labour plans.
> 
> John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, pledged his government would ensure firms are "pulling their weight" to tackle the "existential threat" to the planet.
> 
> And he warned: "For those companies not taking adequate steps under Labour they will be delisted from the London Stock Exchange."


----------



## ekim68

Antivirus vendors and non-profits join to form 'Coalition Against Stalkerware'



> Ten organizations today announced the creation of the Coalition Against Stalkerware, the first global initiative of its kind, with the sole purpose of fighting against stalkerware.
> 
> Also known as spouseware, stalkerware is a smaller category of the spyware class. Stalkerware refers to apps that abusive partners install on the devices of their loved ones without their knowledge or consent.


----------



## ekim68

Russian domestic violence: Women fight back



> Two years ago, many Russians were shocked when the parliament significantly reduced penalties for domestic violence. Since then, women have been fighting back - demanding new legislation to restrain abusers, demonstrating in support of three sisters who took the law into their own hands, and finding new ways of tackling outdated attitudes on gender.


----------



## ekim68

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Police Can't Force You to Tell Them Your Password



> The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a forceful opinion today holding that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects individuals from being forced to disclose the passcode to their devices to the police. In a 4-3 decision in _Commonwealth v. Davis_, the court found that disclosing a password is "testimony" protected by the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination.


----------



## ekim68

Ultrasensitive protein method lets scientists ID someone from a single strand of hair



> A new forensic technique could have criminals-and some prosecutors-tearing their hair out: Researchers have developed a method they say can identify a person from as little as 1 centimeter of a single strand of hair-and that is eight times more sensitive than similar protein analysis techniques. If the new method ever makes it into the courtroom, it could greatly expand the ability to identify the people at the scene of a crime.


----------



## ekim68

Billionaire-Funded Criminal Justice Reform Actually Expands Carceral System



> As debate over how much influence the über-rich should have over U.S. public policy heats up, Texas billionaire John Arnold recently stepped in with a curious defense of fellow billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft fame.
> 
> Gates, the second-richest person in the world, according to _Forbes_, with a net worth of $96.5 billion, came under scrutiny for his prickly, even defensive comments on presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren's plan for a new tax on the super-wealthy. He said it would stifle business innovation. Gates later hedged queries about his presidential preference, saying he would vote for "the most professional" candidate.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen Axes All Non-Electric Racing Programs Worldwide



> Volkswagen announced Friday that it will discontinue all of its motorsport activities outside of electric vehicles. The Volkswagen factory will no longer support racing efforts powered by internal combustion engines, which includes halting the development of a new Golf GTI TCR car.


----------



## ekim68

DOD joins fight against 5G spectrum proposal, citing risks to GPS



> The Department of Defense has weighed in against a proposal before the Federal Communications Commission to open the 1 to 2 Gigahertz frequency range-the L band-for use in 5G cellular networks. The reason: segments of that range of radio spectrum are already used by Global Positioning System signals and other military systems.


----------



## ekim68

A Study on Real-Life Tesla Battery Deterioration



> Tesla cars are known for their long range, providing hundreds of miles on a single full charge-but how does the battery hold up after years of use? To find out, we've analysed real-life data submitted by hundreds of car owners to determine how Tesla batteries deteriorate over time.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Cybertruck will get built-in solar charging option, Elon Musk says



> The Tesla Cybertruck will have a solar charging option that can extend its driving range 15 miles a day, Chief Executive Elon Musk said Friday. On top of that, "fold-out solar wings" could increase that extra range to 30 to 40 miles per day, he said.
> 
> "Would love this to be self-powered," Musk tweeted of the Cybertruck solar charging option, adding that the average car in the United States travels 30 miles per day.


----------



## ekim68

How mercenaries are reshaping the battlefield



> Increasingly, nations are deploying private security contractors to troubled and remote parts of the world.
> 
> Beyond the scope of democratic accountability, opaque and operating beyond and around international law - they are proving to be useful agents of diplomacy and proxy wars.
> 
> But there have been well-publicised failures. In 2007, Blackwater contractors killed 17 unarmed Iraqis and injured 24 others. Blackwater went on to change its name to Academi and continues to provide services to the Pentagon around the world.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/smartphone-videos-can-now-be-analyzed-and-used-to-pinpo-1839979803']Smartphone Videos Can Now Be Analyzed and Used to Pinpoint the Location of a Shooter[/URL]



> Complex arrays of microphones are often used by law enforcement and the military to help quickly pinpoint where the sound of gunfire originates. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that videos captured by smartphones can be just as useful for determining the location of a shooter.


----------



## ekim68

He was a baby when his dad died in Afghanistan. He's 18 now, and the war still isn't over.



> Jake Spann and his sisters were the first American kids to lose a parent in Afghanistan. Today, there are hundreds of children of the fallen.


----------



## ekim68

Transport Canada official says 737 MAX MCAS system "must go"



> In a growing line of whistleblowers and skeptics voicing their concerns before the expected re-certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, another rogue agent has emerged. In an email sent to regulators in the U.S., Europe and Brazil, a Transport Canada safety official called for the entire removal of the MCAS system from the 737 MAX. The official believes that the U.S. plane maker should remove the software, largely blamed for the two deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes, before the aircraft is cleared to fly again.


----------



## ekim68

Top ten tech turkeys 2019: The year's absolute worst product and service failures



> It's been an annual custom at _ZDNet_ to point out which products and services from the technology industry win the prize for their sheer incompetence in terms of technical implementation and the spectacularity of their failure -- or because they just plain rubbed us the wrong way.
> 
> This was a banner year.


----------



## ekim68

Dubai is Adding Tesla Cybertrucks to its Police Car Fleet



> The news comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that the oddball electric pickup has already received 250,000 pre-orders.
> 
> Commander-in-Chief of Dubai Police Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri told _Arabian Business_ that the new cars will help enhance security presence in tourist destinations.


----------



## ekim68

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor



> Oracle has finally addressed long standing accusations that it discriminates against and underpays women and minorities by... suing the government department that has repeatedly flagged the issue, claiming it has no authority over Larry and his boys.
> 
> In a lawsuit [PDF] filed Wednesday in a Washington DC district court, Big Red accuses the US Department of Labor of "unprecedented overreach by an executive agency," and claims the agency doesn't have the authority to cut Oracle out of government contracts for its discriminatory practices or sue it for underpaying certain staff.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists turn undersea fiber optic cables into seismographs



> Monitoring seismic activity all over the world is an important task, but one that requires equipment to be at the site it's measuring - difficult in the middle of the ocean. But new research from Berkeley could turn existing undersea fiber optic cables into a network of seismographs, creating an unprecedented global view of the Earth's tectonic movements.


----------



## ekim68

The Biggest News and Health Story in the U.S. That Nobody Paid Attention To



> Air pollution kills. According to the World Health Organization, every year, 7 million people die early because of air pollution - from more strokes, heart attacks, and deadly lung and respiratory infections.


----------



## ekim68

With suction cups and lots of luck, scientists measure blue whale's heart rate



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Using a bright orange electrocardiogram machine attached with suction cups to the body of a blue whale, scientists for the first time have measured the heart rate of the world's largest creature and came away with insight about the renowned behemoth's physiology.


----------



## ekim68

New York warns FedEx to keep their delivery robots off the city's streets



> (CNN)When it comes to robots driving around, navigating the streets and tirelessly delivering packages, who wouldn't be a fan? Well ... New York City, apparently.
> 
> FedEx SameDay Bots, six-wheeled, robots which will deliver packages straight to a customer's door, were seen in the city last week.
> 
> The delivery robot, called Roxo, is not actually being tested in New York, but was visiting the city for a special event, a FedEx spokesperson told CNN.
> 
> Nevertherless, lawyers for the New York City Department of Transportation delivered a cease-and-desist letter to FedEx on Monday, warning that the robots were violating multiple traffic provisions.


----------



## ekim68

Out of the jungle and into a death trap: the fate of Malaysia's last nomadic people



> It swept over the settlement like a plague. First came a fever, then their throats swelled up, their eyes became bloodshot and their lungs rattled with coughing. And then they began to die.
> 
> Over two weeks in May, 15 members of Malaysia's last nomadic people, the Batek, were killed by this mysterious disease, while more than 100 were hospitalised. By the end, only about 20 of the 186 people in the tribe living in their Kuala Koh settlement were left untouched.


----------



## ekim68

What happened after an explosion at a Russian disease research lab called VECTOR?



> At a huge Soviet-era virology campus in Siberia called VECTOR, a sudden, unexpected explosion in September blew out the windows and set parts of a building ablaze. Around the world, people sat up and took notice. Global public health and security officials were concerned the explosion might have affected labs holding dangerous viruses. Biosecurity experts questioned whether it was a deliberate attack, and international security analysts and biodefense experts deliberated how to read the situation-acutely aware that biosafety breaches in a similar facility 40 years ago had caused a large and deadly anthrax outbreak that eventually exposed the Soviet Union's prohibited biowarfare activities.


----------



## ekim68

A Look Inside Porsche's Massive New Taycan Factory



> The Taycan Turbo S boasts 750 horsepower, with an extensive network of charging stations. In North America, Taycan stations are part of the Volkswagen Group initiative called Electrify America, which offers a charge at up to 350 kilowatts at 300 highway locations. Porsche has said it will spend more than €6 billion ($6.6 billion) on electric and sustainable mobility by 2022. And the brand is going big to produce the new electric sedan it's been developing for the past four years: A €700 million factory opened on Sept. 9 will build the Taycan and its CUV variant, the Taycan Cross Turismo.


----------



## ekim68

Indigenous Colombians Escalate Fight to Rescue Ancestral Lands



> The Nasa are one of 102 Indigenous peoples of Colombia who were pushed up into the mountains by European conquest in the 16th century, and later by massive sugarcane plantations. Since 2015, they have been carrying out direct actions in which they cut down cane fields, plant organic crops in their place, and allow the native vegetation to cover additional areas within the same reclaimed lands. They call this action "the liberation of Mother Earth," an initiative that has cost them at least eight lives and approximately 600 evictions by Colombian state security forces trained by the U.S. Southern Command, according to people interviewed.


----------



## ekim68

Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a 'Pirate Bay of Science' Never Goes Down



> It's hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The latest studies and current research huddle behind paywalls unread by those who could benefit. But over the last few years, two sites-Library Genesis and Sci-Hub-have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers.
> 
> The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two "Pirate Bays of Science."


----------



## ekim68

Internet Society says opportunity to sell .org to private equity biz for $1.14bn came out of the blue. Wow, really?




> Anger rises over ten-figure sale of registry


----------



## ekim68

FDA bowed to industry for decades as alarms were sounded over talc



> Since at least the 1970s, the regulatory agency downplayed health concerns about talc in powders and cosmetics, deferring again and again to manufacturers. Only now, as pressure mounts from lawsuits and a Reuters investigation, is the agency stepping up testing.


----------



## ekim68

Flash from the past.. 


The Home Computer Christmas Wars


----------



## ekim68

GM, LG Chem set $2.3 billion electric vehicle battery venture in Ohio



> WARREN, Michigan (Reuters) - General Motors Co (GM.N).and South Korea's LG Chem (051910.KS) said on Thursday they will invest $2.3 billion to set up an electric vehicle battery cell joint venture plant in Ohio, creating one of the world's largest battery facilities.


----------



## ekim68

Study that argued EVs aren't cleaner gets an update



> There are people who object to newfangled technologies that address our reliance on dirty energy. For them, claims like this are irresistible catnip: electric vehicles aren't actually cleaner than their gas-burning counterparts. What a delicious I-told-you-so to those naïve environmentalists! The only problem with these claims is that they aren't true.


----------



## ekim68

Delivery Only: The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders



> Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in pita bread.
> 
> If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, it's a familiar scene. But what's missing here are waiters and customers. Every dish is placed in a to-go box or bag.


----------



## ekim68

Suspected Internet Cable Spy Ship Operating In Americas For Over A Month



> Russia's controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October. She is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables. Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System).


----------



## ekim68

Saudi Arabia ends gender-segregated entrances for restaurants



> RIYADH (Reuters) - Restaurants in Saudi Arabia will no longer need to maintain entrances segregated by sex, the authorities said on Sunday, further eroding some of the world's strictest social rules as sweeping reforms take hold.


----------



## ekim68

The biggest battery breakthroughs of 2019



> Many corners of society stand to gain from advances in battery technology, from automakers, to manufacturers of consumer electronics to all that care about the environment. This year offered a little something for everybody with an interest in this area of science, bringing us tech that could charge electric vehicles in 10 minutes, batteries that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and news that the world's biggest battery is set to get even bigger. Here are the most significant battery breakthroughs of 2019.


----------



## ekim68

The 16 most innovative new companies of the 2010s



> But while the 2010s were, to some extent, dominated by tech legacy names, other companies came forward - and took advantage of the new always-connected public.


----------



## ekim68

The death of the paper ticket for sporting events



> Over the last decade, tickets have transitioned out of the physical realm and, like so many other aspects of our lives, gone digital. Most are now purchased on and delivered to a mobile device, then scanned at the stadium.
> 
> *Why it matters:* Tickets were once mementos, collected like photographs and saved in scrapbooks. They are now barcodes on our phones - convenient as heck and impossible to lose yet, sadly, often forgotten about the moment they're scanned.


----------



## ekim68

World's first all-electric commercial aircraft takes off



> The world's first successful flight of an all-electric commercial aircraft was completed today as a modified six-passenger DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver took to the air from the Fraser River at Harbour Air Seaplanes terminal in Richmond, British Columbia with Harbour Air CEO and founder Greg McDougall at the controls. Operated by Harbour Air and equipped with a by a 750-horsepower (560 kW) magni500 propulsion system built by magniX, it is the first in a planned fleet of all-electric commercial seaplanes.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 named 'best electric car' by Edmunds



> Tesla Inc.'s Model 3 won Edmunds.com's best electric vehicle category, with the car shopping website and industry consultant saying that, for its price, no other electric vehicle "comes close to matching" its appeal.
> 
> Edmunds said its editors selected the 2019 top vehicles based on "extensive" vehicle testing and from a group of finalists that included the highest-ranking vehicles within each category. The winners "represent the very best new vehicles on the road today," Edmunds said on Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

Greeks set to face heavy fines if they don't spend 30 per cent of their income electronically



> Greeks will be hit with a hefty fine if they do not spend almost a third of their income electronically in an unprecedented bid by the new government to stamp out rampant tax evasion.
> 
> The government expects to raise more than €500 million ($808 million) every year from the initiative that will force Greeks to spend 30 per cent of their income electronically, Alex Patelis, the prime minister's chief economic adviser, revealed.


----------



## ekim68

How to stop spam calls right now



> Spam calls drive us all crazy. Here are four ways to stop robocalls and other unsolicited phone calls.


----------



## ekim68

Cities are criminalizing homelessness by banning people from camping in public. That's the wrong approach, report says



> More cities are punishing homeless people for sleeping in public, a new report shows, amid an increase in Americans living on the streets.
> 
> Arresting or ticketing people who have nowhere else to go doesn't help them find permanent housing, according to the National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty report. Instead, policies criminalizing homelessness can make it more difficult to afford and qualify for housing.


----------



## ekim68

Republicans admit it: Senate impeachment trial of Trump will be a total sham



> Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows Donald Trump is guilty. He just doesn't care - McConnell plans to cover it up and doesn't even really care how obvious that is
> 
> All that was made clear from an article published late Wednesday in the Washington Post, in which Senate Republicans admitted that the plan is to rubber-stamp their acquittal of Trump, and their lack of desire to even try to dignify this travesty of justice by pretending to hold a real impeachment trial, as the Constitution demands.


----------



## ekim68

The Verge's gadgets of the decade



> Gadgets in the 2010s were shaped first by the furious race to win the smartphone wars and then a furious race to create new kinds of hardware once it was clear that Apple, Google, and Samsung would dominate phones. And that hardware was tied to software and services like never before - every light bulb the endpoint of a cloud service, every speaker imbued with the voice of the data center's soul.


----------



## ekim68

For some of us getting up there in age....


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous truck carts 40,000 lb of butter coast to coast in the US



> In an illustration of how far self-driving vehicles have come, an autonomous articulated lorry recently drove a refrigerated load of 40,000 lb (18,100 kg) of butter 2,800 mi (4,500 km) across the continental United States. Equipped with a driving technology package by Plus.ai, the truck and its cargo from the Land O' Lakes company made a hub-to-hub journey from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania.
> 
> Self-driving technology has been steadily developing for a number of years, but there are more challenges than just ones of engineering and software. There's also the fact that such machines must operate in the messy world of everyday life with all the baggage and complications that have built up over generations.


----------



## ekim68

Google Maps has now photographed 10 million miles in Street View



> The search giant has also mapped out the parts of the world where 98% of people live, through satellite photos on Google Earth.


----------



## ekim68

Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back



> Millennials have earned a reputation for reshaping industries and institutions - shaking up the workplace, transforming dating culture, and rethinking parenthood. They've also had a dramatic impact on American religious life. Four in ten millennials now say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center. In fact, millennials (those between the ages of 23 and 38) are now almost as likely to say they have no religion as they are to identify as Christian.


----------



## ekim68

AirAsia shutters call centres to go all-in on chatbot and voice AI



> AirAsia has closed its voice call centres in a move the company's chief customer happiness officer Adam Geneave said was "controversial", but embraces the future.
> 
> Speaking at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference recently, Geneave said the future of customer experience is messaging and voice-based artificial intelligence (AI).
> 
> In preparing for this future, AirAsia has gone all-in with its chatbot, Ava.


----------



## ekim68

Supreme Court affirms homeless right to be on public property



> The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Boise would be violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments by enforcing criminal penalties under its anti-camping ordinance when its three homeless shelters are full.


----------



## ekim68

California's high-voltage battle between utilities and rooftop solar could impact electric bills



> A battle over where California will get its renewable power is poised to heat up in coming months - as the thriving rooftop solar industry faces off with the state's most powerful electric utilities.
> 
> At stake is the extent to which solar power will be generated atop homes and businesses, as opposed to using massive solar arrays in the desert and other remote locations.


----------



## ekim68

CRISPR, gravity waves, water on Mars: A decade of discoveries



> From finding the building blocks for life on Mars to breakthroughs in gene editing and the rise of artificial intelligence, here are six major scientific discoveries that shaped the 2010s-and what leading experts say could come next.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90439521/the-weird-wonderful-world-of-y2k-survival-guides-a-look-back']The weird, wonderful world of Y2K survival guides: A look back[/URL]




> Twenty years ago, people thought that bugs might lead to bank failures and plane crashes come January 1, 2000. They didn't. But these books remain amazing.


----------



## ekim68

Nearly 50K U.S. deaths per year linked to opioid use




> The rate of suicides among opioid users has declined while unintentional deaths -- like overdoses -- have increased dramatically.


----------



## ekim68

In rural Colorado, the kids of coal miners learn to install solar panels




> Where the mines once provided steady employment, solar energy now offers jobs for the next generation.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea observes deployment of F-35A fighters in private ceremony



> Dec. 17 (UPI) -- South Korea strategically deployed newly acquired F-35A fighter jets for the first time on Tuesday, but the event was marked without fanfare and no photographs were issued, according to reports.
> 
> South Korea's air force has received a total of 13 F-35A stealth fighters in 2019 and is expected to receive a total of 40 aircraft by 2021, Yonhap reported.


----------



## ekim68

Executive dies, taking investor cryptocurrency with him. Now they want the body exhumed



> The CEO of Quadriga was the only one who could access user funds, but claims of his death have not satisfied everyone.


----------



## ekim68

New water-splitting process could kick-start "green" hydrogen economy



> Australian scientists claim they've worked out a much cheaper, more efficient way to split hydrogen out of water, using easily sourced iron and nickel catalysts instead of expensive, rare ruthenium, platinum and iridium catalysts favored by current large-scale hydrogen producers, which are literally thousands of times more expensive.
> 
> Much is being made of the developing "hydrogen economy" idea, in which compressed hydrogen fuels will become an energy source as common as gasoline, and fuel cell cars will take a place alongside combustion engines and electric vehicles in the transport mix.


----------



## ekim68

Faced With Proof Colleges Scammed Students, DeVos Insists Students Are the Con Artists



> DeVos already has expressed this week her continuing concerns about an epidemic of fraud and abuse in the for-profit college sector. Unfortunately, DeVos seems to believe the con artists are not the for-profit college operators who have been caught, over and over, ripping off students and deceiving regulators, but rather the veterans, single mothers, immigrants, and other students who attend these schools.


----------



## ekim68

8-year-old is top YouTuber again, with $26 million in earnings



> The highest-earning YouTuber this year is once again Ryan Kaji, the 8-year-old star of the Ryan's World channel who's the main talent for a small media empire that pulled in an estimated $26 million.


----------



## ekim68

Virginia has big plans for electric school buses in 2020




> The buses will store excess power and return it to the grid when needed.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street's Machine of Silence Stopped a #MeToo Revolution



> The finance industry apologizes every now and then, but it hasn't caught up with the times.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Justice Department and FCC fight state effort to block merger of Sprint, T-Mobile



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission filed in court on Friday to support a merger of T-Mobile (TMUS.O) and Sprint (S.N), the third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers.
> 
> A group of state attorneys general has asked a judge to stop the $26 billion deal, saying it would lead to higher prices for customers. The case is being heard in federal court in New York and could wrap up on Friday.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce unveils electric plane to chase new speed record



> Roll-Royce has unveiled what it hopes will be the world's fastest all-electric aircraft. At Gloucestershire Airport in England, the company presented the single-passenger, zero-emissions ACCEL project plane that is predicted to reach a top speed of over 300 mph (480 km/h) early next year.
> 
> In the world of electric aircraft, development is similar to what we see in electric cars. In both cases, the technology is progressing from two opposite directions. On the one hand, some engineers are starting from low-performance electric airplanes and working their way up but on the other hand, there are those who are going for the high-performance craft that they can scale down into something more practical.


----------



## ekim68

A major funder of the anti-vaccine movement has made millions selling natural health products



> The nation's oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group often emphasizes that it is supported primarily by small donations and concerned parents, describing its founder as the leader of a "national, grass roots movement."
> 
> But over the past decade a single donor has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center, accounting for about 40 percent of the organization's funding, according to the most recent available tax records. That donor, osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, has amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines.


----------



## ekim68

The infinity war



> We say we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war?


----------



## ekim68

China Is About to Fire Up Its 'Artificial Sun' in Quest for Fusion Energy



> China is about to start operation on its "artificial sun"-a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun.
> 
> If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy.


----------



## ekim68

Accountability Is Nowhere To Be Found For Foxconn's Wisconsin Head Fake



> If you recall, the state of Wisconsin had originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew to $4.5 billion, the promised factory began to shrink further and further to the point where nobody is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90446468/apple-wants-to-bypass-carriers-and-beam-internet-data-directly-to-iphones-via-satellites']Apple wants to bypass carriers and beam internet data directly to iPhones via satellites[/URL]



> Lookout Verizon, AT&T, and any other carrier out there: Apple is working on a way to bypass carriers and beam internet and other data directly to iPhones. That's according to a report from _Bloomberg_ that says the initiative is "a company priority" for Tim Cook.


----------



## ekim68

Shock treatment removes nuclear contaminants from reactor waste water



> A new technique developed by researchers at MIT uses shock waves to remove radioactive contaminants from nuclear reactor wastewater. Called shock electrodialysis, the cleansing process separates waste products from the power plant's coolant system for disposal, while the water can be recycled instead of replaced.





> So far, the technique has been used to remove 99.5 percent of the radioactive cobalt and cesium from simulated wastewater that also contains boric acid and lithium, which are left behind. This means that up to two-thirds of the water can be recycled. The process is scalable and MIT says that it can not only be used to clean reactor cooling systems, but also for large-scale applications like removing lead from drinking water.


----------



## ekim68

The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money.



> In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.


----------



## ekim68

'Advertising breaks your spirit': the French cities trying to ban public adverts



> For decades France has had one of the most well-organised anti-advertising movements in the world, ranging from guerrilla protests with spray-cans to high-profile court cases. But now the boom in what is artfully called "digital-out-of-home advertising" - eye-catching video screens dotted across urban areas, from train platforms to shopping centres - has sparked a new spate of French protests, civil disobedience and petitions.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese criminal gangs spreading African swine fever to force farmers to sell pigs cheaply so they can profit



> Chinese criminals have been exploiting the country's African swine fever crisis by intentionally spreading the disease to force farmers to sell their pigs for a low price before smuggling the meat and selling it on as healthy stock, state media has reported.


----------



## ekim68

Why Hedge Funds Are Folding



> Liquidations are on pace to exceed last year's total.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla's new electrolyte solvent patent is a step towards a 1 million-mile battery



> A newly published patent from Tesla aims to bring the company's idea for a one-million mile battery to life by using numerous electrolyte additives to increase the longevity and performance of its lithium-ion cells.


----------



## ekim68

China to complete Beidou competitor to GPS with new launches



> BEIJING (AP) - China said Friday its Beidou Navigation Satellite System that emulates the U.S. Global Positioning System will be competed with the launch of its final two satellites in the first half of next year.


----------



## ekim68

Turkey unveils first fully homemade car in $3.7 billion bet on electric



> ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey unveiled its first fully domestically-produced car on Friday, saying it aimed to eventually produce up to 175,000 a year of the electric vehicle in a project expected to cost 22 billion lira ($3.7 billion) over 13 years.


----------



## ekim68

Lies, Damned Lies, and Recycling



> Have you heard the news? Recycling is dead-or close to it. China no longer wants our trash and its neighbors are following suit, shedding the region's undesirable role as a dumping ground for the Global North. This reversal was several years in the making, but after decades of offshoring our low-quality recyclables and generally neglecting our domestic waste infrastructure, American towns and cities have proved woefully ill-equipped to handle the logjam of unwanted material. As municipal waste commissioners and their private industry counterparts scramble to find alternatives, many of the items collected in blue and green bins are being discreetly rerouted into landfills and incinerators, extinguishing any last pretense that recycling can alleviate our ballooning waste footprint.


----------



## ekim68

Fossil Fuel Knocks the Wind Out of Renewable Energy Movement in Ohio



> With no shortage of wide-open land, Ohio is ripe for a transition to renewable energy, but instead the state has become a hotbed for corporate-driven attacks on wind energy. As a result of increasingly restrictive laws on renewables, the state was recently ranked second to last among U.S. states in its renewable energy generation, with only 2.3 percent of its energy generated through renewable sources.
> 
> A closer look at the workings of the anti-wind-energy movement in Ohio offers a glimpse of the dynamics that are also at work to suppress wind energy generation elsewhere throughout the country.


----------



## ekim68

How Oil Companies Avoided Environmental Accountability After 10.8 Million Gallons Spilled



> Louisiana still hasn't finished investigating 540 oil spills after Hurricane Katrina. The state is likely leaving millions of dollars in remediation fines on the table - money that environmental groups say they need as storms get stronger.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon is looking into tech that can identify you using the veins in your hand



> What if you could pay for your groceries using your veins?
> 
> Amazon filed a patent for technology that could identify you by scanning the wrinkles in the palm of your hand and by using a light to see beneath your skin to your blood vessels. The resulting images could be used to identify you as a shopper at Amazon Go stores.


----------



## ekim68

More Climate Lawsuits Could Spur Federal Legislation and a Just Transition



> When, after two hours of testimony, the Honolulu City Council unanimously passed a resolution to initiate legal action against fossil fuel conglomerates and corporate entities, it became the latest of over a dozen municipalities, cities, counties and one state to sue Big Oil for climate change-related damages.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://electrek.co/2019/12/27/los-angeles-considers-making-uber-and-lyft-go-all-electric/']Los Angeles considers making Uber and Lyft go all-electric[/URL]



> In November, Los Angeles-based clean technology leaders announced its Zero Emissions 2028 Roadmap 2.0. At the time, Mayor Eric Garcetti called for a 25% reduction in air pollution by 2028. Today the Financial Times is reporting that Los Angeles may now force Uber and Lyft to use electric cars.
> 
> Mayor Garcetti said:
> 
> "We have the power to regulate car share. We can mandate and are looking closely at mandating that any of those vehicles in the future be electric."
> 
> The city's 2028 green plan includes purchasing more electric buses, and EVs for the city's municipal fleet. Electric vehicles would account for 30% of all light-duty passenger vehicles on the road and at least 80% of all vehicles sold. The city may end up deploying America's first electric fire engine.


----------



## ekim68

Social media surveillance drives 2019 drop in global internet freedom



> An annual report tracking internet freedom across the world has found global declines for the ninth consecutive year. Underpinned by domestic election interference and social media surveillance, the report identified internet freedom deterioration in more than half of the 65 countries assessed.
> 
> Titled Freedom on the Net, this annual report is published by Freedom House, a non-governmental organization promoting democracy and civil rights. Freedom House is primarily US Government funded, however, since its founding in 1941, it has attempted to track the ebb and flow of global freedoms from an apolitical standpoint.


----------



## ekim68

Public Domain Day 2020



> On January 1, 2020, works from 1924 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee.


----------



## ekim68

How the On-Demand Economy Reshaped Cities




> Since 2010, a slew of on-demand companies and technologies have managed to use consumer data to transform the commercial significance of urban living.


----------



## ekim68

The Verge's gadgets of the decade



> TheThe story of technology in the 2010s is the story of gadgets going from the corners of our lives to everywhere all the time. The tools to create and consume culture are omnipresent now, offering us incredible new capabilities but also demanding that we care for them more than any consumer products in history.


----------



## ekim68

Amid shut-off woes, a beacon of energy



> A Native American tribe has insulated itself from California's blackouts by creating a microgrid utility


----------



## ekim68

Palau is first country to ban 'reef toxic' sun cream



> The Pacific nation of Palau has become the first country to ban sun cream that is harmful to corals and sea life.
> 
> From Wednesday, sun cream that includes common ingredients, including oxybenzone, is not allowed to be worn or sold in the country.


----------



## ekim68

He told police he was stabbed for being Jewish. Then his Apple Watch caught him in a lie.



> A 26-year-old man faked his own stabbing at the West Bloomfield synagogue where he worked and then reported he was attacked because of his Jewish faith, authorities say.
> 
> Now Sean Samitt is facing a felony charge of filing a false police report, according to West Bloomfield Police.
> 
> Police said Samitt's Apple Watch helped them solve the case.


----------



## ekim68

The future belongs to the middle-aged



> THE 1960s WERE a great decade for anthems of generational takeover. Songs like "The Times They are a-Changin'" by Bob Dylan, "My Generation" by The Who and "Five to One" by the Doors did not just rail against the middle-aged and old-they actually predicted their ousting. The singers were confident about this partly because of demography. America was a young country in 1965, with a median age of 28, and was getting younger. As Jim Morrison put it in "Five to One": "They got the guns/But we got the numbers."
> 
> Well, the times they have a-changed. The median American is now 38, the median non-Hispanic white American six years older than that. The world is rapidly going the same way. Although some countries are still extremely youthful-the median age in Niger is 15-almost all are ageing. Humanity as a whole is already older than America was in the mid-1960s. In 2020, for the first time in history, the median person will be older than 30.


----------



## ekim68

For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity



> Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days - and it's not because they're antiques.
> 
> Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren't as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.


----------



## ekim68

Finland to introduce four-day working week and six-hour days




> Finland





> 's new Prime Minister has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule that would involve a four-day week and six-hour days.
> 
> Sanna Marin, the youngest female head of government in the world , has announced the intention to trial the initiative, which she claims could be "the next step" in working life.


----------



## ekim68

US finally prohibits ISPs from charging for routers they don't provide



> A new US law prohibits broadband and TV providers from charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers have provided themselves.
> 
> Even by the low customer-service standards of the cable and telecom industries, requiring customers to pay a monthly fee for equipment they own is pretty rude. But that's exactly what Frontier Communications does to its customers, as we wrote in July 2019.


----------



## ekim68

Australia's Wildfire Catastrophe Isn't the "New Normal." It's Much Worse Than That.



> Since September, the combination of soaring temperatures and a severe drought has triggered wildfires across Australia that have enveloped more than six times the land burned during California's devastating 2018 wildfire season. The current blazes encompass an area about the size of Scotland and have released an estimated 200 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent to about 40 percent of the country's annual average carbon emissions-into the atmosphere above the state of New South Wales, where the fires have been the most devastating. With more than 100 separate fires still burning, the end isn't anywhere in sight. Some estimates have wildfires continuing for months into 2020.


----------



## ekim68

NYC internet plan aims to provide all New Yorkers with broadband access



> New York City unveiled an ambitious plan Tuesday to bring universal internet access to its 8.5 million residents by partnering with private internet service providers, a move Mayor Bill de Blasio says will help close the digital divide. The Internet Master Plan would create partnerships between the city and ISPs to facilitate permitting processes and developing infrastructure, such as fiber optic cables.


----------



## ekim68

Russian journals retract more than 800 papers after 'bombshell' investigation



> Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The moves come in the wake of several other queries suggesting the vast Russian scientific literature is riddled with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and so-called gift authorship, in which academics become a co-author without having contributed any work.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft launches tool to identify child sexual predators in online chat rooms



> Microsoft has developed an automated system to identify when sexual predators are trying to groom children within the chat features of video games and messaging apps, the company announced Wednesday.
> 
> The tool, codenamed Project Artemis, is designed to look for patterns of communication used by predators to target children. If these patterns are detected, the system flags the conversation to a content reviewer who can determine whether to contact law enforcement.


----------



## ekim68

A New Protein Source Made From Air Could Be A Planet-Saving Game Changer



> A new protein made from air, water and renewable electricity could revolutionize our food system within the next decade.
> 
> Developed by the Finnish company Solar Foods in a lab just outside Helsinki, the protein ― called Solein ― is made using living microbes that are then grown in a fermenter in a process similar to brewing beer. The microbes are fed with carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen ― all taken from the air.


----------



## ekim68

Despite everything, U.S. emissions dipped in 2019



> Just a week into the new year, and the first estimate of how much planet-cooking pollution the United States belched into the atmosphere last year is already in. It's not the kind of report card you'd be proud to show your parents, but at least it won't leave you in tears.
> 
> Perhaps surprisingly, total emissions fell 2 percent compared with the year before, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm that frequently crunches climate numbers. The reason for that decline? The U.S. is burning less coal.


----------



## ekim68

Activists Reclaimed a Water Source for Palestinians, Showing Co-Resistance Works



> Recently, nonviolent Palestinian activist Kifah Adara drew water from the Ein Albeida spring near her West Bank village of Al-Tuwani for the first time in 15 years. The spring is a natural water source that was used by Palestinian communities in the region for generations, but a decade and a half ago, nearby Israeli settlers started swimming in the spring, which dirtied the water and made it unsuitable for drinking. For years, due to settler violence and intimidation tactics, Palestinians couldn't access the spring at all.
> 
> That all changed after a massive nonviolent direct action in which a group of over 150 Palestinian, Israeli, and diaspora Jewish activists reclaimed and rehabilitated Ein Albeida, thereby enabling Adara to walk from her village to fill water buckets for the first time since her youth.


----------



## ekim68

Pittsburgh's Insurance-Free Doctor Charges $35 Per Visit



> This fall, Dr. Timothy Wong opened the doors to iHealth Clinic, inviting patients for $35 walk-in appointments, seven days a week. The clinic's hours are 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. The sole staffer, he does everything from running the website to answering the phone to cleaning the exam room.


----------



## ekim68

Think Debtors Prisons Are a Thing of the Past? Not in Mississippi.




> How the state's "restitution program" forces poor people to work off small debts.


----------



## ekim68

Australia's Wallabies, Recovering From Fires, Fed by Carrots Falling From the Sky



> Thousands of pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes are falling from the sky in Australia, air-dropped to help feed the Brush-tailed Rock wallabies whose habitats have been devastated by massive brushfires.
> 
> The wallabies, agile marsupials that use their furred tails for balance while climbing trees and vertical rocks, tend to survive fires. But their vegetation is often destroyed, according to the New South Wales government, which on Sunday announced it was coordinating helicopter drops in the state as part of recovery efforts.


----------



## ekim68

Washington And Oregon Fine CenturyLink For Completely Bogus Broadband Fees



> For decades, broadband providers have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price you'll be paying each month. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly okay with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.


----------



## ekim68

As Windows 7 support ends, these are your four options



> If your business is still running on Windows 7, it's time to get serious about how you're going to handle the January 14, 2020 end of support. Here are your four options.


----------



## ekim68

12 Ways You Can Help Australia's Wildfire Victims



> Since Australia's bushfire season began in July 2019, the country has been ravaged by fires that have devastated nearly 18 million acres of land, destroyed thousands of homes, and killed an estimated 1 billion animals. Fortunately, there are ways you can help.


----------



## ekim68

How digital sleuths unravelled the mystery of Iran's plane crash



> Open-source intelligence proved vital in the investigation into Ukraine Airlines flight PS752. Then Iranian officials had to admit the truth


----------



## ekim68

Apple responds to AG Barr over unlocking Pensacola shooter's phone: "No."



> In no uncertain terms, Apple stands by its policy that backdoor access to its devices threatens every user.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://jalopnik.com/there-isnt-a-single-american-car-on-this-2020-list-of-v-1840994309']There Isn't A Single American Car On This 2020 List Of Vehicles People Keep For At Least 15 Years[/URL]



> Once again our friends at _iSeeCars_, have crunched some data to find out which cars are likely to be kept for 15 years or more. This year's list doesn't look terribly different than the one from last year and is basically dominated by only two brands.


----------



## ekim68

As Apple plots to drop iPhone ports, Europe plans law to give all phones same charger



> European lawmakers consider legislation that could be irrelevant by the time it arrives.


----------



## ekim68

China's Growing Influence Around the World



> Research lab AidData (part of W&M Global Research Institute) has compiled a massive database of Chinese-backed projects spanning from 2000-2017. It is a comprehensive look at China's efforts to grow its influence, especially in Africa and South Asia.
> 
> 6 of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are located in Africa. China is the top trading partner on the continent, with the United States sitting in 3rd place.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft makes 'carbon negative' pledge



> Microsoft has pledged to remove "all of the carbon" from the environment that it has emitted since the company was founded in 1975.
> 
> Chief executive Satya Nadella said he wanted to achieve the goal by 2050 .
> 
> To do so, the company aims to become "carbon negative" by 2030, removing more carbon from the environment than it emits.


----------



## ekim68

The Boring Company's Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done



> Elon Musk's Boring Company has made plenty of progress with its Las Vegas Convention Center people mover. The underground tunnel is now about 50% complete and around six football fields in length, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
> 
> The Boring Company officially started tunneling for the people mover after a ceremonial groundbreaking event on November 15. In just two months, the project is nearly halfway completed.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast settles lying allegations, will issue refunds and cancel debts



> Comcast has agreed to issue refunds to 15,600 customers and cancel the debts of another 16,000 people to settle allegations that the cable company lied to customers in order to hide the true cost of service. Comcast will have to pay $1.3 million in refunds.


----------



## ekim68

For the first time, the Alarmed are now the largest of Global Warming's Six Americas



> Nearly six in ten (58%) Americans are now either "Alarmed" or "Concerned" about global warming. From 2014 to 2019, the proportion of "Alarmed" nearly tripled.


----------



## ekim68

Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election - And We're Not Ready

*



Anthony Ferrante had just

Click to expand...

*


> arrived for work at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, when the first attack hit. Around 7 a.m., internet service went out across the United States and parts of Europe. Reddit, Netflix, and _The New York Times _website wouldn't load. Ferrante couldn't check Twitter for updates because that was down too. "No one knew what it was," he says. "It was definitely chaotic."
> 
> It was Friday, October 21st, 2016. In two weeks, Americans would pick a new president. When Ferrante, a director in the White House's cybersecurity team, realized the internet had gone dark across the country, he feared the worst. Ferrante thought he was witnessing a dry run for an attack on the election.


----------



## ekim68

College Degrees Used to Make Families Wealthier. That's No Longer True



> The high cost of education and soaring student loan debt has choked off the net worth of younger families.


----------



## ekim68

Big Oil's Plan B is already in the pipeline: More plastic



> As public concern about plastic pollution rises, consumers are reaching for canvas bags, metal straws, and reusable water bottles. But while individuals fret over images of oceanic garbage gyres, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are pouring billions of dollars into new plants intended to make millions more tons of plastic than they now pump out.
> 
> Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic - which is made from oil and gas, and their byproducts - to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels, analysts say.


----------



## ekim68

Frontier, an ISP in 29 states, plans to file for bankruptcy



> Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy within two months, Bloomberg reported last week.
> 
> The telco "is asking creditors to help craft a turnaround deal that includes filing for bankruptcy by the middle of March, according to people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg wrote.


----------



## ekim68

Newly understood protein raises hopes of advanced arthritis treatments



> Our body's immune cells are highly effective patrol officers, springing into action when a foreign threat invades and poses a risk to our well-being. But they can be prone to cases of mistaken identity, incorrectly attacking healthy cells and joints to give rise to what we know as autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Scientists have just discovered a new mechanism that can be key in regulating these immune attacks, raising new hopes of drugs that can protect against joint inflammation and the ailments it can bring.


----------



## ekim68

Loot boxes push kids into gambling, says England's NHS mental health director



> Claire Murdoch, mental health director of England's National Health Service (NHS), has reignited the loot box controversy with a report claiming they push young people into "under the radar" gambling.
> 
> "Frankly no company should be setting kids up for addiction by teaching them to gamble on the content of these loot boxes", she said. "No firm should sell to children loot box games with this element of chance, so yes those sales should end."


----------



## ekim68

EV charging technologies to be tested across Europe



> Renault and partners have announced the launch of the INCIT-EV project, where innovative electric vehicle charging technologies will be installed and evaluated in various locations throughout Europe.
> 
> Groupe Renault says it responded to a European Commission call for new ideas by forming a 33-member consortium to test EV charging innovations. Originally announced last year, and now officially launched, the INCIT-EV project kicks off this month and will run until December 2023, and will be split into two parts.
> 
> Phase 1 will gather data on user needs and requirements, and then assess electric vehicle charging technologies and infrastructure integration. From mid-2022, Phase 2 will roll out seven tech demonstrators to sites across Europe.


----------



## ekim68

These Billionaires Made Their Fortunes by Trying to Stop Climate Change



> Four shareholders in China's giant supplier of electric-vehicle batteries have built a combined fortune of $17 billion. An Australian businessman has created a $7 billion net worth from recycling. A ten-figure stake in a hydrogen fuel cell trucking company has minted an American billionaire.


----------



## ekim68

Traditional TV Enters Its Final Death Spiral



> For the better part of the decade, even Wall Street stock jocks have acknowledged that the current pay TV ecosystem simply isn't sustainable. Broadcasters continue to demand higher and higher rates for the same programming, driving up costs for consumers. Those consumers are then fleeing to the exits in record numbers; either migrating to new streaming video alternatives or over the air antennas. Many executives' response to the problem? Mindlessly double down on most of the behaviors that brought them here, namely, mindless consolidation and price hikes.


----------



## ekim68

India's democracy may not have much time left



> The attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University shows that the ideological civil war in India has taken a new violent turn.


----------



## ekim68

Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group



> The white supremacist group the Base has been a target of FBI raids and its members accused of planning a race war. The Guardian can now reveal the identity of its secretive leader


----------



## ekim68

Free Software Foundation suggests Microsoft 'upcycles' Windows 7... as open source



> More than 10 years on from its campaign to persuade users to dump Windows 7 for a non-proprietary alternative, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a petition to urge Microsoft to open-source the recently snuffed software.


----------



## ekim68

These are the favorite charitable causes of the world's wealthiest families - and climate change is NOT one of them



> Climate change has captured the attention of scientists, the media and global economic leaders at Davos, but it doesn't appear to be a top priority for billionaire philanthropists.
> 
> Wealthy donors say they donate the most money to education; health; and arts, culture and sports, according to a new report from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Campden Wealth. "Despite increasing global concern for climate change, the environment receives a scant 8% of the giving portfolios in this survey," the authors said in a statement.


----------



## ekim68

Cruise launches Origin autonomous electric ride-share shuttle



> A future where people are transported around cities and urban areas without having to so much as touch a steering wheel is getting ever closer. Vehicles that can drive themselves have already moved from limited campus trials to public roads. And it won't be too long before hailing a self-driving ride-share pod for the trip to work will be the done thing. Startup Cruise has revealed its vision for just such an autonomous shuttle - the Origin.
> 
> Though not a particularly common sight, self-driving cars have been rolling themselves around city streets across the globe for a while now. Earlier this month, Waymo announced that its fleet had clocked up a total of 20 million real-world miles on public roads.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With...More Price Hikes



> Cord cutting continued to set records in 2019 despite years of cable and broadcast executives trying to claim the trend _wasn't actually happening_. Now that they're finally acknowledging the threat is real, many of these same executives are doubling down on the kind of behavior that brought them to this point in the first place.


----------



## ekim68

Porsche's first Super Bowl ad in 23 years is for the electric Taycan



> It's one of the first big game ads that doesn't treat EVs as novelties.


----------



## ekim68

America's Radioactive Secret




> Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America


----------



## ekim68

The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org



> On Friday, activists will take to the streets in Los Angeles to attempt to prevent a consequential giveaway of an obscure piece of technological architecture. A newly formed private equity firm named Ethos Capital is bidding to take over the registry that handles the .org domain, which is reserved for nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Ethos would be able to raise prices without limit on website owners, and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs, which include practically every human rights organization in the world.


----------



## ekim68

GM to invest $2.2 billion at Detroit factory to make electric trucks, SUVs



> General Motors Co will invest $2.2 billion in its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant to build electric trucks and sport utility vehicles, a move that would create 2,200 jobs, the No.1 U.S. automaker said on Monday.
> 
> The company said its first electric truck will be a pickup, whose production will begin late next year and will be followed by a self-driving vehicle, Cruise Origin.


----------



## ekim68

Albatrosses Outfitted With GPS Trackers Detect Illegal Fishing Vessels




> By utilizing the majestic birds to monitor huge swaths of the sea, law enforcement and conservationists could keep better tabs on illicit activities


----------



## ekim68

CRISPR gene-editing corrects muscular dystrophy in pigs



> Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is one of the most common and most devastating muscular diseases, greatly reducing patients' quality of life and life expectancy. Now, researchers in Germany have managed to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to correct the condition in pigs, bringing the treatment ever closer to human trials.


----------



## ekim68

With 130-Mile Coast, New Jersey Marks a First in Climate Change Fight



> Builders will be forced to take climate change, including rising sea levels, into account to win government approval for projects.


----------



## ekim68

One of the biggest impacts of Brexit? An end to freedom of movement.



> For a generation, for more than four decades, Londoners have been able to pack off to Lisbon, Berliners to Birmingham, Mancunians to Milan. No paperwork, no visas, no job offer needed on the other side - just buy a ticket and go.
> 
> Freedom of labor - beside the free movement of goods, capital and services - was one the biggest, boldest ideas of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. It was an audacious gambit that the people who had torn themselves to pieces in two world wars, who spoke dozens of languages, should be able to settle across a borderless continent.


----------



## ekim68

Google to translate and transcribe conversations in real time



> Google on Tuesday unveiled a feature that'll let people use their phones to both transcribe and translate a conversation in real time into a language that isn't being spoken. The tool will be available for the Google Translate app in the coming months, said Bryan Lin, an engineer on the Translate team.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla posts first annual profit



> Tesla posted its first annual profit, easily topping Wall Street's forecasts in the final three months of 2019.


----------



## ekim68

Study of YouTube comments finds evidence of radicalization effect



> Research presented at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona today supports the notion that YouTube's platform is playing a role in radicalizing users via exposure to far-right ideologies.


----------



## ekim68

3 industries that won't exist in 20 years



> Insurance, transportation, and retail will be absorbed into broader, horizontal ecosystems, says Tata Consultancy Services.


----------



## ekim68

Lab turns trash into valuable graphene in a flash



> Scientists are using high-energy pulses of electricity to turn any source of carbon into turbostratic graphene in an instant. The process promises environmental benefits by turning waste into valuable graphene that can then strengthen concrete and other composite materials.


----------



## ekim68

Which New Electric Vehicle Can Take on Tesla?



> Every year, EV proponents insist that Americans are _this close_ to adopting electric cars en masse, the way they adopt wayward dogs and cats. Those predictions were dead wrong, again, in 2019. Oh, sales of pure battery EVs (not counting plug-in hybrids) did rise by 20 percent, to nearly 253,000 cars. Problem is, that was still less than 1.5 percent of a $462 billion new-car market that attracted more than 17 million buyers for a record fifth consecutive year.


----------



## ekim68

Spinal injury researchers find a sweet spot for stem cell injections



> As they do in many areas of medicine, stem cells hold great potential in treating injured spinal cords, but getting them where they need to go is a delicate undertaking. Scientists at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) are now reporting a breakthrough in this area, demonstrating a new injection technique in mice they say can deliver far larger doses of stem cells and avoid some of the dangers of current approaches.


----------



## ekim68

A new bill could punish web platforms for using end-to-end encryption



> The bill doesn't lay out specific rules. But the committee - which would be chaired by the Attorney General - is likely to limit how companies encrypt users' data. Large web companies have moved toward end-to-end encryption (which keeps data encrypted for anyone outside a conversation, including the companies themselves) in recent years. Facebook has added end-to-end encryption to apps like Messenger and Whatsapp, for example, and it's reportedly pushing it for other services as well. US Attorney General William Barr has condemned the move, saying it would prevent law enforcement from finding criminals, but Facebook isn't required to comply. Under the EARN IT Act, though, a committee could require Facebook and other companies to add a backdoor for law enforcement.


----------



## ekim68

Rust offers a cheap way to filter arsenic-poisoned water



> Inspired by natural processes in soil that bind contaminants and filter them out, van Genuchten has been using iron oxides such as rust, which are abundant in soil, to filter out arsenic from groundwater. He leads experiments at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory that investigate low-cost methods of treating groundwater using only small amounts of electricity and steel or iron. The team's most recent paper, which compares the arsenic-removing performance of different forms of rust has been published in _Water Research_.


----------



## ekim68

Instagram's Search Results For Vaccines Are A Public Health Nightmare



> It's been almost a year since Instagram pledged to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on its platform. But today, it continues to do the exact opposite.


*
*


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Rust offers a cheap way to filter arsenic-poisoned water


I suppose it must act as a chelating agent.


----------



## ekim68

Electric cars grab 44% market share in Norway in January



> OSLO (Reuters) - Electric cars accounted for a 44.3% share of Norway's new car sales in January, rising year on year but falling short of the 50-60% range the industry forecast for 2020, data from the Norwegian Road Federation showed on Monday.
> 
> In January 2019 electric cars made up 37.8% of sales in the Nordic country and climbed in subsequent months to an overall 42.4% market share for the full year.
> 
> As it seeks to phase out the sale of combustion-engine cars by the middle of this decade, oil-producer Norway has exempted battery-powered vehicles from taxes imposed on those running on petrol and diesel.


----------



## ekim68

Only three of the Top 100 international airports pass basic security checks



> Only three of the world's Top 100 international airports pass basic security checks, according to a report published last week by cyber-security firm ImmuniWeb.
> 
> The three are the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, the Helsinki Vantaa Airport in Finland, and the Dublin International Airport in Ireland.
> 
> According to ImmuniWeb, these three "may serve a laudable example not just to the aviation industry but to all other industries as well."


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90459676/this-tesla-product-will-be-more-even-important-than-the-cybertruck']Forget the Cybertruck: This is the most important Tesla product no one is talking about[/URL]



> In the past year, Elon Musk and Tesla have fascinated the world with new innovations like the Tesla Cybertruck. There is excitement about most new Tesla products, but one hugely important one has been largely overlooked. With far less fanfare and no stage performance by Musk, Tesla started offering car insurance last September. In the long run, this is going to have a major impact on most of our lives-perhaps even greater than Tesla's more eye-catching innovations.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter is finally fighting back against deepfakes and other deceptive media



> On Tuesday, Twitter announced changes to its policy around posts that are deceptively manipulated - including "deepfakes," or AI-altered videos that distort reality - ahead of the 2020 elections.


----------



## ekim68

California is driving the EV revolution



> EVs are quiet. Efficient. Cheap to maintain. They produce no exhaust emissions. And run for millions of miles.
> 
> California has ambitious climate and air quality goals.


----------



## ekim68

Strategy Analytics: Apple Watch Outsells the Entire Swiss Watch Industry in 2019



> BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, Apple Watch outsold the entire Swiss watch industry by a huge margin in 2019. Apple Watch shipped 31 million units worldwide in 2019, compared with 21 million for all Swiss watch brands combined. Swiss companies, like Swatch, are losing the smartwatch wars.


----------



## ekim68

Capture Carbon in Concrete Made With CO2



> On a vast grassy field in northern Wyoming, a coal-fired power plant will soon do more than generate electricity. The hulking facility will also create construction materials by supplying scientists with carbon dioxide from its exhaust stream.
> 
> A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a system that transforms "waste CO2" into gray blocks of concrete. In March, the researchers will relocate to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, part of the Dry Fork power plant near the town of Gillette. During a three-month demonstration, the UCLA team plans to siphon half a ton of CO2 per day from the plant's flue gas and produce 10 tons of concrete daily.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists unravel mystery of photosynthesis



> Scientists have solved a critical part of the mystery of photosynthesis, focusing on the initial, ultrafast events through which photosynthetic proteins capture light and use it to initiate a series of electron transfer reactions.


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus Update: Russia Blames USA For NCov 2019 Outbreak



> Russian spies are up to their old tricks, this time blaming the United States for unleashing the raging Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) on China in a Trump-sanctioned effort to cripple the latter's economy. They contend 2019-nCoV is really an American biowarfare weapon developed by U.S. scientists and covertly launched by American spies to destroy rival China.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90462377/yahoo-and-tumblr-lost-33-of-their-web-traffic-in-the-last-several-years']Yahoo and Tumblr lost 33% of their web traffic in the past several years[/URL]



> If there were any major sites that took a web traffic pummeling in 2019 it was Yahoo and Tumblr. That's according to a new report from SimilarWeb. The report looks back on key web trends in 2019. Among those trends were some pretty bad news for some sites.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Pay is on pace to account for 10% of all global card transactions



> Apple's mobile wallet is gobbling up a growing chunk of card payments around the world. As the service grows, it's becoming a greater challenge to rivals like PayPal and attracting the attention of competition watchdogs.
> 
> Apple Pay accounts for about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to handle 1-in-10 such payments by 2025, according to recent trend data compiled by Bernstein, a research firm.


----------



## ekim68

People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia



> It was something Tom Pollak had heard whispers about-an odd factoid, referred to now and again, usually with bewilderment: No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.


----------



## ekim68

From models of galaxies to atoms, simple AI shortcuts speed up simulations by billions of times



> Modeling immensely complex natural phenomena such as how subatomic particles interact or how atmospheric haze affects climate can take many hours on even the fastest supercomputers. Emulators, algorithms that quickly approximate these detailed simulations, offer a shortcut. Now, work posted online shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can easily produce accurate emulators that can accelerate simulations across all of science by billions of times.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers find a "consciousness switch" deep in the brain



> Now, researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, appear to have made a bit of a breakthrough. In a study published in the journal _Neuron_, the team showed that at a frequency of 50 Hz, electrical stimulation of the central lateral thalamus, a region once thought of mainly as a relay, amplification and processing station, was able to pull macaque monkeys out of an anesthetized state and elicit normal waking behaviors.


----------



## ekim68

How the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger Legitimizes Monopoly



> Judge Victor Marrero's Tuesday ruling that let T-Mobile take over Sprint just deepened America's already dire corporate concentration crisis. By allowing the nation's third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers to combine, Marrero has dealt a clear blow to competition in the wireless market and empowered all corporations seeking dominance through mergers and acquisitions.


----------



## ekim68

How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables




> The tech giant is engineering a way to encourage its employees to eat healthier - and it might just help the rest of the country


----------



## ekim68

Medicare for All Helps Unions by Taking Health Care Off the Bargaining Table



> To paraphrase Nelson and her advocacy, Medicare for All is popular among organized workers. The 150,000 members of National Nurses United (NNU), the U.S.'s largest union of registered nurses, have organized the charge on behalf of patients and fellow workers. NNU and AFA aren't alone: Over 600 locals, 22 national unions, 44 State AFL-CIOs and 158 Central Labor Councils and Area Labor Federations have endorsed the single-payer legislation. Even with strong support from many rank and file members, some union leaders have shied away from Medicare for All in order to adjust their sails to the political winds at a moment's notice.


----------



## ekim68

A new spin on 3D printing can produce an object in seconds



> 3D printers are great for rapid prototyping and building low-volume, specialized parts, but they sure can take a while. Today's 3D printers might be _called_ "3D printers" but really, the print heads work in 2D. A 3D model is sliced up into hundreds of 2D horizontal layers and slowly built up, one layer at a time. This layer-by-layer process can take hours or even days, but what if we could print the entire model at once? A new technique demonstrated by researchers from Switzerland's Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)-and further detailed in this Nature article- does just that and can print an entire model in seconds.
> 
> The new technique builds a model by hardening a photosensitive resin with a laser, not unlike existing stereolithography (SLA) printers. The big difference here is the application of tomographic techniques, the same used in x-rays and ultrasounds, that allows for rotational printing.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.howtogeek.com/657333/watch-out-this-verizon-smishing-scam-is-crazy-realistic/']Watch Out: This Verizon Smishing Scam Is Crazy Realistic[/URL]



> Text message scams are becoming more common, and the latest scam we've seen is the most sophisticated yet. The scammer impersonates Verizon, sending you an "account security" text message that takes you to a shockingly convincing copy of Verizon's website.
> 
> We opened the link to see the scam in action. Don't try this at home: If you receive a scam message, we recommend against opening any links attached to it. You should also delete the message and block the sender.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW



> TOKYO -- Toyota Motor and Volkswagen each sell 10 million cars, give or take, every year. Tesla delivered about 367,500 in 2019. But when it comes to electronics technology, Elon Musk's scrappy company is far ahead of the industry giants.
> 
> This is the takeaway from Nikkei Business Publications' teardown of the Model 3, the most affordable car in the U.S. automaker's all-electric lineup, starting at about $33,000.


----------



## ekim68

Revived Windows 95 PowerToys lets you create Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts



> Microsoft PowerToys developers say the new keyboard manager will help Linux- and Mac-to-Windows switchers.


----------



## ekim68

Solar aircraft designed to stay aloft for a year makes maiden flight



> A super-endurance unmanned solar-electric aircraft built for year-long flights has completed its maiden run. Built by BAE Systems subsidiary Prismatic, the Persistent High Altitude Solar Aircraft (PHASA-35) took to the air over the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Woomera Test Range in South Australia for its first fully-integrated flight test.


----------



## ekim68

Fast-and-loose culture of esports is upending once staid world of chess



> Grandmasters and upstarts are reinventing the game online, becoming its most visible ambassadors and arguably its first entertainers.


----------



## ekim68

The Green Miles




> Kentucky was devastated for decades by mountaintop removal. Now scientists have figured out a way to undo the damage - one tree at a time.


----------



## ekim68

A new use for McDonald's used cooking oil: 3D printing



> Professor Andre Simpson had a problem. The University of Toronto's Scarborough campus was paying through the nose for a crucial material for its 3D printer. Few would have guessed McDonald's would come to the rescue.


----------



## ekim68

Windows 10 icons are getting an overdue redesign



> Microsoft refreshed Office's icons last year, and now it's Windows 10's turn. The software giant is rolling out updates to the icons for Windows 10's core apps over the months ahead, starting with the Calendar and Mail apps in a new Release Preview for Windows Insiders in the Fast ring.


----------



## ekim68

150K Nature Illustrations Spanning Hundreds of Years Are Now Free Online




> Thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, you can easily peruse rad nature drawings, Charles Darwin's personal library, and many other works in the public domain.


----------



## ekim68

US Gas Pipeline Shut After Ransomware Attack



> A US natural gas facility was forced to shut down operations for two days after becoming infected with commodity ransomware, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has revealed.
> 
> The unnamed "natural gas compression" plant was first targeted with a spear-phishing email, allowing the attacker to access its IT and then pivot to its OT network, according to the technical alert from the DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/ring-barred-cops-from-using-surveillance-to-describe-it-1837380102']Amazon's Ring Barred Cops From Using 'Surveillance' to Describe Its Products[/URL]



> Amazon's home security company Ring quietly removed the term "surveillance" from a statement law enforcement officials provided to local news outlets, according to public records obtained by Gizmodo.


----------



## ekim68

Markets Have ALWAYS Been Rigged, Broken & Manipulated



> Every year the entire global financial system avoids complete and utter collapse the chorus of anger grows louder from a subset of people who claim markets are some combination of broken, rigged and manipulated.
> 
> Markets are untethered from fundamentals and nothing more than a casino.


----------



## ekim68

Australia's wildfires burned 21 percent of the country's temperate forests



> Feb. 25 (UPI) -- New research suggests Australia's devastating wildfires were unprecedented in their scope.
> 
> Analysis conducted by scientists at Western Sydney University's Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment showed approximately 21 percent of Australia's temperate forests burned during the summer of 2019-2020.
> 
> When researchers surveyed historical records for evidence of comparable wildfire seasons -- not just in Australia, but across the globe. They found nothing approaching the scope of Australia's devastation.


----------



## ekim68

First Amendment doesn't apply on YouTube; judges reject PragerU lawsuit



> YouTube is a private forum and therefore not subject to free-speech requirements under the First Amendment, a US appeals court ruled today. "Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said.


----------



## ekim68

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash




> 'It's time to stop pretending they have driverless cars. Because they don't'


----------



## ekim68

'An issue of survival': Why Mozilla welcomes EU attempts to regulate the internet giants




> The web is 'optimised for Chrome, not for independent browsers'


----------



## ekim68

Printing's Not Dead: The $35 Billion Fight Over Ink Cartridges



> The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in the Envy printers made by HP Inc. The 63 Tri-color cartridge may not look like much, but that ink, which needs a refill every 165 pages, is ridiculously valuable. HP's printer supplies business garnered $12.9 billion in sales last year, and the printer division overall represented 63% of the company's profits. Here in the year 2020, proprietary ink cartridges remain important enough to spark a fight worth at least $35 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Humongous Tesla Battery Plant Approved In California Is 10× Bigger Than World's Biggest Battery Plant



> Tesla has been approved to reinvent the Moss Landing power plant in California as a battery power plant. Tesla will be bringing clean and renewable energy into the plant, which will be one of the largest - probably the largest - energy storage facility in the world. In fact, it will be approximately 10× bigger than Tesla's Hornsdale energy storage project (1.2 GWh versus 129 MWh), which was 3× bigger than any other battery storage facility at the time it was built.


----------



## ekim68

FCC Approves Plan to Pay Satellite Companies to Give Up Airwaves



> U.S. regulators approved a plan to pay Intelsat SA and other satellite providers to give up airwaves so they can be redeployed for the fast 5G mobile networks being rolled out.
> 
> The Federal Communications Commission on a 3-2 vote Friday approved Chairman Ajit Pai's plan for as much as $9.7 billion to clear the frequencies, with the money coming from bidders expected to include large telephone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc.


----------



## ekim68

Swinging the Vote?



> Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she's in trouble with 0 percent.
> 
> These aren't poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail's primary inbox in a simple test.
> 
> The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla "big battery" in Australia is becoming a bigger nightmare for fossil fuel power generators



> Tesla's "big battery" utility-scale Powerpack system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia has yielded more than doubled the savings to consumers in 2019 than the year prior as it dominates fossil fuel generators on quicker demand response for the grid.
> 
> Hornsdale Power Reserve saved consumers AUD116 million ($75.78 million) in 2019, a big jump from AUD40 million ($26.14 million) savings in 2018.


----------



## ekim68

The music industry was left for dead a few years ago. Now it's booming again



> New York (CNN Business)The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually extinct. But music has found its white knight: streaming.
> 
> Last year, recorded music revenues in the United States went up by 13% to $11.1 billion - the highest level since 2006. That persuaded Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, two of the biggest music companies that represent stars like Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift, to announce plans to go public.


----------



## ekim68

Vatican backs AI regulations to 'protect people'



> Vatican officials will on Friday release voluntary guidelines for the development and use of artificial intelligence technology, with U.S. tech giants IBM and Microsoft among the first signatories.
> 
> "In order for AI to act as a tool for the good of humanity and the planet, we must put the topic of protecting human rights in the digital era at the heart of public debate," said the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," to be presented during a conference at the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life.


----------



## ekim68

NASA records huge drop in China's pollution after coronavirus outbreak



> As sections of China's workforce grind to a halt to combat the spread of the deadly coronavirus, it appears to be having a dramatic effect on the country's notorious pollution levels. Satellite data has revealed "significant decreases" in nitrogen dioxide over the country, which NASA says is at least "partly related" to the slowdown in economic activity intended to contain the threat.


----------



## ekim68

This tiny electric car looks like a washing machine and costs just $6,600



> (CNN)French automaker Citroën has unveiled the Ami, a tiny electric car that's designed from the outset to be as cheap as possible. The car isn't very fast and it looks a bit like a washing machine, but it only costs €6,000, or the equivalent of about $6,600.
> 
> It would be hard to get a good used car at that price, but the two-seat Ami is barely a car. In fact, Citroën refers to it as a "non-conformist mobility object." It has a top speed of just 45 kilometers an hour, roughly equal to 28 miles per hour. It's powered by a 6 kilowatt, or 8 horsepower, electric motor. For that reason, though, the Ami can be driven by kids as young as 14 in France, or 16 in many other European countries, without a license.


----------



## ekim68

Seven hackers have now made a million dollars each from bug bounties, says HackerOne



> The bug bounty platform doubled in size in just a year. Its new report shows that ethical hacking is becoming a lucrative pastime.


----------



## ekim68

Self-healing potassium batteries: A cheap, long-life rival to lithium



> Lithium is expensive, environmentally questionable in large volumes, and tends to catch on fire from time to time. It's the best solution we've currently got for EV and device battery storage, but other alternatives are starting to surface, and one that could actually make a fair bit of sense is the potassium metal battery.
> 
> As well as being cheap and abundant, potassium tends to be easier to work with, meaning manufacturing costs are lower as well as material costs. Using full potassium metal anodes, batteries can be built with energy densities (both by volume and weight) that are comparable to what lithium offers.


----------



## ekim68

In A 1st, Scientists Use Revolutionary Gene-Editing Tool To Edit Inside A Patient



> For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to edit a gene while the DNA is still inside a person's body.
> 
> The groundbreaking procedure involved injecting the microscopic gene-editing tool into the eye of a patient blinded by a rare genetic disorder, in hopes of enabling the volunteer to see. They hope to know within weeks whether the approach is working and, if so, to know within two or three months how much vision will be restored.


----------



## ekim68

Alzheimer's blood test may replace invasive spinal taps for diagnosis



> Alzheimer's disease is not an easy one to diagnose, with physicians relying on expensive PET scans and fluid sampling to make a decision on a patient's wellbeing. Some exciting advances are being made when it comes to blood-testing, however, that could change the game by offering clearer insights into the disease during its earlier stages. The latest example of this offers a particularly promising pathway forward, with an ability to spot a traditionally hard-to-detect protein called tau, considered a key biomarker of the disease.


----------



## ekim68

Fiat 500 all-electric city car goes up for pre-order



> 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the now iconic Nuova Fiat 500, and the release of a new flavor - the Fiat 500 city car. There were some who thought that this little runabout would make a great around town electric, leading to builds by the likes of EV Adapt and Karabag/Linde. Now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has officially joined the e-mobility party with an all-electric 500.


----------



## ekim68

People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report



> Participants in Ontario's prematurely cancelled basic income pilot project were happier, healthier and continued working even though they were receiving money with no-strings attached.
> 
> That's according to a new report titled Southern Ontario's Basic Income Experience, which was compiled by researchers at McMaster and Ryerson University, in partnership with the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction.


----------



## ekim68

eBay bans sales of face masks, hand sanitizer amid coronavirus price gouging



> The online retailer says it'll also remove listings that mention coronavirus or COVID-19.


----------



## ekim68

Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich



> Investors and clients of the facial recognition start-up freely used the app on dates and at parties - and to spy on the public.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/food-security'] 
 Scientists turn to tech to prevent second wave of locusts in east Africa[/url]



> Researchers use supercomputer to predict potential breeding areas as food security fears grow.


----------



## Professionalgirl

You know what the signs of the times really are? They are prophecies in the bible that are coming true. So far 14 out of 16 prophecies came true. I think the signs of the times are that there is a major increase in deadly diseases spreading globally. These viruses include, Ebola, Covid-19, Bovine TB, Swine (H1N1) Flu, Zoonotic diseases affecting every animal on the face of the earth, Measles, Whooping cough, polio, Meningitis and all other diseases with the potential to kill off most living things are all making a comeback and are extremely out of control. All these diseases are increasing dramatically in strength while antibiotics are becoming no longer effective at combating Bacterial infections like MRSA and flesh eating diseases, strep throat All diseases are included in a world wide outbreaks. That's how I think the world is going to end.


----------



## ekim68

Florida Woman Changed Voters' Party Affiliations, Officials Say



> Cheryl A. Hall falsified 10 registration forms, at least six of which enrolled Democratic and independent voters as Republicans, said the authorities, who are eyeing an additional 109 forms.


----------



## ekim68

The grandfather of distributed computing projects, [email protected], shuts down



> Over the weekend, the people who manage the [email protected] distributed-computing project announced it would be going on hiatus at the end of March. The project was one of the first efforts that successfully convinced home users to donate some of their free computing time to help with research, and its success spawned a large number of related projects.
> 
> While it's on hiatus, users with a fondness for distributed computing might take a look at [email protected], which is trying to figure out the structures of proteins on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.


----------



## ekim68

Are Frequent Flier Miles Killing the Planet?



> In October, a two-line recommendation buried on Page 35 of a report commissioned by the United Kingdom's Committee on Climate Change garnered disproportionate attention in the world of frequent fliers.
> 
> "Introduce a ban on air miles and frequent flier loyalty schemes that incentivize excessive flying," it suggested.
> 
> Message boards and blogs that serve points-obsessed, platinum-status-seeking travelers lit up. "Air miles should be axed to deter frequent fliers, advises report," blared a headline in The Guardian.


----------



## ekim68

Australia's privacy watchdog is suing [URL='https://crunchbase.com/organization/facebook']Facebook  over the Cambridge Analytica data breach[/url]



> Australia's Privacy Act sets out a provision for a civil penalty of up to $1,700,000 to be levied per contravention - and the national watchdog believes there were 311,074 local Facebook users in the cache of ~86M profiles lifted by Cambridge Analytica . So the potential fine here is circa $529BN.


----------



## Brigham

Professionalgirl said:


> You know what the signs of the times really are? They are prophecies in the bible that are coming true. So far 14 out of 16 prophecies came true. I think the signs of the times are that there is a major increase in deadly diseases spreading globally. These viruses include, Ebola, Covid-19, Bovine TB, Swine (H1N1) Flu, Zoonotic diseases affecting every animal on the face of the earth, Measles, Whooping cough, polio, Meningitis and all other diseases with the potential to kill off most living things are all making a comeback and are extremely out of control. All these diseases are increasing dramatically in strength while antibiotics are becoming no longer effective at combating Bacterial infections like MRSA and flesh eating diseases, strep throat All diseases are included in a world wide outbreaks. That's how I think the world is going to end.


Or it could mean that travel is ever increasing. Of course it must be god that is making us travel.


----------



## ekim68

Study finds tropical forests' ability to capture carbon peaked in 1990s



> The ability of the world's tropical forests to sequester carbon dioxide, and by extension play a role in slowing the rate of global warming, is in rapid decline, according to a new study. The research analyzed hundreds of forests around the Amazon and Africa and their ability to capture carbon across the last three decades, finding that it may have actually reached its peak in the 1990s.
> 
> The research was carried out by an international team and led by scientists at the University of Leeds. It looked at 300,000 individual trees over a 30-year period. These trees hailed from 565 tropical forests across Africa and the Amazon, and the scientists used data captured at regular intervals on tree height and tree death to calculate changes in the total carbon they are able to store.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla just made its one millionth car



> Tesla has produced one million electric cars, the company's CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter. Musk made the announcement by sharing a picture of the car, a red Model Y, and congratulated the Tesla team on hitting the milestone. It's a significant moment for an automaker that was only founded in 2003.


----------



## ekim68

Uber resumes autonomous car testing in San Francisco



> Just over a month after Uber received a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) license to test driverless cars on public roads, the company has resumed autonomous testing in San Francisco. Uber says it will limit its time on the road to a "few weeks" while it completes a codebase and infrastructure update and that two of its Volvo XC90 prototypes will be deployed initially, each with a pair of safety drivers in the front seats.


----------



## ekim68

REPORT: The Average Cable Bill Now Exceeds All Other Household Utility Bills Combined





> The average household cable package is now $217.42 per month.
> [*]The average household spends $205.50 per month on all major utilities combined (electricity, gas, water, sewage, garbage).
> [*]The average household cable package cost continues to increase year-over-year.


----------



## ekim68

How Mount Everest became a multimillion-dollar business



> Growing crowds have turned the world's tallest mountain into a valuable commercial asset. But where's all the money going?


----------



## ekim68

New tandem perovskite-silicon solar cell breaks efficiency record



> The use of solar photovoltaic cells as a renewable energy source is booming, as the technology becomes more efficient and less expensive. Stacking perovskite solar cells on top of silicon ones is one way to increase the amount of sunlight harnessed, and now researchers at Australian National University (ANU) have broken a new efficiency record for these tandem solar cells.
> 
> The researchers say that their new perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells have hit 27.7 percent efficiency for converting sunlight into energy. That's more than double where the technology was just five years ago (13.7 percent), and a decent step up from reports two years ago of 25.2 percent.


----------



## ekim68

US Cable Companies Lost 5 Million Paying Customers Last Year Alone



> For most of the last decade, cable and broadcast industry executives insisted that "cord cutting" (users cancelling traditional TV and moving to antennas or streaming) either wasn't real or was only something losers did. Many of the analysts and viewer tracking firms (like Nielsen) -- which have a financial stake in telling cable and broadcast executives what they wanted to hear -- were quick to happily parrot these denials.
> 
> Now that it's impossible to deny the trend, most of those folks have become notably quiet.


----------



## ekim68

Internet 'is not working for women and girls', says Berners-Lee



> Women and girls face a "growing crisis" of online harms, with sexual harassment, threatening messages and discrimination making the web an unsafe place to be, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned.
> 
> The inventor of the world wide web said the "dangerous trend" in online abuse was forcing women out of jobs, causing girls to skip school, damaging relationships and silencing female opinions, prompting him to conclude that "the web is not working for women and girls".


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus could force ISPs to abandon data caps forever



> Pressure from the global pandemic has broadband companies loosening the arbitrary restrictions on the connections users pay for - and this may be the beginning of the end for the data caps we've lived in fear of for decades. Here's why.


----------



## ekim68

Bill Gates leaves Microsoft board



> "I have made the decision to step down from both of the public boards on which I serve - Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway - to dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities including global health and development, education, and my increasing engagement in tackling climate change," Gates said on LinkedIn. "The leadership at the Berkshire companies and Microsoft has never been stronger, so the time is right to take this step."


----------



## ekim68

The Relationship Between Recessions and Market Crashes



> It's time to start seriously preparing for the possibility of a recession for the first time in over a decade.
> 
> The coronavirus is slowing down businesses, wreaking havoc on the travel industry, shutting down large events, quarantining large groups of people, closing down schools, testing our healthcare capabilities, and leading to a level of fear we haven't seen in some time. The global economy is taking hits from all sides at the moment.


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus has caused a bicycling boom in New York City



> If there's a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic - and let's be real: we could all really use a win right now - it's that there's probably never been a better time to ride a bike in the Big Apple.





> Now, less than a week later, it's clear that inexperience and physical impediments weren't enough to keep New Yorkers from adopting a more hygienic, climate-friendly, people-powered form of transportation. The city's Department of Transportation announced on Wednesday that it's seen a _50 percent_ increase in bike traffic on bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens compared to last March. New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike, has also seen an enormous upswing in demand. Citi Bike announced on Thursday that rides are up 67 percent compared to a year ago.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.fastcompany.com/90473758/what-would-happen-if-the-world-reacted-to-climate-change-like-its-reacting-to-the-coronavirus']What would happen if the world reacted to climate change like it's reacting to the coronavirus?[/URL]



> The coronavirus has transformed everyday life so significantly that the effects are already visible from space. In China, where hundreds of millions of people were quarantined to help stop the spread of the disease, before-and-after satellite photos show pollution disappearing as work came to a standstill. In the U.S., as the number of coronavirus cases has grown quickly, companies are asking employees to work from home and canceling conferences. Schools are canceling classes. In Italy, another massive quarantine is underway. The changes have been sudden, driven by widespread recognition that it's a public health emergency-and, although the window of opportunity may have already closed, a chance to prevent another deadly disease like the flu from becoming a permanent, ongoing problem.
> 
> The scale of the response raises another question: What would it look like if the world responded to the climate crisis with a similar sense of urgency?


----------



## ekim68

Researchers create focus-free camera with new flat lens



> Using a single lens that is about one-thousandth of an inch thick, researchers have created a camera that does not require focusing. The technology offers considerable benefits over traditional cameras such as the ones in most smartphones, which require multiple lenses to form high-quality, in-focus images.


----------



## ekim68

Good stuff.. 


Satellite Streak Watcher

*



What participants do

Click to expand...

*


> Use your smartphone camera to record satellite streaks through the night sky to monitor this problem over time.


----------



## Professionalgirl

ekim68 said:


> The grandfather of distributed computing projects, [email protected], shuts down
> 
> 
> 
> [/QU
> 
> 
> Brigham said:
> 
> 
> 
> Or it could mean that travel is ever increasing. Of course it must be god that is making us travel.
> 
> 
> 
> I don't think god is making us travel but I do believe the end is near and a virus that is potentially strengthening to much deadlier forms will cause the Armageddon and that's pretty scary for most of us. The governor in my area is planning too shut schools down for 10 days like as if the virus is going to magically disappear. The kids will just resume spreading it as soon as the 10 days are up. I have been pretty lucky the virus has not entered my area yet but the threat is imminent.
Click to expand...




ekim68 said:


> The grandfather of distributed computing projects, [email protected], shuts down


I don't think god is making us travel but I do believe the end is near and a virus that is potentially strengthening to much deadlier forms will cause the Armageddon and that's pretty scary for most of us. The governor in my area is planning too shut schools down for 10 days like as if the virus is going to magically disappear. The kids will just resume spreading it as soon as the 10 days are up. I have been pretty lucky the virus has not entered my area yet but the threat is imminent.


----------



## Professionalgirl

Viewing this from a positive aspect about this entire situation with Covid-19 is that Chinese medical scientist are experimenting ways to control the virus by using HIV Antiviral medication to lesson the severity of the disease in its early stages. However the medication must be taken early before the pathogens destroy the patients lungs, otherwise it would be too late to disperse the HIV meds in a patient's latent stages of the deadly Covid-19 Pneumonia.


----------



## ekim68

Professionalgirl said:


> I don't think god is making us travel but I do believe the end is near and a virus that is potentially strengthening to much deadlier forms will cause the Armageddon and that's pretty scary for most of us. The governor in my area is planning too shut schools down for 10 days like as if the virus is going to magically disappear. The kids will just resume spreading it as soon as the 10 days are up. I have been pretty lucky the virus has not entered my area yet but the threat is imminent.


That's a pretty dismal outlook... Can't trust the major media because they're making too much money sensationalizing it.. So who do you trust?


----------



## Professionalgirl

I understand ekim, I honestly don't know who to believe anymore. The CDC, WHO and local news sources which are credible sources appear to be declining the amount of trust we have in them these days. I really don't think any of us know what this disease is actually capable of. If you view chickenpox, TB and HIV that used to cause Shingles and death now have vaccines and treatment for them but we know nothing about covid-19 and its capabilities. TB remains dormant for years and is not contagious in the dormant phase. The disease may reactivate years later and cause active TB with the potential to spread person to person through a person just speaking! That alone is scary enough.


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus: Norway university urges students to return home from 'poorly developed' US



> A university in Norway is urging its students to return home from abroad, and the US in particular, amid the escalating coronavirus crisis.
> 
> The alert by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology advised students to return home if they were residing in "a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure and/or collective infrastructure."
> 
> A previous version of the post, which has now been updated on the university's Facebook feed, singled out the US.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla begins Model Y deliveries, meeting expectations for the crossover SUV




> Tesla





> has begun deliveries for its Model Y crossover SUV, the company announced on Twitter Monday, matching analyst expectations on timing.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's A14 Chip Rumored to Become First Arm-Based Mobile Processor to Exceed 3GHz



> Apple's A14 processor, the successor to the A13 chip in both the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, is expected to debut this fall in Apple's "iPhone 12" models. The report highlights the suspected Geekbench 4 score of the A14 chip, with a frequency reaching 3.1GHz. This would be 400MHz higher than Apple's current A13 Bionic chip with a frequency of 2.7GHz.


----------



## Professionalgirl

ekim68 said:


> Coronavirus: Norway university urges students to return home from 'poorly developed' US


I totally agree 100%!! 'The United States does have a poorly developed health system" as you suggested because we are not really used to large pandemics. It makes me angry because I live here and my family in poor health may get exposed as it is way out of control here. So far still no cases here but our health care is improving somewhat. Our governor just shut down our state's non essential business and is effective tonight at midnight. Why wait until midnight? It needs to shut down now and all of us should be provided food and necessities and be quarantined until the outbreak is over. Health care workers around here rely too much on hospital masks that do not work and expose themselves to the virus anyway. They need to wear Hazmat suits like any other country would and contain it. Our governor lacks proper mitigation skills. He really thinks that the virus is going to magically disappear in 10 days. The kids will resume spreading the virus as soon as 10 day shut down of our schools are lifted. How do you think the Chinese mitigated the covid-19 threat? They did so by taking aggressive measures to quarantine everyone. I'm not implying that they should throw people in metal boxes like China has but just enforce a mandate on quarantine of Americans rather than just setting guidelines as Trump stated in a conference earlier. I though it was sad when the Chinese government placed there citizens in medal boxes like animals. That is inhumane. My heart broke for those people.


----------



## Johnny b

Professionalgirl said:


> I totally agree 100%!! 'The United States does have a poorly developed health system" as you suggested because we are not really used to large pandemics. .........................


The US has avoided the brunt of recent pandemics because our government in the past instituted early responses and mitigated the impacts.
Not so with COVID-19.

The impact we're seeing has been exaggerated by the actions of the Trump administration. From budget cuts in health departments to outright lies, appeals to ignorance and on to insensitive speeches and decisions.

What we are seeing/experiencing is a 'perfect storm'.


----------



## Johnny b

Professionalgirl said:


> I understand ekim, I honestly don't know who to believe anymore. The CDC, WHO and local news sources which are credible sources appear to be declining the amount of trust we have in them these days. I really don't think any of us know what this disease is actually capable of. If you view chickenpox, TB and HIV that used to cause Shingles and death now have vaccines and treatment for them but we know nothing about covid-19 and its capabilities. TB remains dormant for years and is not contagious in the dormant phase. The disease may reactivate years later and cause active TB with the potential to spread person to person through a person just speaking! That alone is scary enough.





> The CDC, WHO and local news sources which are credible sources appear to be declining the amount of trust we have in them these days.


There is a lot we don't want to hear.
There is much we need to be told.
imo, the onus is on our current government.
It acted to restrict rather than advance knowledge and mitigation.
The CDC and NIH are only as good as their financial support.
And their budgets are still being cut.

March 11,2020
*Trump administration isn't backing off proposed cuts to CDC budget*
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow...n-t-backing-proposed-cuts-cdc-budget-n1155411

BTW, there currently is no vaccine for HIV.


----------



## ekim68

Super-rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreak



> 'Self isolate' for some of world's richest means Covid-19 tests abroad, personal medics and subterranean hideouts


----------



## ekim68

In fast-moving pandemic, sources of falsehoods spread by text, email, WhatsApp and TikTok elude authorities



> Misleading text messages claiming that President Trump was going to announce a national quarantine buzzed into cellphones across the country over the weekend, underscoring how rapidly false claims are spreading - and how often it is happening beyond the familiar misinformation vehicles of Facebook and Twitter.
> 
> The false texts spread so widely that on Sunday night the White House's National Security Council, fearing the texts were an attempt to spook the stock market as it opened Monday, decided to directly debunk the misleading claims in a Twitter post: "Text message rumors of a national #quarantine are FAKE. There is no national lockdown."
> 
> But by then the messages already had spread widely, as had similar ones both in the United States and Europe in recent days.


----------



## Professionalgirl

Johnny b said:


> The US has avoided the brunt of recent pandemics because our government in the past instituted early responses and mitigated the impacts.
> Not so with COVID-19.
> 
> The impact we're seeing has been exaggerated by the actions of the Trump administration. From budget cuts in health departments to outright lies, appeals to ignorance and on to insensitive speeches and decisions.
> 
> What we are seeing/experiencing is a 'perfect storm'.


I'm here to back you up Johnny. That is true. I remember the fast response times to mitigate the Ebola crises and it never reached the United States here so I know they can do better than what they have been and its partially Trump's fault and too many politicians, top level health officials and congress with differential opinions that messed up our health care system.


----------



## ekim68

America's Restaurants Will Need a Miracle



> The spread of the coronavirus across the United States has caused a generalized shutdown of public life. Schools are closed, sports are canceled, and concerts are over. This is entirely appropriate. A pandemic is war, and public gatherings at the moment give aid and comfort to the biological enemy.
> 
> But this shutdown will crush the economy, starting with the restaurant industry. In the past 48 hours, several states, including Ohio and Illinois, and major cities, including New York City and Los Angeles, announced that restaurants will be closed or limited to takeout and delivery. Shelly Fireman, a New York restaurateur who runs several diners, called the fallout "worse than after 9/11."


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus lockdown leads to decline in air pollution over Italy



> As COVID-19 spreads around the globe and key elements of society grind to a halt, satellite data is revealing its impacts on air quality and emissions of harmful pollutants. As it did in China, a lockdown in response to the coronavirus in Italy has led to a drop in air pollution over the country, which scientists say is due to less traffic and industrial activity.


----------



## Professionalgirl

The United States here is tightening their grip on the corona virus. We are now at level three partial lock down. Our governor just declared a level three emergency and all bars and restaurants are shut down while grocery store shelves are empty. Now the corona virus has caused an economic crises and our government officials in Washington are debating whether or not to issue a 1,000 dollar stimulus to all Americans to compensate for the crises.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-wants-netflix-to-lower-streaming-video-quality-t-1842410415']The EU Wants Netflix to Lower Streaming Video Quality to Prevent the Internet From Breaking[/URL]



> With people self-quarantining in order to help stop the spread of covid-19, many are turning to streaming video services to pass the time while they are cooped up inside. But now, due to a massive spike in users and bandwidth, the EU is asking companies like Netflix and home users alike to lower streaming video quality to help prevent the internet from breaking.


----------



## ekim68

Experts Say the Internet Will Mostly Stay Online During Coronavirus Pandemic



> As millions of Americans hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19, U.S. broadband networks are seeing a significant spike in usage. While industry insiders say that the U.S. internet should be able to handle the strain overall, broadband availability, affordability, and slow speeds could still pose a serious problem for many housebound U.S. residents.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen e-Bulli: An all-electric 60s classic conversion you can buy



> Volkswagen has pulled out its 4-cylinder boxer engine, which was good for a very relaxed 43 horsepower when absolutely thrashed, and replaced it with a much more sprightly electric drive system that can silently and effortlessly output 82 horses and 212 Nm (156 lb-ft). This raises the T1's top speed from 105 km/h (65 mph) to a more freeway-friendly 130 km/h (81 mph), electronically limited. The battery is a 45 kWh pack good for around 200 km (124 miles) between charges.


----------



## ekim68

Ransomware Gangs to Stop Attacking Health Orgs During Pandemic



> Some Ransomware operators have stated that they will no longer target health and medical organizations during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
> 
> Last night, BleepingComputer reached out to the operators of the Maze, DoppelPaymer, Ryuk, Sodinokibi/REvil, PwndLocker, and Ako Ransomware infections to ask if they would continue targeting health and medical organizations during the outbreak.


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus: Air pollution and CO2 fall rapidly as virus spreads



> Levels of air pollutants and warming gases over some cities and regions are showing significant drops as coronavirus impacts work and travel.
> 
> Researchers in New York told the BBC their early results showed carbon monoxide mainly from cars had been reduced by nearly 50% compared with last year.
> 
> Emissions of the planet-heating gas CO2 have also fallen sharply.


----------



## ekim68

The Cashmere crisis in the Himalayan ice desert



> British photographer Andrew Newey has documented the lives of the Changpa nomads in Kashmir, examining the threats to their Pashmina wool production.


----------



## ekim68

Hackers breach FSB contractor and leak details about IoT hacking project



> Russian hacker group Digital Revolution claims to have breached a contractor for the FSB -- Russia's national intelligence service -- and discovered details about a project intended for hacking Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
> 
> The group published this week 12 technical documents, diagrams, and code fragments for a project called "Fronton."
> 
> ZDNet has also seen the documents first hand, along with BBC Russia, who first broke the news earlier this week.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk and Tesla Sent 50K Units of N95 Mask To UW Medicine



> Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised yesterday that he would donate 250,000 masks with the N95 protection level, which belong to his companies, to hospitals. Today UCLA Health Hospital received a truckload of various protective items, including masks and gowns from Tesla.
> 
> But this is not the only good story and good deed that was committed today. UW Medicine also received masks from Tesla and its CEO. 50,000 masks designed to protect the health of medical personnel in the hospital were delivered to Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf. The doctor was so impressed with this act that he told this story to The Seattle Times.


----------



## ekim68

Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down for Coronavirus



> In cities across the United States, traffic on roads and highways has fallen dramatically over the past week as the coronavirus outbreak forces people to stay at home and everyday life grinds to a halt.
> 
> Pollution has dropped too.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: Elite hackers target WHO as coronavirus cyberattacks spike



> WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) - Elite hackers tried to break into the World Health Organization earlier this month, sources told Reuters, part of what a senior agency official said was a more than two-fold increase in cyberattacks.


----------



## ekim68

UK's first Electric Avenue charges electric cars from streetlamps



> A street in the City of Westminster in London has been dubbed Electric Avenue, W9 after Siemens and Ubitricity installed EV charging points in streetlamps, making it the first in the UK where all of its streetlamps have been given double duty.
> 
> Research conducted by Siemens found that over a third of British motorists are planning to buy into an electric future by purchasing a hybrid or full electric vehicle as their next car, with 40 percent saying that they would have jumped in sooner if the charging infrastructure was better.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.gpsworld.com/ups-to-develop-new-delivery-drones-with-wingcopter/']UPS to develop new delivery drones with Wingcopter[/URL]




> UPS Flight Forward (UPSFF)





> is collaborating with German drone-maker Wingcopter to develop the next generation of package delivery drones for a variety of use cases in the United States and internationally. UPSFF is a subsidiary of UPS dedicated to drone delivery.
> 
> UPS chose Wingcopter for its unmanned aircraft technology and its track record in delivering a variety of goods over long distances in multiple international settings.


----------



## ekim68

Meet the Chinese operating system that's trying to shift the country off Windows



> China's homegrown operating systems haven't made much of a dent on the global stage. Now there's a Linux-based system that's aimed at weaning the country off Windows.
> 
> UOS, or Unified Operating System, hit a new milestone after its first stable release in January: Union Tech's OS can now boot in 30 seconds on China-made chips.


----------



## ekim68

Congress to bail out firms that avoided taxes, safety regulations and spent billions boosting their stock




> Less than a dozen years after the bailouts of the Great Recession, airlines, hotels and a long list of others come calling.


----------



## ekim68

How the World's Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask



> A very American story about capitalism consuming our national preparedness and resiliency.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists identify microbe that could help degrade polyurethane-based plastics



> There may be a small answer to one of the biggest problems on the planet.
> 
> German researchers report in the journal _Frontiers in Microbiology_ that they have identified and characterized a strain of bacteria capable of degrading some of the chemical building blocks of polyurethane.
> 
> "The bacteria can use these compounds as a sole source of carbon, nitrogen and energy," said Dr. Hermann J. Heipieper, a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig, Germany and co-author of the new paper. "This finding represents an important step in being able to reuse hard-to-recycle PU products."


----------



## ekim68

Help needed to rescue UK's old rainfall records



> At a loss to know what to do with your self-isolation time?
> 
> Well, why not get on the computer and help with a giant weather digitisation effort?
> 
> The UK has rainfall records dating back 200 years or so, but the vast majority of these are in handwritten form and can't easily be used to analyse past periods of flooding and drought.
> 
> The Rainfall Rescue Project is seeking volunteers to transfer all the data into online spreadsheets.


----------



## ekim68

As the ocean warms, marine species relocate toward the poles



> Since pre-industrial times, the world's oceans have warmed by an average of one degree Celsius (1°C). Now researchers report in _Current Biology_ on March 26th that those rising temperatures have led to widespread changes in the population sizes of marine species. The researchers found a general pattern of species having increasing numbers on their poleward sides and losses toward the equator.


----------



## ekim68

How China's "Bat Woman" Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus



> Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus has led to a 775 percent increase in usage of Microsoft Azure cloud services



> This weekend, Microsoft has given an insight into the impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on its services. The company says that there has been a huge increase in Teams usage, and there are not over 44 million daily users.
> 
> In regions where there are isolation and home sheltering orders in place, Microsoft says that there has been a colossal 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services. Despite the surge in demand, there have not been any significant service disruptions.


----------



## ekim68

2019 saw over 60 gigawatts of wind power installed



> On Wednesday, the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry trade organization, released its review of the market in 2019. During the past year, wind power saw its second-largest amount of new installed capacity ever, with over 60GW going in. But the news going forward is a bit more uncertain, with the report predicting that after years of double-digit growth, the industry would see things tail off into steady-but-unspectacular territory. And that prediction was made before many key markets started dealing with the coronavirus.
> 
> A very good year
> 
> Wind power is now one of the cheapest options for generating electricity. In many areas of the globe, building and maintaining wind power is cheaper per unit of power than it is to fuel a previously constructed fossil fuel plant. While offshore wind remains more expensive, its prices have dropped dramatically over the last several years, and it is rapidly approaching price parity with fossil fuels.


----------



## ekim68

China's Divorce Spike Is a Warning to Rest of Locked-Down World



> As the  coronavirus raged through China, Ms. Wu, a housewife in her 30s in southern Guangdong province, spent almost two months in isolation with her out-of-work spouse. They fought constantly. Wu, who declined to give her full name because she wants to protect her privacy, ticked off a familiar list of marital irritants, including money (too little), screen time (too much), and housework and child care (not evenly split). One particular annoyance was her husband's habit of engaging their two children in play in the evening when they were supposed to be going to bed. "He's the troublemaker in the house," she says. "I don't want to endure anymore. We've agreed to get a divorce, and the next thing is to find lawyers."


----------



## ekim68

Hawaiian Electric Plans Nearly 1 Gigawatt-Hour Of Battery Storage, Mostly From Tesla Megapacks



> The state of Hawai'i has set a goal of getting 100% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2045. Clearly, in order to reach that goal, grid-scale battery storage will be required. Now Hawaiian Electric, which supplies electricity to 95% of Hawai'i residents, says it is looking at installing up to 1 gigawatt-hour of battery storage.
> 
> According to the _Honolulu Star Advertiser_, a major portion of that storage may be supplied by 244 Megapacks from Tesla located on 6 acres of land adjacent to its Kahe power plant in Nanakuli. Other smaller storage facilities are planned for other locations on Oahu, Maui, and Hawai'i.


----------



## ekim68

Google trains chips to design themselves



> One of the key challenges of computer design is how to pack chips and wiring in the most ergonomic fashion, maintaining power, speed and energy efficiency.
> 
> The recipe includes thousands of components that must communicate with one another flawlessly, all on a piece of real estate the size of a fingernail.


----------



## ekim68

EU justice chief urges U.S. tech giants to halt virus clickbaits



> BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU justice chief Vera Jourova on Thursday criticized U.S. tech giants such as Google and Facebook for making money off coronavirus-related fake news instead of putting in more efforts to stop the deluge.


----------



## ekim68

5 things to never do in an online job interview



> As the economy has taken a hit from COVID-19, many workers are looking for new employment. Here are five don'ts from three HR experts.


----------



## ekim68

System uses machine learning to offer new way to screen for hard-to-detect cancers



> A new blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer has been revealed by researchers in the latest study to offer hope for early detection.
> 
> The test is based on DNA that is shed by tumours and found circulating in the blood. More specifically, it focuses on chemical changes to this DNA, known as methylation patterns.
> 
> Researchers say the test can not only tell whether someone has cancer, but can also shed light on the type of cancer they have.


----------



## ekim68

These hidden cache files are bloating your Google Chrome



> Google Chrome could be storing a hundred thousand cached files on your computer, and it doesn't give you a way to delete them.


----------



## ekim68

Intel's new 10th Gen laptop processors crack 5GHz



> Intel has unveiled its newest generation of laptop processors, which are the first to streak past the 5 GHz mark.


----------



## ekim68

The Recession Bread Lines Are Forming in Mar-a-Lago's Shadow



> Though it's just a four-minute drive across the lagoon from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's private club, and ten minutes from the Palm Beach outposts of Chanel and Louis Vuitton, Howley's diner has become an emblem of America's stark new economic reality.
> 
> With more than 10 million people across the nation suddenly unemployed, bread lines are forming in the shadows of privileged enclaves like this one in Florida.


----------



## ekim68

The coronavirus pandemic is making Earth vibrate less



> Once-crowded city streets are now empty. Highway traffic has slowed to a minimum. And fewer and fewer people can be found milling about outside.
> 
> Global containment measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus have seemingly made the world much quieter. Scientists are noticing it, too.


----------



## ekim68

Coastal pollution reduces genetic diversity of corals, reef resilience



> A new study by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) found that human-induced environmental stressors have a large effect on the genetic composition of coral reef populations in Hawai'i. They confirmed that there is an ongoing loss of sensitive genotypes in nearshore coral populations due to stressors resulting from poor land-use practices and coastal pollution. This reduced genetic diversity compromises reef resilience.


----------



## ekim68

Mayo Clinic uses autonomous shuttles to collect COVID-19 test samples



> The US, like much of the world, is moving to keep contact between its residents to minimum as it grapples with the spread of coronavirus, and a new project taking place at the Mayo Clinic is exploring what this could mean for medical testing. In what is billed as a first for the country, autonomous shuttles are being used to move COVID-19 tests from a drive-through testing checkpoint to a lab for analysis, all without a human on board.


----------



## ekim68

Experimental organic proton battery charges in minutes



> Researchers at Uppsala University have developed a new type of experimental proton battery that's built with entirely organic components, making it much more environmentally friendly than most. On top of that, it can also be charged in a matter of minutes and can function at very low temperatures.
> 
> Most batteries, such as the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery, are made with metals that need to be mined and refined, which creates a lot of environmental harm. And then of course there's the problem with disposing of them safely as well.
> 
> So, the researchers on the new study set out to create organic batteries, made of elements that are easier to find in nature. In this case, the active material is a group of organic compounds called quinones. These are often used by bacteria and plants in processes like photosynthesis and cellular respiration.


----------



## ekim68

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Movie/Theater Industry



> Economic crises, natural disasters, and other long-tail events tend to accelerate underlying trends, exacerbate balances of power, and unravel businesses, business models, and business practices that were sustained by a robust economy. COVID-19's effect on the media and entertainment sector looks like it will be consistent with this history. Note, too, that the longer/worse the pandemic, the stronger the impact.


----------



## ekim68

In a first, China knocks U.S. from top spot in global patent race



> China was the biggest source of applications for international patents in the world last year, pushing the United States out of the top spot it has held since the global system was set up more than 40 years ago, the U.N. patent agency said on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

A Rapid Test for Covid-19 Arrives Via a 20-year-old Technology Already in Many Hospitals




> Cepheid's microfluidics-based rapid testing system proved itself during the 2001 anthrax attacks. Now it steps into the coronavirus battle


----------



## ekim68

Messaging App Signal Threatens to Dump US Market if Anti-Encryption Bill Passes




> Signal





> is warning that an anti-encryption bill circulating in Congress could force the private messaging app to pull out of the US market.
> 
> Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the free app, which offers end-to-end encryption, has seen a surge in traffic. But on Wednesday, the nonprofit behind the app published a blog post, raising the alarm around the EARN IT Act. "At a time when more people than ever are benefiting from these (encryption) protections, the EARN IT bill proposed by the Senate Judiciary Committee threatens to put them at risk," Signal developer Joshua Lund wrote in the post.


----------



## ekim68

Your Internet is working. Thank these Cold War-era pioneers who designed it to handle almost anything




> Coronavirus





> knocked down - at least for a time - Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, who offers this reflection on the experience: "I don't recommend it … It's very debilitating."
> 
> Cerf, 76 and now recovering in his Northern Virginia home, has better news to report about the computer network he and others spent much of their lives creating. Despite some problems, the Internet overall is handling unprecedented surges of demand as it keeps a fractured world connected at a time of global catastrophe.


----------



## Brigham

Many of the tests being used are non specific. Some of them are dangerous as they can give the testee a false sense of security. One of these tests is for coronavirus. It does include covid19, but Flu and SARS as well.


----------



## ekim68

When are stimulus checks being sent out? Here's how to make sure you get yours



> Checks for millions of Americans, a key part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, will start rolling out as early as next week.
> 
> That money can't come soon enough for the more than 16 million people who are suddenly out of a job, and everyone else who's worried about how to pay their bills, rent and withstand the coronavirus' economic onslaught.


----------



## ekim68

Venture Capitalist Stuns CNBC by Saying We Should Let Hedge Funds Fail



> Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya stunned _CNBC_ anchor Scott Wapner and generated widespread applause on social media by declaring in a television interview Thursday that the U.S. government should let hedge funds and billionaire CEOs "get wiped out" by the coronavirus-induced economic collapse and instead focus its attention on rescuing Main Street.


----------



## ekim68

NASA wants your help to map the world's coral reefs



> NASA is calling on citizen scientists to help identify and classify the world's corals by playing a virtual diving game, so that experts can better understand how they are evolving and how they might be best preserved for the future.
> 
> What you need is the NASA NeMO-Net game for iOS and iPadOS (macOS and Android coming soon). It'll take you on a series of virtual dives in the ocean, and your job is to identify the coral that you come across. The computer-generated underwater environments are based on data collected over the last few years by NASA's Ames Research Center in California. The team there has been using fluid-lensing cameras to map out the ocean in greater detail than ever before.


----------



## ekim68

Federal appeals court allows Facebook privacy lawsuit to proceed



> The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Thursday that a privacy lawsuit against Facebook can proceed.
> 
> Plaintiffs are Facebook users who allege that Facebook violated their privacy rights by tracking their internet activity after they logged out of the platform. Plaintiffs assert their privacy claims on behalf of themselves and users who had active accounts between May 27, 2010, and September 26, 2011. Plaintiffs explained Facebook uses "plug-ins to track users' browsing histories when they visit third-party websites, and then compiles these browsing histories into personal profiles which are sold to advertisers to generate revenue."


----------



## Brigham

ekim68 said:


> Experimental organic proton battery charges in minutes


Dihydroxyanthraquinone is a laxative. The name can be shortened to Danthron. It is a quinone though.


----------



## ekim68

History's deadliest pandemics, from ancient Rome to modern America




> Centuries before coronavirus, plague, smallpox, yellow fever and other contagions killed hundreds of millions around the world


----------



## ekim68

The Power Plant of the Future Is Right in Your Home



> Basalt Vista is designed to be an all-electric community that produces as much power as it uses. Each home comes outfitted with an electric vehicle charger in the garage, a large battery pack in the basement, and a roof covered with solar panels. The homes are linked together as a microgrid, a self-contained electricity distribution network that can operate independently of the regional electric grid. Their energy systems work together to balance the energy load across the neighborhood-the solar panels harvest energy, plugged in EVs can store electricity as needed, and large battery packs can supply power when the sun isn't shining.
> 
> But what makes Basalt Vista's microgrid unique is that it autonomously allocates power.


----------



## ekim68

Two new solar cells break records, including highest efficiency ever 



> Solar cells are constantly improving on the road to maximum efficiency. Now, three records have been broken by two different devices, including one that pushes the highest overall solar conversion efficiency towards the 50-percent mark.
> 
> The top honor was claimed by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who have developed a new solar cell with an efficiency of 47.1 percent. That makes it the most efficient solar cell of any kind in the world - for now, at least. These records have a tendency to be broken pretty regularly.


----------



## ekim68

How the Virus Transformed the
Way Americans Spend Their Money



> The coronavirus has profoundly altered daily life in America, ushering in sweeping upheavals to the U.S. economy. Among the most immediate effects of the crisis? Radical changes to how people spend their money.
> 
> In a matter of weeks, pillars of American industry essentially ground to a halt. Airplanes, restaurants and arenas were suddenly empty. In many states, businesses deemed nonessential - including luxury goods retailers and golf courses - were ordered closed.


----------



## ekim68

Voting by Mail Could Be What States Need. But Can They Pull It Off?



> WASHINGTON - When Colorado's 3.5 million voters help select a president this fall, their choice will be made almost entirely by mail, via ballots in postage-paid envelopes dropped off in mailboxes or, more commonly, in bins scattered statewide.
> Not so in Alabama. As the law now stands, all voters must cast their ballots on Election Day, at their designated polling places, unless they vote absentee. And getting an absentee ballot is so hard that fewer than 55,000 of 1.7 million voters cast one in the last election.


----------



## ekim68

US Space Force condemns test launch of Russian anti-satellite weapon 



> The United States Space Force (USSF) reports that Russia has launched a Direct Ascent Anti-Satellite (ASAT) missile. US Space Command detected and tracked the weapon capable of destroying a satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) on April 15.
> 
> Anti-satellite weapons were in development even before the first Sputnik was launched in 1957. As the name implies, their function is to destroy satellites for either military advantage or because the target poses a hazard to other spacecraft or populated areas on Earth.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus makes first-ever fully automatic air-to-air refueling contacts



> Airbus has announced the successful completion of the world's first fully automatic boom system air-to-air refueling (A3R) operation. At an undisclosed date earlier this year, an Airbus tanker test aircraft equipped with the Airbus A3R refueling system completed 45 flight test hours and 120 dry fueling contacts with a Portuguese Air Force F-16 fighter jet.


----------



## ekim68

Wind blows by coal to become Iowa's largest source of electricity



> A new report from the American Wind Energy Association says wind is now the largest single source of electricity in Iowa.
> 
> According to the trade association's Wind Powers America 2019 Annual Report, Iowa is now generating more than 10,000 megawatts of wind energy, accounting for more than 40% of the state's electricity.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook to warn users who 'liked' coronavirus hoaxes



> Facebook will soon let you know if you shared or interacted with dangerous coronavirus misinformation on the site, the latest in a string of aggressive efforts the social media giant is taking to contain an outbreak of viral falsehoods.
> 
> The new notice will be sent to users who have clicked on, reacted to, or commented on posts featuring harmful or false claims about COVID-19 after they have been removed by moderators. The alert, which will start appearing on Facebook in the coming weeks, will direct users to a site where the World Health Organization lists and debunks virus myths and rumors.


----------



## ekim68

Florida: endangered sea turtles thriving thanks to Covid-19 restrictions




> Marine life





> researchers in Florida say that coronavirus restrictions keeping humans and harmful waste off beaches are having a beneficial effect on the numbers of endangered leatherback sea turtles in the state.
> 
> With the summer nesting season barely two weeks old, staff from the Loggerhead MarineLife Center in Juno Beach have already found and marked 76 nests of the world's largest species of sea turtle on the nine and half mile stretch they monitor, a "significant" increase from the same stage last year.
> 
> The elevated numbers are raising hopes of a bumper nesting season for leatherbacks, and also vulnerable loggerhead turtles that begin to arrive to lay eggs before the end of May.


----------



## ekim68

What the United States loses by quitting the Open Skies treaty, in one chart



> Reports emerged this week that the White House may be moving "soon" on withdrawing from the Open Skies treaty, a nearly two-decade-old agreement that allows 34 countries to fly and share reconnaissance missions over each other to promote military cooperation and transparency.


----------



## ekim68

Britain has 139 tons of plutonium. That's a real problem.



> The United Kingdom's last plutonium reprocessing plant, B205, located in Sellafield in northern England, will shut down by the end of 2020. It will bring an end to the era of plutonium separation in the country, which began 68 years ago. Because the United Kingdom never used any of the material it recouped from reprocessing except in nuclear weapons, today it has amassed a stockpile of almost 139 metric tons of separated plutonium.


----------



## ekim68

Is BGP safe yet? _No._




> Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)





> is the postal service of the Internet. It's responsible for looking at all of the available paths that data could travel and picking the best route.
> 
> Unfortunately, it isn't secure, and there have been some major Internet disruptions as a result. But fortunately there is a way to make it secure.


----------



## ekim68

'Turn Around, Go Back': Summer Islands Don't Want Coronavirus, or You



> Visitors to the western end of Fire Island are greeted by a large sign telling them to "Stop, turn around, go back."
> In bold, red letters, the sign proclaims that the island's residential areas are "closed to visitors" and that it has "No restrooms, no open business, no medical facility."
> 
> In fact, visiting Fire Island is not banned - a resident put up the unofficial sign - but it is strongly discouraged by local officials who fear that outsiders might bring the coronavirus to this 32 mile-long barrier island east of New York City, accessible mainly by ferry from mainland Long Island.


----------



## ekim68

The Day Petroleum Was Less Than Worthless



> April 20, 2020, may not be remembered as the day when marijuana briefly became a more valuable commodity than petroleum. It happened, though, right smack dab in the middle of the country's unofficial 4/20 weed holiday. Some ironies require no enhancement, and a Hollywood script with this plot twist would get laughed out of the room, but it happened all the same.
> 
> On Monday afternoon, as the COVID pandemic ran roughshod over governments and hospitals and the daily lives of billions, almighty oil was abruptly worth less than zero. In other words, if you had oil, you had to theoretically pay to get rid of it, instead of getting paid for delivering it. It's the equivalent of gassing up at your local station and having the attendant run you out a fiver for the privilege of depleting his stock.


----------



## ekim68

The Death of the Department Store: 'Very Few Are Likely to Survive'



> American department stores, once all-powerful shopping meccas that anchored malls and Main Streets across the country, have been dealt blow after blow in the past decade. J.C. Penney and Sears were upended by hedge funds. Macy's has been closing stores and cutting corporate staff. Barneys New York filed for bankruptcy last year.
> But nothing compares to the shock the weakened industry has taken from the coronavirus pandemic. The sales of clothing and accessories fell by more than half in March, a trend that is expected to only get worse in April. The entire executive team at Lord & Taylor was let go this month. Nordstrom has canceled orders and put off paying its vendors. The Neiman Marcus Group, the most glittering of the American department store chains, is expected to declare bankruptcy in the coming days, the first major retailer felled during the current crisis.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say



> American officials were alarmed by fake text messages and social media posts that said President Trump was locking down the country. Experts see a convergence with Russian tactics.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T's massive TV losses continue as another 900,000 customers flee



> AT&T lost another 897,000 premium TV subscribers in Q1 2020, as the DirecTV owner's string of massive customer losses continued. An AT&T executive today said the company is moving ahead with a company-wide cost-cutting program.


----------



## ekim68

Here's a list of all the ransomware gangs who will steal and leak your data if you don't pay



> Ransomware gangs are getting more aggressive these days about pursuing payments and have begun stealing and threatening to leak sensitive documents if victims don't pay the requested ransom demand.


----------



## ekim68

The many languages missing from the internet 



> Imagine your favourite social media platform does not let you post in English. Now think of a keyboard that won't allow you to type in your own words. You would have two options: either switch to another language or remain digitally silent.
> 
> This is the reality for most people that speak indigenous languages and dialects.
> 
> There are nearly 7,000 languages and dialects in the world, yet only 7% are reflected in published online material, according to Whose knowledge?, a campaign that aims to make visible the knowledge of marginalised communities online.


----------



## ekim68

The Cybersecurity 202: There's finally a Supreme Court battle coming over the nation's main hacking law



> The Supreme Court is finally considering whether to rein in the nation's sweeping anti-hacking law, which cybersecurity pros say is decades out of date and ill-suited to the modern Internet.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Space Force's First Offensive Weapon Is a Satellite Jammer



> The United States Space force now has offensive power, though it might not be the massive orbiting weapons system that you're envisioning.
> 
> The new weapons system delivered to the space force is a jammer type array that can prevent military or intelligence combatants from accessing their military satellites. This functionality allows the space force to neutralize orbiting satellites in a matter of minutes.


----------



## ekim68

https://electrek.co/2020/04/24/tesla-autopilot-traffic-light-and-stop-sign-control-feature/



> Tesla has released a new, highly anticipated Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control feature.
> 
> As we reported last month, Tesla has started to push an Autopilot update with the actual ability to handle intersections to some drivers in its "early access fleet," a group of owners who beta test new software update from Tesla.
> 
> We even got to see a quick demo video.


----------



## ekim68

The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to Cities



> The New York City streetscape has become a strange, inverted mirror image of the normal world. Suddenly, if you have a car, and actually have someplace to go, driving seems weirdly pleasant, almost rational: Congestion is rare, gas is even cheaper than usual, and parking is abundant. This is the Hollywood version of getting around Brooklyn: No matter your destination, you can find a spot right out front.


----------



## ekim68

UPS to deliver prescription medicines to retirement village by drone



> After first announcing a drone delivery collaboration last October, UPS and CVS are pushing ahead with their vision for aerial shipments of medical goods. Announced today, the next phase of this partnership will see UPS drones deployed to carry prescription drugs from a Florida pharmacy to the largest retirement community in the US.
> 
> UPS is making some significant strides in its efforts to integrate drones into its business model, along with other forward-thinking solutions such as electric bikes and trucks.


----------



## ekim68

Intel Comet Lake - all the gaming CPU specs, pricing, release date, and performance info



> Intel has dished all the dirt on its 10th Gen Comet Lake desktop processors.


----------



## ekim68

This Tech Conference Is Being Held on an Animal Crossing Island



> A tech worker from New York had a different idea for his tech conference, which he announced, in all seriousness, on April Fools' Day. The free conference is called Deserted Island DevOps and is happening on Thursday, entirely inside _ Animal Crossing_, the Nintendo Switch hit game released in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.
> 
> Speakers are doing their talks on an island in Animal Crossing specifically built for the conference, and attendees can follow along in the game, on Twitch, or Zoom, as a fallback option.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast Graciously Extends Suspension Of Completely Unnecessary Data Caps 



> After pressure from consumer groups, major ISPs last month announced that they would be suspending all usage caps and overage fees for 60 days in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.





> The problem, as we just got done exploring, is that there's no justification for these limits in the first place. They never should have been imposed, therefore removing them, temporarily, isn't much of a concession or accomplishment.


----------



## ekim68

Humour in the 19th Century: 200-Year-Old Jokes



> In addition to being dependent on personal taste, humour tends to be specific to culture, to place and to time. This makes it tricky to weave jokes into fiction set in the past, like _Napoleon in America_. What did people find funny 200 years ago? How well have those jokes held up over time? You be the judge of this humour from the early 19th century.


----------



## ekim68

COVID Tests Are Free, Except When They're Not 



> Her doctor worried she had COVID-19 but couldn't test her for it until she ruled out other things. That test cost a bundle.


----------



## ekim68

Studios bypass cinemas with lucrative lockdown premieres



> Universal's latest on-demand hit, kept out of theatres by Covid-19, has made more profit in three weeks than its predecessor did in five months on the big screen


----------



## ekim68

15 Old Computer Sounds That Will Take You Back to the '90s



> In the '90s, there were distinct sounds associated with computers that we don't think about today, but they're lodged deep in our memories. Let's go back to some computer sounds you probably haven't heard in decades.


----------



## ekim68

Study: Global warming to place billions in "near-unliveable" heat 



> Climate change stands to reshape the world in all kinds of ways, and one of the most profound will be the impact of warmer temperatures on the human population. An international team of researchers casting an eye towards this future has published a study detailing a grim outlook for billions of people, with rapidly rising temperatures to leave them outside the "climate niche" where humans have thrived for thousands of years.


----------



## ekim68

World's fastest camera captures 70 trillion frames per second 



> The best phone cameras can record slow motion with under 1,000 frames per second. Commercial rigs generally shoot with several thousand. But that all absolutely pales in comparison to the new record holder for the world's fastest camera, boasting a mind-boggling rate of 70 trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to capture light waves in movement.
> 
> Developed at Caltech, the technology is called compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP). As you might expect from the incredible frame rate, it doesn't function like any ordinary camera. It uses extremely short pulses of laser light, each one lasting just one femtosecond. For reference, that's one quadrillionth of a second.


----------



## ekim68

Cisco spotlights new IT roles you've never heard of



> A Cisco report on IT trends says new jobs to address changing IT needs include business translator, network guardian and network detective.


----------



## ekim68

US prepares secretive X-37B space plane for mission six 



> A secretive space plane developed by the US Air Force is being readied for another outing, with the department today announcing the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle's sixth mission will kick off on May 16. The classified vehicle's upcoming expedition will see a new emphasis placed on onboard experiments, following a record-breaking 780-day flight that came to an end last October.


----------



## ekim68

Google Lens can now copy and paste handwritten notes to your computer



> Google has added a very useful feature to Google Lens, its multipurpose object recognition tool. You can now copy and paste handwritten notes from your phone to your computer with Lens, though it only works if your handwriting is neat enough.


----------



## ekim68

"Political Connections and Cronyism": In Blistering Whistleblower Complaint, Rick Bright Blasts Team Trump's Pandemic Response



> Two weeks after being pushed out of his post, the former head of a $1.5 billion federal health agency formally accuses top officials of pressuring him to approve unproven chloroquine drugs and award pricey contracts to friends of the administration.


----------



## ekim68

The Results Are In for the Sharing Economy. They Are Ugly.



> Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That's a problem when much of the world is staying home.


----------



## ekim68

How the NRA Is Using Coronavirus Fears to Drive Up Gun Sales



> At the center of the controversy is the NRA. Ever since the emergence of COVID-19 sent the world into a tailspin, the group has sought not just to fight to keep gun stores open and boost firearms sales, but also to stoke fear and suspicion during the country's darkest hour. On social media, in videos, and in blog posts, the nation's oldest and most influential gun rights organization has repeatedly pushed out alarmist messaging suggesting that the pandemic will lead to a societal breakdown-and that the only way people can protect themselves and their families is by purchasing a gun.


----------



## ekim68

US military is furious at FCC over 5G plan that could interfere with GPS



> GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, US military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday.
> 
> In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference.


----------



## ekim68

The Fragility of the Global Nurse Supply Chain



> The pandemic has exposed how richer countries, including the United States, rely on health-care workers from poorer ones, such as the Philippines.


----------



## ekim68

Cord-Cutting Hit Record Levels in First Quarter



> Traditional pay TV subscriptions fell by a record-setting 1.8 million in the first quarter, according to an analysis by Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research.
> 
> The 7.6% decline includes a 14.3% plunge for satellite, compared to a 4% drop for cable.


----------



## ekim68

The world's biggest PC games are fighting a new surge of cheaters and hackers



> If you've ever played a PC game that has a competitive element, you've probably played against a cheater. Whether it's that sniper bullet that felt a little too accurate, the person teleporting around the map, or the opposition that just somehow knows which angle you're about to peek from _every single time_. Some of the world's most popular PC games are now fighting back against cheaters in new and interesting ways - just as cheating becomes an even bigger problem.


----------



## ekim68

Shuttered restaurants, bars, hotels speed up TV cord-cutting even more



> Residential customers have been cutting the cord for years, but now commercial subscribers to pay-TV companies have started jumping into the cancellation heap, The Wall Street Journal reports. Restaurants, bars, hotels, and airlines aren't continuing to pay for pricey channel bundles when nobody is coming in, and even if they could, those viewers would have nothing to watch.


----------



## ekim68

California Is Sending Every Voter a Ballot This Fall. The Rest of the Country Is Running Out of Time.



> 20 million Californians will have a ballot sent to their homes this year.


----------



## ekim68

Indoor perovskite solar cells pack high efficiency in artificial light 



> It might sound counterintuitive to put solar cells indoors, but there's still plenty of light energy inside that's largely going to waste. Now, a team of engineers is claiming to have created flexible perovskite solar cells with the highest efficiency of any indoor flexible solar cells.


----------



## ekim68

Large chunks of a Chinese rocket missed New York City by about 15 minutes



> A week ago, China launched the newest version of its largest rocket, the Long March 5B, from its southernmost spaceport. The launch proceeded normally and represented another success for China as it seeks to build a robust human spaceflight program. Over the next few years, this rocket will launch components of a modular space station.


----------



## ekim68

Court Upholds Public Right of Access to Court Documents



> A core part of EFF's mission is transparency and access to information, because we know that in a nation bound by the rule of law, the public must have the ability to know the law and how it is being applied.


----------



## ekim68

Netflix Saved Its Average User From 9.1 Days of Commercials in 2019


----------



## ekim68

Get Ready for a Vaccine Information War



> Social media is already filling up with misinformation about a Covid-19 vaccine, months or years before one even exists.


----------



## ekim68

During COVID-19, Healers Need Healing Too



> A physician's suicide reminds us that the plague of COVID-19 creates deep emotional wounds in health care workers


----------



## ekim68

Indoor perovskite solar cells pack high efficiency in artificial light



> It might sound counterintuitive to put solar cells indoors, but there's still plenty of light energy inside that's largely going to waste. Now, a team of engineers is claiming to have created flexible perovskite solar cells with the highest efficiency of any indoor flexible solar cells.


----------



## ekim68

Refrigerated trucks used as morgues during coronavirus pandemic can transport food again, FDA says



> Refrigerated trucks that were used to preserve human remains during the coronavirus pandemic may be used to transport food again after being properly cleaned and sanitized, according to recommendations published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week.


----------



## ekim68

Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)



> I've spent the last decade writing about, speaking about, and investing in clean energy and mobility. Over that time, I've made a series of forecasts about the future costs of clean energy technologies, including solar, wind, energy storage, and electric vehicles.
> 
> My first forecast, in 2011, was of the future cost of solar. It was quite a naive model, with errors I wince at today.


----------



## ekim68

Doctors are now social-media influencers. They aren't all ready for it.



> When President Donald Trump suggested during a press conference that doctors should look into treating covid-19 patients with an "injection inside" of disinfectant, "or almost a cleaning," Austin Chiang, a gastroenterologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, knew he had to react.


----------



## ekim68

*STATEMENT: After public outcry, ventilator repair restrictions loosen*



> BOSTON -- U.S. PIRG has been calling on manufacturers of ventilators to release all the service information needed for biomedical technicians to repair that equipment. Increasingly, those companies are posting the requested information online.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's People-Moving Tunnels Are Right on Schedule



> After a year's worth of digging, Elon Musk's The Boring Company has completed the second tunnel for its underground people-mover system at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). It's keeping in step with an anticipated opening date in January 2021-just in time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES).


----------



## ekim68

Cell-tower attacks by idiots who claim 5G spreads COVID-19 reportedly hit US



> The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly issuing alerts to wireless telecom providers and law enforcement agencies about potential attacks on cell towers and telecommunications workers by 5G/coronavirus conspiracy theorists. The DHS warned that there have already been "arson and physical attacks against cell towers in several US states."


----------



## ekim68

Tokyo Fire Dept adds Japan's first electric ambulance to its fleet 



> The Ikebukuro branch of the Tokyo Fire Department now has an electric ambulance in its fleet of vehicles thanks to a partnership with Nissan, and is based on the NV400 van currently on sale in Europe.
> 
> Part of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's "Zero Emission Tokyo" initiative, the ambulance can accommodate seven crew and passengers and comes fitted with an electric stretcher.


----------



## ekim68

The Industries Hit Hardest By The Unemployment Crisis 



> Economic "supersectors" by percent change in seasonally adjusted nonfarm employees from February to April 2020


----------



## ekim68

Carbon emissions dropped 17 percent globally amid coronavirus



> "Globally, we haven't seen a drop this big ever, and at the yearly level, you would have to go back to World War II to see such a big drop in emissions."


----------



## ekim68

Report Says Amazon Could Be Interested In JCPenney Acquisition 



> Amazon (AMZN) is reportedly in talks with JCPenney (JCP), the debt-laden retailer that filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Amazon stock moved up.


----------



## ekim68

The bizarre tale of the world's oldest cognac 



> The only remaining bottle of the world's oldest cognac will sell at auction next week, and will almost certainly set a new price record for a bottle of the famous French brandy.


----------



## ekim68

Every new Volvo model is now electronically limited to 112 mph




> Volvo





> is keeping one of its more controversial promises by installing an electronic speed limiter in all of its cars regardless of drivetrain type, horsepower, body style, or target market. It also announced a feature named Care Key that lets owners set additional speed-related restrictions when letting another motorist drive their car.


----------



## ekim68

California trash-to-hydrogen plant promises dirt-cheap, super-green H2 



> Lancaster, California will be home to a "greener than green" trash-to hydrogen production plant three times the size of any other green H2 facility. SGH2 says its process is the cleanest of all on the market, while matching the price of the cheapest producers - and pulling tens of thousands of tons of garbage out of landfills.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists find brain center that 'profoundly' shuts down pain



> A research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals' sense of pain. Somewhat unexpectedly, this brain center turns pain off, not on. It's located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety.


----------



## ekim68

State of the game: The key players in the emerging eVTOL air taxi market



> Electric VTOL air taxis are one of the great emerging technologies of our time, promising to unlock the skies as traffic-free, high-speed, 3D commuting routes. Much quieter and cheaper than helicopter travel, they'll also run on zero-local-emission electric power, and many models suggest they'll cost around the same per mile as a ride share.


----------



## ekim68

As Russia stalks US satellites, a space arms race may be heating up



> The Georgian conflict proved a far cry from the US military's GPS-powered assault on Iraqi forces in a 100-hour ground offensive in 1991. For Russia, the conflict signaled the need for a major military upgrade-particularly in the satellite systems critical for navigation, targeting, and communications.
> 
> Twelve years and billions of rubles later, Russia is now challenging the United States' long-standing supremacy in space and working to exploit the US military's dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting. Moscow is developing counter-space weapons as a part of its overall information warfare strategy. For example, Russia just tested an anti-satellite missile system designed to destroy satellites in low earth orbit.


----------



## ekim68

Wikipedia sets new rule to combat "toxic behaviour"



> Wikipedia is to institute a new code of conduct to battle what the firm called "toxic behaviour" by some volunteers.
> 
> The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that runs the site, voted on new measures that will be finalised by the end of the year.


----------



## ekim68

Internet giants are fighting to protect your private browsing history



> And they're doing a pretty good job


----------



## ekim68

10 Things to Remember About Memorial Day



> Memorial Day is much more than just a three-day weekend and a chance to get the year's first sunburn. It's a time to remember the men and women who sacrificed their lives for their country. Here are some facts to give the holiday some perspective.


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus pandemic claims another victim: Robocalls



> Have you been missing something amid the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders? No, not human contact. Not even toilet paper.
> 
> Robocalls.
> 
> Industry experts say robocalls are way down - scam calls as well as nagging from your credit-card company to pay your bill. The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted millions of job losses, and scammers have not been immune.


----------



## ekim68

Chrome and Firefox Block Torrent Site YTS over "Phishing"



> Chrome and Firefox are blocking direct access to the movie download pages of popular torrent site YTS. According to Google's safe browsing report, YTS.mx is a "deceptive site" that may trick visitors into doing dangerous things. The warning is likely the result of malicious advertisements.


----------



## ekim68

GE is saying goodbye to its 129-year-old light bulb business



> New York (CNN Business)General Electric is saying goodbye to the light bulb. The conglomerate is shedding a struggling business founded by Thomas Edison more than a century ago.
> 
> After years of failing to find a buyer, GE announced Wednesday it will sell its 129-year-old lighting division to smart home company Savant Systems.


----------



## ekim68

Frontier: Yes, yes, we've filed for bankruptcy protection, but that's not stopping us giving key staff $38m in bonuses



> Despite filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, US ISP Frontier Communications has insisted on giving key staff $38m in bonuses and other incentives - and an American judge has agreed.


----------



## ekim68

NSA warns of new Sandworm attacks on email servers



> The US National Security Agency (NSA) has published today a security alert warning of a new wave of cyberattacks against email servers, attacks conducted by one of Russia's most advanced cyber-espionage units.
> 
> The NSA says that members of Unit 74455 of the GRU Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST), a division of the Russian military intelligence service, have been attacking email servers running the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA).


----------



## ekim68

COVID-19 Brings Private Equity Investment in Nursing Homes into the Spotlight



> Officials had already expressed concerns about the rise of private equity investment in skilled nursing facilities, citing a lack of transparency and concerns over quality.
> 
> Then the coronavirus crisis hit.


----------



## ekim68

Trading Standards squad targets anti-5G USB stick



> Trading Standards officers are seeking to halt sales of a device that has been claimed to offer protection against the supposed dangers of 5G via use of quantum technology.
> 
> Cyber-security experts say the £339 5GBioShield appears to no more than a basic USB drive.


----------



## ekim68

$100 million in bounties paid via HackerOne to ethical hackers



> Bug bounty platform HackerOne announced today that $100,000,000 in rewards were paid out to white-hat hackers around the world as of May 26, 2020.
> 
> Since it started delivering vulnerability reports to its customers, HackerOne bug bounty hunters have found roughly 170,000 security vulnerabilities according to the company's CEO Mårten Mickos.


----------



## ekim68

Nuro's autonomous vehicles to deliver CVS prescriptions in Texas 



> Self-driving startup Nuro is well-positioned to pursue its ambitions of autonomous delivery, having received a first-of-its-kind exemption from the US Department of Transport back in February. The company is building on this through a new partnership with CVS, which will see its driverless vehicles deliver prescription medicines to customers in Texas within three hours of purchase.


----------



## ekim68

Evolution of pandemic coronavirus outlines path from animals to humans



> A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.


----------



## ekim68

Mining firm Rio Tinto sorry for destroying Aboriginal caves



> Mining giant Rio Tinto has apologised for blowing up 46,000-year-old Aboriginal caves in Western Australia dating back to the last Ice Age.
> 
> The Juukan Gorge caves, in the Pilbara region, were destroyed last Sunday as Rio Tinto expanded an iron ore project agreed with the authorities.
> 
> Many prehistoric artefacts have been found at the remote heritage site.
> 
> "We are sorry for the distress we have caused," said Chris Salisbury, the firm's iron ore chief executive.


----------



## ekim68

More than half of Twitter's 'Reopen America' calls from bots, study finds



> In a now-familiar truth, scenario, malicious actors are creating bots to sow discontent and division. That's according to a new study out of Carnegie Mellon, which found that half of all Twitter calls to reopen the country may be from bots.


----------



## ekim68

Troll farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines pushed coronavirus disinformation on Facebook



> One of the largest publishers of coronavirus disinformation on Facebook has been banned from the platform for using content farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines, Facebook said on Friday.
> 
> The publisher, Natural News, was one of the most prolific pushers of the viral "Plandemic" conspiracy video, which falsely claimed that the coronavirus is part of an elaborate government plot to control the populace through0 vaccines, and erroneously claimed that wearing a mask increases the risk of catching the coronavirus.


----------



## ekim68

Behind tech layoffs lay systemic cash flow negative companies



> Since the pandemic started, there's been approximately 61,260 tech layoffs [1]. Close to 30% of the layoffs came from public tech companies, *85% of those companies are unprofitable*.


----------



## ekim68

HBO Max won't hit AT&T data caps, but Netflix and Disney Plus will



> HBO Max, AT&T's big bet on the future of streaming, will be excused from AT&T's mobile data caps, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus will use up your data.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook software engineer resigns with scathing criticism of the network's refusal to act on 'weaponized hatred'



> The former Facebook employee accuses the social network of allowing "politicians to radicalize individuals and glorify violence."


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 was California's best selling car through first quarter



> The electric sedan found more buyers than any rivaling luxury car, and even mass-market sedans and crossovers.


----------



## ekim68

The next big problem for the economy: Businesses can't pay their rent



> Nearly half of commercial retail rents were not paid in May. Companies as big as Starbucks say the financial devastation from the shutdown has left them unable to pay their full property bills on time. Some companies warn they will not be able to pay rent for months.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook to block ads from state-controlled media entities in the U.S.



> Facebook said Thursday it will begin blocking state-controlled media outlets from buying advertising in the U.S. this summer. It's also rolling out a new set of labels to provide users with transparency around ads and posts from state-controlled outlets. Outlets that feel wrongly labeled can appeal the process.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Watch Fall Detection credited with saving unresponsive Arizona man



> The Apple Watch's Fall Detection feature is being credited as helping save an unresponsive man in Chandler, Arizona.
> 
> Fall Detection, introduced on the Apple Watch Series 4, can detect if a user takes a hard fall and will alert local emergency services if they don't respond within 60 seconds.


----------



## ekim68

Will the Pandemic Cost Teachers Their Pensions? 



> There have been countless headlines about the American education system's struggles to educate 50 million students under quarantine. But there's another, troubling consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic for the nation's students: the disruption of policymakers' efforts to improve the financial plight of public-school teachers.


----------



## ekim68

NYC reports no new coronavirus deaths for first time since mid-March 



> The Big Apple marked a major turning point in its battle against the coronavirus pandemic Wednesday with no new confirmed deaths from COVID-19 for the first time since March 12.


 * 
*


----------



## ekim68

Manned Fighter To Face Autonomous Drone Next Year In Sci-Fi Movie-Like Showdown



> The Air Force is hoping to pit an autonomous drone equipped with an artificial intelligence-driven flight control system against a fighter jet with a human pilot in a little over a year. The service has described this effort in the past as a "big moonshot" that could revolutionize air-to-air combat in ways that have so far been limited to the realm of fiction - at least as far as we know.


----------



## ekim68

Pandemic offers scientists unprecedented chance to 'hear' oceans as they once were



> NEW YORK (Reuters) - Eleven years ago, environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel dreamed aloud in a commencement speech: What if scientists could record the sounds of the ocean in the days before propeller-driven ships and boats spanned the globe?
> 
> They would listen to chit-chat between blue whales hundreds of miles apart. They would record the familiar chirps and clicks among a pod of dolphins.


----------



## ekim68

Study Shows Major E-Voting System Open To Numerous Hacking Attacks



> Another day, another electronic voting system that's simply not up to the task.
> 
> Over the weekend, researchers at MIT and the University of Michigan released a paper (pdf) showcasing how OmniBallot, an electronic voting system made by Seattle-based Democracy Live, is vulnerable to hack attacks and vote manipulation.


----------



## ekim68

MIT's tiny artificial brain chip could bring supercomputer smarts to mobile devices



> Researchers at MIT have published a new paper that describes a new type of artificial brain synapse that offers performance improvements versus other existing versions, and which can be combined in volumes of tens of thousands on a chip that's smaller physically than a single piece of confetti. The results could help create devices that can handle complex AI computing locally, while remaining small and power-efficient, and without having to connect to a data center.


----------



## ekim68

Boris Johnson considers giving drivers up to £6,000 in diesel and petrol car scrappage scheme 



> Drivers will be given up to £6,000 to swap their petrol or diesel cars for electric ones under plans being considered by Boris Johnson ahead of a major speech to relaunch the economy.
> 
> The move is designed to provide a shot in the arm for UK electric car manufacturing and for the car industry as a whole after it was devastated by the coronavirus lockdown.


*

*


----------



## ekim68

Boring Co.'s Las Vegas loop set for expansion with first two casino applicants



> The Wynn Las Vegas and the Resorts World Las Vegas are seeking approval to connect to become official stops in The Boring Company's Las Vegas Convention Center transit system.
> 
> Both casinos are seeking approval from Clark County officials to link to Elon Musk's newly constructed underground tunnel system in the Sin City.


----------



## ekim68

US ranks 24th in the world on environmental performance



> The United States is far behind other industrialized nations on environmental performance and now ranks 24th in the world, according to a new analysis by Yale and Columbia universities.
> 
> Denmark came in first place, followed by Luxembourg and Switzerland. The United Kingdom ranked fourth.


----------



## ekim68

Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site



> The Internet Archive is a massive endeavor-it's an online library aiming to "provide Universal Access to All Knowledge." It has digitized millions of web pages, movies, photos, recordings, software programs, and books that might otherwise be lost to history.
> 
> But it's neither un-censorable nor outside the bounds of copyright law. And now open internet supporters are wondering how to save it before it disappears.


----------



## ekim68

Half the Earth relatively intact from global human influence



> Roughly half of Earth's ice-free land remains without significant human influence, according to a study from a team of international researchers led by the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis.


----------



## ekim68

Stalkerware detection rates are improving across antivirus products



> Detections rates for stalkerware applications on Android and Windows devices are slowly improving, according to the findings of a seven-month research project carried out by independent antivirus testing lab AV-Comparatives and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.


----------



## ekim68

Zipline Launches Long-Distance Drone Delivery of COVID-19 Supplies in the U.S.[/url=



> An emergency waiver from the FAA enables a new drone delivery service in North Carolina


----------



## ekim68

Porsche Taycan Turbo bows to humble Tesla Model 3 in 500 km endurance race



> During the recently-conducted 500 km electric car race "Ignitis ON: get to know Lithuania!" in Druskininkai, Lithuania, a stunning black Porsche Taycan Turbo proudly crossed the finish line in 5 hours 47 minutes and 14 seconds. That was very impressive for the Taycan Turbo, which made its debut in the race this year. But inasmuch as the 500 km race was a big win for Porsche's flagship electric car, there was one little detail that tempered its victory.
> 
> One minute and seven seconds before the proud Porsche Taycan Turbo completed the race, a humble Tesla Model 3 crossed the finish line, earning first place.


----------



## ekim68

The Internet Needs a New Architecture that Puts Users First



> Quarantine has changed the way we connect, online and off. As we rely on the internet more and more for work, social connections, and basic needs, it is time to talk about the future of meaningful online experiences, and the need for a new internet architecture. We need a user-focused, localized internet. This competitive architecture would deliver an experience that values real-time connectivity over one-way advertising and puts control with the user, not with big tech platforms.


----------



## ekim68

Google resumes its senseless attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 85



> Google has tried on and off for years to hide full URLs in Chrome's address bar, because apparently long web addresses are scary and evil. Despite the public backlash that came after every previous attempt, Google is pressing on with new plans to hide all parts of web addresses except the domain name.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model S Long Range Plus gets 402-mile EPA range rating 



> When Tesla unveiled the Model S in 2009, its per charge range was given as up to 160 miles on a single charge, which some electric cars don't even manage to this day. Now the EPA has rated its Long Range Plus model for 402 miles on a single charge.


----------



## ekim68

Super secretive Russian disinfo operation discovered dating back to 2014



> Researchers uncover six-years-worth of Russian attempts to mold international politics using fake news and forged documents.


----------



## ekim68

Poll: Americans are the unhappiest they've been in 50 years



> ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - It's been a rough year for the American psyche. Folks in the U.S. are more unhappy today than they've been in nearly 50 years.
> 
> This bold - yet unsurprising - conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. It finds that just 14% of American adults say they're very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they'd often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that.


----------



## ekim68

A Medical Device Maker Threatens iFixit Over Ventilator Repair Project



> iFixit has built a comprehensive online database of repair manuals for ventilators and medical equipment to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. Last week it received a letter claiming copyright infringement.


----------



## ekim68

Cool stuff.. 


How Far Back in Time Could a Modern English Speaker Go and Still Communicate?



> Changes in language don't occur overnight, though slang terms come in and out of use relatively quickly and new words are invented while others fall into disuse. The rules of grammar you learned in school are the same ones your parents were taught and what your own kids will (or do) use.


----------



## ekim68

The Story of Robinhood



> Over the weekend, I learned of a 20 year old who died from suicide after thinking he racked up a $730K+ debit on Robinhood, a free online stock trading platform that's become exceedingly popular with young "traders" placing risky bets on highly volatile companies amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Sadly, it was later revealed that the way the platform displayed account balances led the young man to believe he owed so much money.


----------



## ekim68

Activists Are Using Traffic Cameras to Track Police Brutality



> A group of activists that runs a free community-owned internet service provider in New York City is now archiving hundreds of gigabytes of the city's surveillance camera footage in an effort to keep police accountable.


----------



## ekim68

Rising Seas Threaten an American Institution: The 30-Year Mortgage



> Climate change is starting to transform the classic home loan, a fixture of the American experience and financial system that dates back generations.


----------



## ekim68

Japan's Fugaku surpasses Summit as world's most powerful supercomputer 



> The world's most powerful supercomputer has just fired up. A newcomer named Fugaku has nabbed the number one spot in the Top500 list of supercomputers, surpassing Summit, the reigning champion of the past few years.
> 
> Fugaku is installed in the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and only just began some operations this month. The Top500 list primarily ranks systems based on a metric called High Performance Linpack (HPL), and Fugaku boasts a HPL of 415.5 petaflops. That makes it 2.8 times more powerful than runner-up Summit, on 148.8 petaflops.


----------



## ekim68

The Fastest ISP In America Is Community Owned And Operated



> We've long noted that community broadband networks are just an organic response to the broken, uncompetitive US broadband market. While you'll occasionally see some deployment duds if the business models aren't well crafted, studies have shown such networks (there are 750 and counting now in the States) offer cheaper, faster service than many incumbents. In short, these communities grew so frustrated with America's mediocre, patchy, and expensive broadband service, they built their own.


----------



## ekim68

Company plans space tourism flights in high-altitude balloon



> Researchers, armchair astronauts and even brides and grooms looking for an out-of-this-world wedding experience will be able to celebrate, collect data or simply enjoy the view from an altitude of 100,000 feet in a balloon-borne pressurized cabin, complete with a bar and a restroom, a space startup announced Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

Olympus quits camera business after 84 years



> The firm said that despite its best efforts, the "extremely severe digital camera market" was no longer profitable.
> 
> The arrival of smartphones, which had shrunk the market for separate cameras, was one major factor, it said.
> 
> It had recorded losses for the last three years.


----------



## ekim68

T-Mobile Is Already Trying To Wiggle Out Of Its Sprint Merger Conditions



> Despite countless pre-merger promises that its $26 billion merger would create oodles of new jobs, T-Mobile laid off 6,000 employees at its Metro prepaid division before the ink was even dry. Another 200 Sprint employees were fired during a 6 minute conference call a few weeks ago. T-Mobile and Sprint quietly confirmed the layoffs had nothing to do with the pandemic.


----------



## ekim68

New Rule in California Will Require Zero-Emissions Trucks



> Rebuffing strong opposition from industry, California on Thursday adopted a landmark rule requiring more than half of all trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035, a move that is expected to improve local air quality, rein in greenhouse gas emissions and sharply curtail the state's dependence on oil.


----------



## ekim68

NASA Names Headquarters After 'Hidden Figure' Mary W. Jackson



> NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Wednesday the agency's headquarters building in Washington, D.C., will be named after Mary W. Jackson, the first African American female engineer at NASA.
> 
> Jackson started her NASA career in the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer, went on to lead programs influencing the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. In 2019, she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.


----------



## ekim68

Charter seeks FCC OK to impose data caps and charge fees to video services



> Charter, unlike other ISPs, isn't allowed to impose data caps and faces limits on charges for interconnection payments because of conditions applied to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The conditions were imposed by the Federal Communications Commission for seven years and are scheduled to elapse in May 2023. Last week, Charter submitted a petition asking the FCC to let the conditions run out on May 18, 2021 instead. The FCC is seeking public comment on the petition.


----------



## ekim68

Radar system could let cars see what's around the corner



> While today's cars are getting increasingly good at detecting other vehicles on the road ahead, they can still be surprised by traffic that shoots out from intersecting streets. A new radar system could help, by letting those cars "see" around blind corners.
> 
> Developed at Princeton University by a team led by Asst. Prof. Felix Heide, the setup incorporates relatively inexpensive Dopler radar units.


----------



## ekim68

NEC mass produces plant-based bioplastic that breaks down in four years



> With awareness of the damaging effects of plastic pollution growing all the time, the search is very much on for greener alternatives. Japan's NEC Corp has today made commercially available a material it hopes can be a part of the solution, introducing a bioplastic made with plant ingredients that breaks down in the environment in around four years.


----------



## ekim68

25 technologies that have changed the world



> If 1995 seems a long time ago, that's because it was. The DVD player was the hot new entertainment device, mobile phones were bulky and did little besides place calls, and accessing the internet was a novel (and slow) experience confined to desktop computers. It also was the year CNET began publishing news and reviews.


----------



## ekim68

Data caps on AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile will return June 30



> Major Internet service providers are scheduled to end their quarantine benefits soon, once again subjecting Americans to data caps and removing protections if they are unable to pay their bills.


----------



## ekim68

Deep red light reboots aging retinas like "recharging a battery"



> As our bodies age we can expect different components to deteriorate in performance, however, not all do so at the same pace. The retinas are one example of a part that ages sooner than most, but a new study has demonstrated how a form of deep red light therapy can help arrest this slide. Hitting the eyeball with just the right wavelength of light has been found to "recharge the energy system" and bring significant improvements to vision in those over 40.


----------



## ekim68

400 TB Storage Drives in Our Future: Fujifilm



> One of the two leading manufacturers of tape cartridge storage, FujiFilm, claims that they have a technology roadmap through to 2030 which builds on the current magnetic tape paradigm to enable 400 TB per tape.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands of U.S. judges who broke laws or oaths remained on the bench 



> In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found - including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla becomes most valuable automaker in latest stock rally



> (Reuters) - Tesla Inc on Wednesday became the highest-valued automaker as its shares surged to record highs and the electric carmaker's market capitalization overtook that of former front runner Toyota Motors Corp.
> 
> Tesla shares gained 5% in early morning trade to a record of $1,133, boosting the company's market cap to $209.47 billion - roughly $6 billion more than Toyota is currently valued by investors.


----------



## ekim68

Is the Five-Day Office Week Over?



> Most American office workers are in no hurry to return to the office full time, even after the coronavirus is under control. But that doesn't mean they want to work from home forever. The future for them, a variety of new data shows, is likely to be workweeks split between office and home.


----------



## ekim68

Development projects are converting America's faded retail structures into livable space. 



> Two dramatically different economic trends in America are converging in unexpected ways. On the one hand, environmental and zoning restrictions-enacted by states and municipalities-have helped drive up the cost of housing, spurring an affordability crisis in some communities. On the other, a shift in consumption patterns (even before the coronavirus) has caused the closure of many retailers and malls. Now, inspired builders and planners are looking to use these empty spaces to create housing in mixed-use developments, ranging from the outlying suburbs to central cities. Dozens of communities are reusing such spaces, and early successes have created momentum.


----------



## ekim68

'We feel absolutely abandoned': How the pandemic in Russia tanked the economy and plunged families into crisis



> MOSCOW - She still has her dreams: to raise a doctor, an engineer, a military general and an athlete. But as the coronavirus pandemic swept over Russia, bankrupting businesses and families, Yekaterina Gorbunova, her husband, Alexander, and their four children lost nearly everything.


----------



## ekim68

Study: World's pile of electronic waste grows ever higher



> BERLIN (AP) - The world's mountain of discarded flat-screen TVs, cellphones and other electronic goods grew to a record high last year, according to an annual report released Thursday.
> 
> The U.N.-backed study estimated the amount of e-waste that piled up globally in 2019 at 53.6 million metric tonnes (59.1 million tons) - almost 2 million metric tons more than the previous year.


----------



## ekim68

> https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a...TW&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social-media]
> Ohio Removes Front License Plate Requirement, Joining 19 Other States[/url]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> As of July 1, the state of Ohio no longer requires vehicles to have a license plate mounted on the front. You still have to put one on the back of the car, of course; the state has not yet descended into unlicensed anarchy. That's great news for those with vehicles that look horrible with a front plate-and those with the currently fashionable huge grilles in front. Not as good news for the cops and people who use Uber to get around.
Click to expand...


----------



## ekim68

Networks of self-driving trucks are becoming a reality in the US



> Fully autonomous trucking may be one step closer to reality. On Wednesday, the San Diego-based self-driving startup TuSimple announced what it's calling the world's first autonomous freight network. That means that the company is laying the groundwork for delivering a lot more of our stuff with self-driving trucks.


----------



## ekim68

Germany is first major economy to phase out coal and nuclear



> The plan is part of Germany's 'energy transition' - an effort to wean Europe's biggest economy off planet-warming fossil fuels and generate all of the country's considerable energy needs from renewable sources. Achieving that goal is made harder than in comparable countries such as France and Britain because of Germany's existing commitment to also phase out nuclear power by the end of 2022.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers learn how to pinpoint malicious drone operators



> The solution BGU came up with was the use of neutral networking. Rather than focusing on trying to untangle a variety of signals, the network was trained to predict the location of an operator using only flight paths -- even when in motion.


----------



## ekim68

Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked



> Privacy regulations such as the GDPR say that you need to seek permission from your website visitors before tracking them.
> 
> Most GDPR consent banner implementations are deliberately engineered to be difficult to use and are full of dark patterns that are illegal according to the law.


----------



## ekim68

Inaccurate Public History Is the Issue, Not the Statues



> An angry mob recently tore down a public bust of Ulysses Grant in San Francisco. It makes one wonder whether whoever did this was able to discern that while Grant may not be Che Guevara, he did lead Lincoln's army against the Confederacy, who are _the bad guys_ in this fraught street soap-opera moment.


----------



## ekim68

Nuclear 'Power Balls' May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past



> Triso particles are an alien-looking fuel with built-in safety features that will power a new generation of high-temperature reactors.


----------



## ekim68

The Far Side returns after 25 years, and it's all digital



> Gary Larson just released new comics for _The Far Side_, the first strips since January 1995. While Larson cautions that this is "not a resurrection of _The Far Side_ daily cartoons," after 25 years of rereading our favorites, we're so excited for new work that we'll take anything he wants to share. Larson started to bring his comics online late last year.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands of contracts highlight quiet ties between Big Tech and U.S. military



> On Wednesday, newly published research from the technology accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry revealed that the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, have secured thousands of deals with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Hewlett Packard and even Facebook that have not been previously reported.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts']Search Every Company Approved for Federal Loans Over $150k  [/url]



> As part of the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal government provided up to $659 billion in financial support to banks to make low-interest loans to companies and nonprofit organizations in response to the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Search the loans approved by lenders and disclosed by the Small Business Administration (SBA).


----------



## ekim68

Sign of the times...


----------



## ekim68

The Uncertain Future of Ham Radio



> The number of U.S. amateur licenses has held at an anemic 1 percent annual growth for the past few years, with about 7,000 new licensees added every year for a total of 755,430 in 2018. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission doesn't track demographic data of operators, but anecdotally, white men in their 60s and 70s make up much of the population. As these baby boomers age out, the fear is that there are too few young people to sustain the hobby.


----------



## ekim68

Portland approves 10% cap on fees that food delivery apps can charge restaurants



> The Portland City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to make it illegal for third-party food delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub to collect more than 10% in commission fees from city restaurants amid the coronavirus pandemic.


----------



## ekim68

Volvo Registered A Tesla Model Y In Sweden For Reverse Engineer?



> Model Y will not enter the European market before Giga Berlin is built. Therefore, Volvo imported the car from the Tesla plant in California. We strongly doubt that the Swedish automaker purchased the car so that someone would just drive it, so reverse engineering is the most likely reason. In 2018, Volvo already bought a Model 3, which at that time was not available in Europe, for this purpose.


----------



## ekim68

House Passes Massive Broadband Bill That Surprisingly Doesn't Suck



> The majority of broadband bills that wind their way through Congress don't actually address the most pressing problem in US telecom: a lack of meaningful broadband competition. Often the bills focus almost exclusively on heavy subsidization of incumbent telecom monopolies, an approach that requires a level of diligence the U.S. has historically not been capable of.


----------



## ekim68

'Broken heart syndrome' has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, small study suggests



> A study published Thursday found a significant increase in "broken heart syndrome" at two Ohio hospitals among some patients who don't have coronavirus, suggesting that the physical, social and economic stressors from the pandemic are taking a physical toll.
> 
> Stress-induced cardiomyopathy or Takotsubo syndrome -- which is often called "broken heart syndrome" -- occurs when the heart muscles weaken, leading to chest pain and shortness of breath. It presents like a heart attack, but is triggered by stressful events, not blockages in the bloodstream.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Air Force Launches Three-Year Fielding Plan For Skyborg Weapons



> The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21.
> 
> By fiscal 2023, the Air Force expects to deliver the first operational versions of a new unmanned aircraft system (UAS) called Skyborg, a provocative portmanteau blending the medium of flight with the contraction for a cybernetic organism.


----------



## ekim68

Fun stuff.. 


I turned off autocorrect on my iPhone and learned a terrible lesson


----------



## ekim68

This Iowa Town Is Building An Open Access Fiber Broadband Network. Google Fiber Is Its First Customer



> West Des Moines, Iowa this week announced that it would be building a massive, open access fiber network. The city is one of roughly 750 towns and cities that, frustrated by high prices, limited competition, and patchy availability of US broadband, have decided to instead build their own networks. Well, assuming that AT&T and Comcast haven't bribed your state officials to pass laws banning such efforts yet.


----------



## ekim68

Amid pandemic, wealthy U.S. families approved for government loans



> BOSTON (Reuters) - Private investment firms that manage the fortunes of wealthy individuals and their kin were approved for millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded relief loans designed to help small businesses weather the coronavirus lockdown, according to a review of recently released government data.


----------



## ekim68

US Army's gravity-defying aluminum panel purifies water with sunlight 



> Providing clean drinking water in regions where the resource is scarce is a huge challenge, and one that we're seeing plenty of inventive solutions to. A research team from the US Army and the University of Rochester is throwing a new possibility into the mix, showing off a "superwicking" aluminum panel that uses solar power to purify water with great efficiency.
> 
> Solar power has proven a popular choice when it comes to powering low-cost water purifiers, with sunlight long known to destroy waterborne pathogens.


----------



## ekim68

Is It Time To Kill The Penny?



> The coin shortage could be a rallying cry for a long-running movement that has lost steam in recent years: Kill the penny! Last year, almost 60% of the coins that the U.S. Mint churned out were pennies. _60 percent_. It made more than 7 billion pennies. _Seven billion_. That's a lot of manpower that could be used toward making coins we actually need.


----------



## ekim68

We've been using the same bricks for over 5,000 years. This engineer says it's time for a change.



> The company's signature product is the K-Briq. Made from more than 90% construction waste, Medero says the K-Briq -- which does not need to be fired in a kiln -- produces less than a tenth of the carbon emissions of conventional bricks. With the company testing new machinery to start scaling up production, Medero hopes her bricks will help to build a more sustainable world.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 resale value is over five times better than industry average: study



> Teslas have garnered a reputation for many things, and having a great resale value is one of them. This was recently highlighted in a study conducted by car search engine iSeeCars.com, which analyzed over 6.9 million car sales to identify which vehicles experienced the most and least depreciation in the past three years. As it turns out, the Tesla Model 3 is able to retain its value over five times better than other EVs in the market.


----------



## ekim68

You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot



> Verizon has turned to Google Cloud's Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations.


----------



## ekim68

Breakthrough image shows how "super-ager" brains resist cognitive decline



> New research is illustrating the differences in toxic protein accumulations in the brains of older subjects suffering cognitive decline compared to older subjects with unexpectedly strong cognitive abilities. An image compiled from PET scans of these so-called "super-agers" has won Image of the Year from the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.


----------



## ekim68

Verizon Has To Walk Back Bogus 5G Coverage Claims



> Reality is... something different. One recent study by OpenSignal found that users in the real world are able to obtain a Verizon 5G signal about 0.4% of the time, largely because the millimeter wave spectrum Verizon is using doesn't provide very good range, and can't penetrate buildings particularly well. Even in the places that Verizon advertises as having widespread coverage -- like sports stadiums -- routinely see patchy availability.


----------



## ekim68

On eve of bankruptcy, U.S. firms shower execs with bonuses



> Nearly a third of more than 40 large companies seeking U.S. bankruptcy protection during the coronavirus pandemic awarded bonuses to executives within a month of filing their cases, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings and court records.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. TikTok Hysteria Teeters Toward The Idiotic



> It was just the latest example of how, upon closer inspection, much of the hysteria surrounding TikTok isn't based on much of anything... substantive. There's been no limit of pearl clutching from the Trump administration and its allies about the app, but when it comes to actual supporting evidence to justify an outright ban, there's just not much of it beyond "it's from China."


----------



## ekim68

Study shows how traumatic experiences can leave their mark on a person's eyes 



> New research by Welsh academics shows that a patient's pupils can reveal if they have suffered a traumatic experience in the past.
> 
> Post-traumatic stress disorder can occur when a person has experienced a traumatic event such as a car crash, combat stress, or abuse. They can be left with a greater sensitivity, or hyperarousal, to everyday events and an inability to switch off and relax.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea Commits $61 Billion For 'Net-Zero Society' by 2025



> South Korea announced it's investing $61 billion by 2025 to become a "net-zero society," according to a statement from the country's Ministry of Environment, reports a local news source.


----------



## ekim68

Dogs may use Earth's magnetic field to take shortcuts



> Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional-albeit hidden-sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth's magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain.


----------



## ekim68

Hybrid solar converter harvests both sunlight and heat at 85% efficiency



> Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid solar energy converter, which uses energy from the Sun to create both electricity and steam. The device reportedly has high efficiency and runs at low cost, allowing industry to make use of a wider spectrum of solar energy.


----------



## ekim68

Lithium Can Be Extracted From Groundwater At Geothermal Installations[/quote]


> Scientists at the at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say there is enough lithium dissolved in the groundwater extracted by German geothermal heating and electricity installations to meet the needs of most if not all of the battery manufacturers in the country. "As far as we know, there can be up to 200 milligrams per liter," says geoscientist Dr. Jens Grimmer of the Institute of Applied Geosciences at KIT. "If we consistently use this potential, we could cover a considerable part of the demand in Germany."


----------



## ekim68

Novavax executives could get big payday even if vaccine fails



> One of the leading U.S. firms developing a coronavirus vaccine, Novavax Inc (NVAX.O), has awarded executives stock options that could pay out tens of millions of dollars even if its efforts fail.


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus: Harmful lies spread easily due to lack of UK law



> Misleading and harmful online content about Covid-19 has spread "virulently" because the UK still lacks a law to regulate social media, an influential group of MPs has said.
> 
> The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee urged the government to publish a draft copy of promised legislation by the autumn.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla turns a profit for the fourth quarter in a row - a first for the company



> Tesla turned a profit of $104 million in the second quarter of 2020 despite shutting down its electric vehicle factory in Fremont, California, for roughly seven weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Tesla has now been profitable for four straight quarters for the first time in company history - an elusive benchmark the company has long sought.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter Cracks Down on QAnon. Your Move, Facebook



> Twitter's new policy won't make the conspiracy group disappear. But experts say it could dramatically reduce its ability to spread.


----------



## ekim68

FCC Boss Ajit Pai Pretends To Care About A Prison Telco Monopoly Problem He Helped Protect



> Over the last few decades, companies like Securus have managed to obtain a cozy, government-supported monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services. Like any monopoly, this has pretty traditionally resulted in not only sky high rates -- upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls -- but comically poor service as well.


----------



## ekim68

Pandemic pollution drop found to boost solar panel output  



> The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world in many ways, some obvious and some less so. Now, scientists have quantified an effect that lies a few links down the chain, finding that solar panels in certain cities have seen a boost in output, due to a reduction in air pollution.


----------



## ekim68

Snare system is made to thwart porch pirates  



> So-called "porch pirates" are generally looking for packages that they can grab quickly and easily … if anything presents a challenge, they'll just move on to another porch. It was with this in mind that the Snare Parcel Protection system was created.
> 
> Invented by Canadian entrepreneur (and former machinist) Dennis Evans, Snare incorporates two parts - a stainless steel bracket that's permanently mounted on an outdoor surface such as a wall, and the main parcel-securing unit. The latter is key-locked onto the mount when the user is expecting a package.


----------



## ekim68

NBA is using Microsoft Teams to brings virtual fans into its real-world games



> The basketball organization said it'll install massive 17-foot tall screens on each game court to serve as digital "stands" filled with 300 fans.


----------



## ekim68

Machines can learn unsupervised 'at speed of light' after AI breakthrough, scientists say



> Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence by using light instead of electricity to perform computations:
> The new approach significantly improves both the speed and efficiency of machine learning neural networks - a form of AI that aims to replicate the functions performed by a human brain in order to teach itself a task without supervision.


----------



## ekim68

Qualcomm's Quick Charge 5 can get a phone to 50 percent battery in five minutes



> Qualcomm is giving its Quick Charge technology a sizeable boost, one that the company claims will be able to plug in and get a device with a 4,500mAh battery from 0 to 50% in five minutes and from empty to 100% in 15 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

You can now boot a Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft and play Doom on it



> If you've ever wanted to build a real and working Windows 95 PC inside _Minecraft_, now is the time. A new VM Computers mod has been created for _Minecraft _that allows players to order computer parts from a satellite orbiting around a _Minecraft _world and build a computer that actually boots Windows 95 and a variety of other operating systems.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus' self-flying plane just completed successful taxi, take-off, and landing tests, opening the door for fully autonomous flight



> Over 500 flights were conducted with the new Airbus A350-1000 XWB that successfully utilized "image recognition technology" to essentially give the plane a pair of eyes. The technology, integrated with the A350's exterior cameras, allowed it to perform the phases of flight entirely on its own, Airbus announced.


----------



## ekim68

US Marines to get 'Alpha' exoskeleton for super strength



> The Marines are about to get their hands on an impressive bit of hardware: A wearable robotic exoskeleton that gives users super strength. The company delivering the unit, a defense-focused subsidiary of Sarcos Robotics developed the exoskeleton for industrial uses, including in energy and construction.


----------



## ekim68

After 250 years, Big Sur land finally returned to Native American tribe



> As part of a $4.5 million land deal, the ancestral homeland of the Esselen Tribe has been returned to its people after being landless for a quarter of a millennium.
> 
> "We are back after a 250-year absence - because in 1770 our people were taken to the missions," Tom Little Bear Nason, chairman of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County, told the Monterey County Weekly. "Now we are back home. We plan on keeping this land forever."


----------



## ekim68

Working from home is helping women advance their tech careers



> Now that everyone is working from home recognition is based more on output and quality than on face time with leadership.


----------



## ekim68

Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decades



> Two theoretical physicists specializing in complex systems conclude that global deforestation due to human activities is on track to trigger the "irreversible collapse" of human civilization within the next two to four decades.


----------



## ekim68

9 Books That Predicted the Future



> The problem with writing fiction is that readers expect the worlds authors create, even the most baffling and high concept ones, to make sense-so authors spend a lot of time making the worlds they craft believable. And sometimes, they come up with a plot point in their work that seems to foresee a real-world event.


----------



## ekim68

Building rubble combines with tire waste for recycled road material 



> A team of engineers in Australia has come up with a new recipe for a road construction material that draws on two huge sources of waste; discarded tires and building rubble. The blended material was shown to offer the strength and flexibility required to handle heavy traffic, while being made from entirely recycled products.


----------



## ekim68

Apple surpasses Saudi Aramco to become world's most valuable company



> Apple rode the company's strong earnings report to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company, surpassing the state oil giant Saudi Aramco at Friday's market close.
> 
> Apple shares closed up 10.47% Friday, giving it a market valuation of $1.84 trillion.


----------



## ekim68

Is Your Chip Card Secure? Much Depends on Where You Bank



> Chip-based credit and debit cards are designed to make it infeasible for skimming devices or malware to clone your card when you pay for something by dipping the chip instead of swiping the stripe. But a recent series of malware attacks on U.S.-based merchants suggest thieves are exploiting weaknesses in how certain financial institutions have implemented the technology to sidestep key chip card security features and effectively create usable, counterfeit cards.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change's New Ally: Big Finance



> A growing number of large companies have announced commitments to achieve "net zero" emissions by 2050. What are we to make of this seeming sea change in corporate social responsibility?


----------



## ekim68

Jihadist plots used to be U.S. and Europe's biggest terrorist threat. Now it's the far right.



> An increasing percentage of plans and attacks in the U.S. are linked to far-right activity, said Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.


----------



## ekim68

Politics at the point of a gun



> Conservative armed groups move into politics as backlash builds against protests, stay-at-home orders


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk Quietly Revealed a Brilliant Plan That Could Completely Change the Auto Industry



> Elon Musk has tried to position Tesla as a partner to legacy automakers, not a competitor. His recent statement takes it a step further.


----------



## ekim68

NZ to trial world-first commercial long-range, wireless power transmission 



> A New Zealand-based startup has developed a method of safely and wirelessly transmitting electric power across long distances without the use of copper wire, and is working on implementing it with the country's second-largest power distributor.


----------



## ekim68

Virtual house hunting gets a pandemic boost



> Welcome to house shopping in the age of coronavirus.
> 
> It's not for everyone as, at the moment, house hunters have to use their own headsets.


----------



## ekim68

Firefox 79 clears redirect tracking cookies every 24 hours



> Mozilla today started rolling out Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) 2.0 in Firefox. While the company technically launched Firefox 79 for Windows, Mac, and Linux last week, it only unveiled its marquee feature today. Firefox 79 by default blocks redirect tracking, also known as bounce tracking, and adds a handful of new developer features.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Boring Co. Las Vegas Loop gets approved expansion to new Strip location



> The Boring Company, Elon Musk's tunneling venture, is expanding its Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) transportation Loop to include a station stop at the city's new Resorts World hotel. The local county approved the application on Wednesday, checking off the final step needed to move forward with the project.


----------



## ekim68

Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business



> Toshiba has finally and formally exited the laptop business
> 
> Toshiba has made laptops since 1985 and claims to have been the first to make a mass-market computer in the now-familiar clamshell form factor.


----------



## ekim68

Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?



> A Dutch public broadcaster got rid of targeted digital ads-and its revenues went way up.


----------



## ekim68

This giant climate hot spot is robbing the West of its water



> The average flow of the Colorado River has declined nearly 20 percent over the past century, half of which is because of warming temperatures, scientists say. With the region's snowpack shrinking and melting earlier, the ground absorbs more heat - and more of the precious water evaporates.


----------



## ekim68

Americans are losing faith in an objective media. A new Gallup/Knight study explores why.



> Americans have high aspirations for the news media to be a trusted, independent watchdog that holds the powerful to account. But in a new Gallup/Knight study, we've found the gap is growing between what Americans expect from the news and what they think they are getting. Perceptions of bias are increasing too, which further erodes the media's ability to deliver on its promise to our democracy.


----------



## ekim68

Here's how to make a claim in the $7.5M Google Plus security flaw settlement



> Anyone in the United States who held a Google Plus account between January 1, 2015 and April 2, 2019, and believes they were impacted by a security flaw that Google disclosed in 2018 can now register for a payout from a class action settlement. The lawsuit has settled for a total of $7.5 million. Each class action member is eligible for a payout of up to $12 after attorney fees and other costs are accounted for, although this could vary depending on the number of people who submit a claim. You have until October 8 to register.


----------



## ekim68

Mauritius PM warns damaged ship leaking oil could split



> A ship that ran aground off Mauritius leaking tonnes of oil into the ocean is cracking, the prime minister said, threatening an even greater ecological and economic disaster for the island nation.


----------



## ekim68

Police use of facial recognition violates human rights, UK court rules



> Privacy advocates in the UK are claiming victory as an appeals court ruled today that police use of facial recognition technology in that country has "fundamental deficiencies" and violates several laws.


----------



## 2twenty2

*The world's last Blockbuster has been turned into an Airbnb*

https://dailyhive.com/mapped/worlds-last-blockbuster-airbnb


----------



## ekim68

Japan aims to send flying cars into Tokyo skies in only three years



> The Japanese government hopes to see flying cars in the skies above the country's major cities in only three years.
> 
> The vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) industry, with a particular focus on renewable, electric power systems, is of interest to many vendors in the transport space.


----------



## ekim68

The global coffee crisis is coming



> Nearly 500 billion cups of coffee are consumed every year, making it easily one of the most popular goods in the world. It's cultivated in dozens of countries by nearly 25 million farmers who depend on it to make a living.
> 
> But coffee is becoming harder to grow. It's a notoriously picky plant that requires very specific conditions to grow. And as climate change warms the planet, the places that can sustain the plant are shrinking. A recent study estimates that by 2050, the amount of land that can sustain coffee will have fallen by 50 percent.


----------



## ekim68

The recession is over for the rich, but the working class is far from recovered



> This dichotomy is evident in many facets of the economy, especially in employment. Jobs are fully back for the highest wage earners, but fewer than half the jobs lost this spring have returned for those making less than $20 an hour, according to a new labor data analysis by John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University and co-director of Opportunity Insights.


----------



## ekim68

Regularly Delete Your Digital Assistant's Voice History



> Bugs found in Alexa's web services could have let hackers access voice recordings and personal data stored on Amazon's servers. Some of the vulnerabilities could even let hackers remotely install Alexa Skills on someone else's device without them knowing. Despite the severity of these flaws, you're safe in this particular instance-but it's a great reminder to _please delete your smart speaker's audio recordings already_.


----------



## ekim68

Charter can charge online video sites for network connections, court rules



> Charter can charge Netflix and other online video streaming services for network interconnection despite a merger condition prohibiting the practice, a federal appeals court ruled today.


----------



## ekim68

Families rebel against cost of online classes



> After Southern California's soaring coronavirus caseload forced Chapman University this month to abruptly abandon plans to reopen its campus and shift to an autumn of all-remote instruction, the school promised that students would still get a "robust...


----------



## ekim68

The Fish Rots From the Head



> Along the Amur, one of Asia's great waterways, Russians feel cheated, lied to and ignored. The wild salmon fishery that they once took for granted is gone, they say, because Moscow granted large concessions to enterprises that strung enormous nets across the river's mouth.


----------



## ekim68

Black silicon photodetector hits record-breaking 132% efficiency 



> Researchers at Aalto University have developed a photovoltaic device that has an external quantum efficiency of 132 percent. This impossible-sounding feat was achieved using nanostructured black silicon, and could represent a major breakthrough for solar cells and other photodetectors.
> 
> If a hypothetical photovoltaic device has an external quantum efficiency of 100 percent, that means that every photon of light that strikes it generates one electron, which exits through the circuit and is harvested as electricity.


----------



## Brigham

How can this be true? where do the extra electrons come from?


----------



## ekim68

Brigham said:


> How can this be true? where do the extra electrons come from?


This from the article...



> Obviously you can't have 0.32 of an electron, but put another way you have a 32-percent chance of generating two electrons from a single photon. On the surface it might sound impossible - after all, physics dictates that energy can't be created from nothing. So where are these extra electrons coming from?
> 
> It all comes down to how photovoltaic materials work in general. When a photon of incoming light strikes the active material - usually silicon - it knocks an electron out of one of its atoms. But under certain circumstances, one high-energy photon could bump two electrons out, without violating any laws of physics.


----------



## ekim68

Active wheel alignment system promises huge handling and performance gains



> Change the angle of each car's wheel on the move to get better fuel economy or improve handling? If it sounds like the result of inebriated banter around a barbecue too late one night, you'd be sober to learn it's a new Australian development that is ready to go global.


----------



## ekim68

New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour



> Toyota has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services in ways that will see many of its models upload performance data into the Amazonian cloud to expand the services the auto-maker offers to drivers and fleet owners.


----------



## Brigham

On reading it again, the only place where an extra electron could come from is the photovoltaic material. It must leave a rather peculiar material that has depleted atoms. Perhaps we should take the easy way and put it all down to quantum physics. Next time I see him I will ask Sheldon Cooper.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's stock market value tops $2 trillion



> (Reuters) - Just two years after Apple became the first publicly listed U.S. company with a $1 trillion stock market value, the iPhone maker has now topped $2 trillion.


----------



## ekim68

This Map Lets You Report Landlords Using Tech to Screw Over Tenants



> From facial recognition locks to predictive algorithms that perform background checks, the growth of the surveillance state has been a boon to landlords looking to tighten their grip on their property-and tenants' lives.
> Now, a group of activists have released Landlord Tech Watch, a site that allows anyone to report where this "landlord tech" is being used and plot it on a map-like a version of Nextdoor that turns the tables to hold property owners and real estate companies accountable.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers Can Duplicate Keys from the Sounds They Make in Locks



> Researchers have demonstrated that they can make a working 3D-printed copy of a key just by listening to how the key sounds when inserted into a lock. And you don't need a fancy mic - a smartphone or smart doorbell will do nicely if you can get it close enough to the lock.


----------



## ekim68

Super-dense lithium-sulfur battery gives electric plane a 230-mile range 



> British company Oxis says it's developed safe, high-density lithium-sulfur battery chemistry and will supply Texas Aircraft Manufacturing with a 90-kWh, next-gen battery pack to power the eColt, an electric aircraft with a two hour, 230-mile range.
> 
> Lithium-sulfur is one of the many battery technologies competing to supersede lithium-ion as the king of the next generation. In theory, the way it stores and releases energy offers an opportunity to create batteries that hold as much as five times more charge than lithium for a given size and weight of cell. Thanks to sulfur being a cheap and abundant raw material, these things also project to be much cheaper than current lithium cells.


----------



## ekim68

An Air Force F-16 pilot will face off against an AI adversary in a simulated dogfight. Here's how you can watch it live



> Mark your calendars, folks: The Air Force plans on pitting a seasoned F-16 fighter pilot against an artificial intelligence adversary for the first time in a simulated dogfight next week, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and you can watch the action live.


----------



## ekim68

Epic to host a #FreeFortnite tournament with anti-Apple prizes

_



Fortnite

Click to expand...

_


> -maker Epic Games and Apple are currently embroiled in a public battle over Apple's App Store policies, and in the latest move in the dispute, Epic has announced a _Fortnite_ tournament taking place August 23rd where players can compete to win anti-Apple prizes.


----------



## ekim68

Here's a list of all the ransomware gangs who will steal and leak your data if you don't pay



> Ransomware gangs are getting more aggressive these days about pursuing payments and have begun stealing and threatening to leak sensitive documents if victims don't pay the requested ransom demand.


----------



## ekim68

UK will take a crack at regulating future self-driving car systems



> Numerous questions remain surrounding future self-driving cars, and although we're still miles away from seeing such a machine deployed, let alone an autonomous car on sale, countries are trying to prepare for them.


----------



## ekim68

This Plane Flies Itself. We Went for a Ride



> The conditions are not ideal for our landing. A hard wind is blowing over the low hills east of San Francisco, and at just the wrong angle-straight across the runway where we're set to touch down. But as we ease into our final approach, our two-winged shadow clipping the suburban homes below, the veteran pilot sitting beside me makes a gentle suggestion. "I like to do it hands up. Like a roller coaster," he says.
> 
> He removes his hands from the wheel of our aircraft, a 27-year-old Cessna Caravan that once shuttled United Nations dignitaries in southern Africa. It's nothing especially fancy, with aspects that feel more go-kart than airliner. The cockpit is filled with manual toggles and analog dials; pulleys connect the pedal directly to the rudder at the tail. But recently, this plane underwent some modifications. As we descend past 500 feet, the 15-knot gusts hitting our side and the pilot's hands still hovering, the wheel and pedals begin to jostle, compensating for the wind with inhuman precision. The descent remains smooth-serene, even, as we touch down.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla roars, bears scatter: What to know about the stock and why it keeps going up



> Tesla is finishing out the week after an incredible run that saw its stock price surge roughly 26% in the last seven days. The electric carmaker's stock broke $2,000 per share on Thursday-just 50 days after it broke the $1,000-per-share barrier in June-and it's now the ninth-highest valued company listed on the U.S. market, speeding past retail mega-chain Walmart and closing in on pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson.


----------



## ekim68

Nano-diamond self-charging batteries could disrupt energy as we know it 



> California company NDB says its nano-diamond batteries will absolutely upend the energy equation, acting like tiny nuclear generators. They will blow any energy density comparison out of the water, lasting anywhere from a decade to 28,000 years without ever needing a charge. They will offer higher power density than lithium-ion. They will be nigh-on indestructible and totally safe in an electric car crash. And in some applications, like electric cars, they stand to be considerably cheaper than current lithium-ion packs despite their huge advantages.


----------



## ekim68

New UK law to curb deforestation in supply chains



> UK businesses will have to show that their products and supply lines are free from illegal deforestation, under government plans.


----------



## ekim68

Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades



> Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.


----------



## ekim68

Exxon Mobil replaced by a software stock after 92 years in the Dow is a 'sign of the times'



> Exxon Mobil's been in the Dow in some form since 1928, but its tenure as the longest-serving component is coming to an end.
> 
> On Monday, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the largest changes to the 30-stock benchmark in seven years. Along with Exxon, which is being replaced by Salesforce, Pfizer and Raytheon Technologies are being removed in favor of Amgen and Honeywell International. The changes take effect Aug. 31.


----------



## ekim68

The End of the Oil Age Is Upon Us



> A new report suggests that over the next 30 years, at least 80 percent of the oil industry will be wiped out.


----------



## ekim68

5G in US averages 51Mbps while other countries hit hundreds of megabits



> Average 5G download speeds in the US are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The US came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the US.


----------



## ekim68

Ford Escapes park themselves in automated valet project in Detroit



> Searching for a parking spot is far from the most enjoyable part of driving, and lately we're seeing how autonomous systems might handle this final leg of the journey. The latest example is a collaborative effort from Ford, Bosch and Detroit-based real estate firm Bedrock, in which connected Ford Escapes find empty spaces and park themselves inside a garage.


----------



## ekim68

5 Auto Innovations Driven by NASA



> Space technology developed by and for NASA has made its way into cars and even onto the NASCAR track. Future collaborations with the auto industry and car manufacturers could change how we get from point A to point B. NASA helped drive the following five auto innovations.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Cable Broadband Monopolies Close In On 70% Broadband Market Share



> The U.S. telecom industry's monopolization problem shows no sign of slowing down.
> 
> According to the latest data from Leichtman Research, the cable industry is nearing a 70% market share over fixed line broadband. That's thanks to many reasons, not least of which being that most U.S. phone companies have effectively given up on seriously upgrading their aging DSL lines, driving a greater portion of Americans to the only companies actually offering modern broadband speeds: Charter (Spectrum) and Comcast. Phone companies collectively lost another 150,000 subscribers last quarter, while cable providers added about 1,400,000 users in just three months.


----------



## ekim68

Long-awaited Celera 500L 'bullet' plane is finally revealed



> Now, in the late summer of the strangest year in aviation history, the Celera 500L has finally been revealed to the world, with the launch of a new website and a bunch of very cool new photos.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. tech stocks are now worth more than the entire European stock market



> The dominance of major U.S. tech stocks in recent years has pushed the sector past another milestone as it is now more valuable than the entire European stock market, according to Bank of America Global Research.
> 
> The firm said in a note that this is the first time the market cap of the U.S. tech sector, at $9.1 trillion, exceeds Europe, which including the U.K. and Switzerland is now at $8.9 trillion. For reference, the firm said that in 2007, Europe was four times the size of U.S. technology stocks.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands protest in Mauritius over dead dolphins, demand resignations

9quote] (Reuters) - Thousands of protesters demonstrated in the Mauritius capital Port Louis on Saturday to demand an investigation into an oil spill from a Japanese ship and the mysterious death of at least 40 dolphins that have been found near the site of the spill.[/quote]


----------



## ekim68

Fugaku, the world's fastest computer, is researching the spread of Covid-19



> Fugaku can perform more than 415 quadrillion (or 415,000 trillion) computations a second, making it 2.8 times faster than Summit, the supercomputer built by IBM (IBM) which previously held the top spot.


----------



## ekim68

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life



> Machine learning is a fantastic tool for renovating old photos and videos. So much so that it can even bring ancient statues to life, transforming the chipped stone busts of long-dead Roman emperors into photorealistic faces you could imagine walking past on the street.


----------



## ekim68

Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to reliably identify users



> Online advertisers don't need huge lists of the sites we access. Just 50-150 of our favorite sites are enough.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T Now Trying To Ditch DirecTV After Bungled Merger Spree



> It wasn't supposed to go this way.
> 
> AT&T purchased DirecTV in 2015 for $67.1 billion (including debt). The company then gobbled up Time Warner in 2018 for a cool $86 billion. Together, these deals were supposed to cement AT&T as a dominant player in the video advertising wars to come. Instead, they created a convoluted mess that resulted in a mass exodus of pay TV subscribers. In fact, a combination of bungled integration, massive debt, price hikes, and confusing branding have resulted in AT&T losing 7 million subscribers since 2018.


----------



## ekim68

NuScale's small nuclear reactor is first to get US safety approval



> On Friday, the first small modular reactor received a design certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meaning that it meets safety requirements and could be chosen by future projects seeking licensing and approval.


----------



## ekim68

Teens Can Sign Up as Paid Poll Workers This Fall



> With pandemic that is especially dangerous to the elderly, older teens who want to help ensure that Election Day runs as successful as possible can sign up now to be poll workers on Nov. 3. The Poll Hero organization, founded and run primarily by college students, is recruiting thousands of other college and older high school students to become paid poll workers this fall.


----------



## ekim68

Prototype gravity-based energy storage system begins construction



> As renewable energy generation grows, so does the need for new storage methods that can be used at times when the Sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. A Scottish company called Gravitricity has now broken ground on a demonstrator facility for a creative new system that stores energy in the form of "gravity" by lifting and dropping huge weights.
> 
> If you coil a spring, you're loading it with potential energy, which is released when you let it go. Gravitricity works on the same basic principle, except in this case the springs are 500- to 5,000-tonne weights. When held aloft by powerful cables and winches, these weights store large amounts of potential energy. When that energy is needed, they can be lowered down a mineshaft to spin the winch and feed electricity into the grid.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's move to make advertising harder on iOS 14 is part of a trend



> Starting with iOS 14, which will ship this fall, Apple will begin requiring that developers show you a warning that they are collecting your IDFA, and you'll have to opt in to sharing it. Some large percentage of users can be expected to say "no thanks."


----------



## ekim68

With latest Starlink launch, SpaceX touts 100 Mbps download speeds and 'space lasers'



> During the launch of its latest batch of internet-beaming Starlink satellites, SpaceX revealed key details about the planned constellation's abilities, claiming that the satellites have shown "super low latency and download speeds greater than 100 mbps." The speeds are still not as fast as what SpaceX originally claimed for the constellation, but they are slightly faster than what early user testing has shown.


----------



## ekim68

And the saga continues.... 


Apple to delay privacy change threatening Facebook, mobile ad market



> (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) said on Thursday that it will delay until early next year changes to its privacy policy that could reduce ad sales by Facebook Inc (FB.O) and other companies targeting users on iPhones and iPads.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model 3 hailed as the most reliable executive car in the UK



> A car's reliability could easily determine whether a customer's ownership experience is excellent or poor. Even simple cars could be great to own if they are reliable, and even high-performance vehicles could be a headache if they experience intermittent problems during their ownership period. This is why reliability is arguably one of the most important things that car buyers look for when purchasing an automobile.


----------



## ekim68

Why Big Tech is suing the Patent Office



> Apple, Google, Cisco and Intel this week sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, challenging the agency's recent rule that it can refuse to adjudicate patent claims while litigation about them is pending in court.
> 
> *Why it matters: *The companies say the rule hurts innovation and their legal rights, letting invalid patents stay on the books while lawsuits slowly wend their way through court.


----------



## ekim68

Storelift launches autonomous convenience stores using AI and computer vision



> As physical retail struggles amid the global pandemic, storeowners are rapidly trying to adapt to new realities that also include growing competition from Amazon. But a French startup called Storelift believes it can create a new convenience store concept that leans on many of the same AI and computer vision tools used in Amazon Go stores to reinvent the shopping and checkout experience.


----------



## ekim68

Testing of fuel cell bus as mobile power source for disaster relief begins 



> When disaster strikes, the power often goes out, and it may be a good while before it's restored. Toyota and Honda start testing the Moving e system this month, a fuel cell bus designed to serve as a mobile power source to help meet a community's emergency electricity needs.
> 
> The Moving e mobile power generation/output system is made up of a fuel cell bus from Toyota that's able to carry twice the amount of hydrogen as the FC Bus its based on, two Power Exporter 9000 portable power units from Honda, 20 LiB-AID E500 and 36 Honda Mobile Power Pack portable batteries, and charger/dischargers for the Mobile Power Packs. All in, the demonstrator is expected to generate 454 kWh and output 18 kW.


----------



## ekim68

China to launch initiative to set global data-security rules: WSJ



> (Reuters) - China is launching an initiative to set global standards on data security, countering U.S. efforts to persuade countries to ringfence their networks from Chinese technology, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
> 
> Under its "Global Initiative on Data Security," China would call on all countries to handle data security in a "comprehensive, objective and evidence-based manner," the Journal said, citing a draft that it had reviewed.


----------



## ekim68

Tech Workers Are Living the American Dream-in Canada



> The short-sighted immigration policies of the US administration is driving top talent north of the border.


----------



## ekim68

London's Bridges Really Are Falling Down



> Three major crossings on the Thames are closed to cars--one of them considered too dangerous even to walk across. Even the landmark Tower Bridge was recently shut for two days.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model Y leaves strong impression on VW's Herbert Diess after test drive



> Volkswagen Group Chairman of the Board of Management Herbert Diess seems to be on a social media roll recently, following up on his post about Elon Musk's visit with some new details about the Tesla CEO's test drive session of the ID.3. Apart from this, Diess also revealed that he was able to test drive a Model Y recently, and based on his statements about the all-electric crossover, it appears that he was impressed by Tesla's latest creation.


----------



## ekim68

Plant-based supercapacitor keeps costs low and energy storage high 



> Supercapacitors have the potential to pave the way for electric vehicles that charge in minutes rather than hours, overcoming one of the barriers to widespread adoption and being good for drivers and the environment. In a step towards such a reality, scientists at Texas A&M University have demonstrated a plant-based supercapacitor with excellent energy storage potential.


----------



## ekim68

The Gateway PC Brand Returns With New Laptops



> Acer, which acquired Gateway in 2007, is bringing back the brand to sell consumer-focused laptops in the US. The products will be sold exclusively through Walmart.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk says Tesla will 'one day' produce 'super efficient home HVAC' with HEPA filtering



> Elon Musk has previously touted the "Bioweapon Defense Mode" boasted by Tesla's  vehicles, which are designed to provide excellent air quality inside the car even in the face of disastrous conditions without, thanks in part to high-efficiency HEPA air filtration. Now, Musk has said on Twitter that he hopes to one day provide similar air filtration along with home HVAC systems.


----------



## ekim68

A Climate Reckoning in Fire-Stricken California



> SAN FRANCISCO - Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face.


----------



## ekim68

The Big Corporate Rescue and the America That's Too Small to Save



> Girish Patel doubts his small, 20-year-old shop will survive the pandemic economy. Thirty stories above, aerospace company TransDigm has sustained eye-popping profits thanks to steep layoffs and raised over a billion with help from the U.S. government.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Can Detect Aftermarket Hacks Designed to Defeat EV Performance Paywalls



> The battle between automakers and aftermarket tuners is a war that has been waged for quite some time. While some manufacturers have embraced the movement, others are still fighting to protect their vehicles from being altered after they leave the factory, even going as far as encrypting vehicle ECUs to prevent tuners from fiddling with things. Electric vehicles have opened up a new front-manufacturers like Tesla can now create lower- and higher-performance versions of the exact same car using nothing but software.


----------



## ekim68

The Mozart Effect: Study affirms classical music reduces epileptic seizures 



> A new systemic review has examined a dozen studies into the effect of Mozart's music on epilepsy, finding the classical piano music may reduce the frequency of seizures. The review rekindles an idea that has circulated since the early 1990s, labelled the Mozart Effect, suggesting listening to certain classical music can make you smarter.


----------



## ekim68

WTO finds Washington broke trade rules by putting tariffs on China



> GENEVA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The World Trade Organization found on Tuesday that the United States breached global trading rules by imposing multibillion-dollar tariffs in President Donald Trump's trade war with China, a ruling that drew anger from Washington.


----------



## ekim68

Addicted to losing: How casino-like apps have drained people of millions



> NBC News spoke to 21 people who said they were hooked on casino-style apps and had spent significant sums of money. The industry is almost entirely unregulated.


----------



## ekim68

Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation



> In the battle for tech supremacy between the US and China, America has "dropped the ball" in funding for basic research, according to former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
> 
> And that's one of the key reasons why China has been able to catch up.


----------



## ekim68

How the Fed's Quick Action May Have Given Congress Cover for Inaction



> By doing its job of stabilizing the financial system, it has reduced the sense of urgency for lawmakers to help ordinary Americans.


----------



## ekim68

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is growing fast



> DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform.
> 
> While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Megapack batteries help balance the UK's energy grid for the first time



> Thanks to its Megapack batteries and its Autobidder platform, Tesla recently became the first party to trade flexible power in the UK's Balancing Mechanism (BM), which uses the National Grid's new control room API. This marked the first time that Tesla, which was able to acquire an energy generation license in June, was able to help balance supply and demand in Britain's electricity market.


----------



## ekim68

Wikipedia edits have massive impact on tourism, say economists



> Forget glossy travel brochures and whizzy online sites; one of the most cost-effective ways tourism chiefs can drive business to their towns or cities is by updating their Wikipedia page.
> 
> An experiment by economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany, found that a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page could lead to an extra £100,000 a year in tourism revenue for a small city, underscoring the power of the free online encyclopaedia.


----------



## ekim68

Why everything you know about 5G is wrong



> If you buy what the telcos are telling you, 5G will bring you gigabit-per-second-speeds and sub-10-millisecond latency. With speeds like that you could have 8K movies streaming to your smartphone. It's a pity that you won't actually see anything like that in the real world.


----------



## ekim68

New reality show promises to send winner into space for 10 days



> New York (CNN Business) A planned reality show will seek to give the winner of its on-air competition "the greatest prize ever given out on Earth" - a 10-day stay on the International Space Station.
> The winning contestant on the show, called "Space Hero," could launch into orbit as soon as 2023, the production company behind the proposed series, which is also called Space Hero, said in a press release Thursday. The news was reported earlier by Deadline.


----------



## ekim68

Why passenger jets could soon be flying in formation



> As far back as a century ago, avian scientists began to understand that birds were increasing aerodynamic efficiencies by flying in close formation, taking advantage of the changed airflow in each bird's wake.
> 
> With that in mind, the Airbus fello'fly flight demonstration project will fly two large commercial aircraft in formation, looking to mimic the energy savings of our feathered friends.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Spy Plane Impersonates Malaysian Aircraft, Apparently to Fool China



> A U.S. Air Force aircraft electronically impersonated a Malaysian plane while flying over the South China Sea this week. The RC-135W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft flew off China's Hainan island on Tuesday, coming within 55 miles of the Chinese mainland.





> The caper was outed on Twitter by a think tank operated by the Chinese government, which provided enough details for independent verification.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus eyes hydrogen-powered future with commercial aircraft concepts 



> According to a recent international study, aviation is responsible for 3.5 percent of all human activities that drive climate change. Airbus is looking to a cleaner future for the commercial aircraft industries, where hydrogen powers the zero-emissions aircraft of tomorrow.
> 
> With today's reveal of three designs collectively known as the ZEROe concepts, the company is looking to be at the front of the effort to decarbonize the aviation industry, and it is aiming to bring the first hydrogen-fueled aircraft into service as soon as 2035.


----------



## ekim68

Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People



> A company called Civvl says evicting people is the "FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19."


----------



## ekim68

Big Oil has been lying about plastic recycling since at least 1974



> NPR's Planet Money has a harrowing new story about the plastic recycling industry - specifically, that the entire thing is built on a lie that the oil industry perpetuated for decades, despite knowing that the majority of plastic would never actually get recycled.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World



> How much longer are we going to allow its platform to foment hatred and undermine democracy?


----------



## ekim68

Researchers claim long-term exposure to air pollution in China killed 30.8 million people between 2000 and 2016



> A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China and one in the U.S. has found evidence that suggests as many as 30.8 million people suffered premature deaths in China over the years 2000 to 2016 due to breathing polluted air.


----------



## 2twenty2

Internet: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180


----------



## ekim68

Tesla announces 'tabless' battery cells that will improve range of its electric cars



> Tesla unveiled plans Tuesday to develop a "tabless" battery that could improve an electric car's range and power. The company will produce its new batteries in-house, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicts will help dramatically reduce costs and allow the company to eventually sell electric vehicles for the same price as gasoline-powered ones.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla to develop a $25,000 electric car within three years



> Speaking at Tesla's 2020 Battery Day live presentation, on Tuesday, entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the development of a $25,000 vehicle is on the horizon, with the overall aim of bringing down the initial cost associated with purchasing a Tesla.


----------



## ekim68

China, in Pointed Message to U.S., Tightens Its Climate Targets



> President Xi Jinping of China pledged on Tuesday that his country would adopt much stronger climate targets and achieve what he called "carbon neutrality before 2060." If realized, the pledges would be crucial in the global fight against climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers found the manual for the world's oldest surviving computer



> Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what's considered the world's oldest surviving (digital) computer after its long-lost user manual was unearthed. The Z4, which was built in 1945, runs on tape, takes up most of a room and needs several people to operate it. The machine now takes residence at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but it hasn't been used in quite some time.


----------



## ekim68

California to ban new gas, diesel vehicle sales by 2035



> Worried about manual transmissions going away? Get ready for an extinction event properly worth grieving over, because Gavin Newsom has just announced plans to abolish the internal combustion engine by 2035. In an executive order announced Wednesday, Newsom said sales of internal-combustion passenger vehicles and light trucks would be banned by 2035. Instead of gas and diesel vehicles, the mandate calls for the sale of zero-emission vehicles. Medium- and heavy-duty trucks will be given an extra decade to comply.


----------



## 2twenty2

*Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery*

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/world/europe/giant-rat-magawa-medal.html


----------



## ekim68

Hydrogen-powered passenger plane completes maiden flight in 'world first'



> A hydrogen fuel-cell plane that's capable of carrying passengers completed its maiden flight this week, in another step forward for low and zero-emission flight.
> 
> ZeroAvia's six-seater Piper M-class aircraft - which has been retrofitted with the device that combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity - undertook a taxi, take-off, full pattern circuit and landing on Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

It's Official - Consumer Reports Confirms EV Owners Spend Half As Much On Maintenance



> Data is king, and when it comes to information on the frequency of repairs on automobiles, Consumer Reports has more data than anyone. For its latest report, it did a deep dive into the data from its 2019 and 2020 reliability surveys of electric and gasoline powered vehicles. After crunching all the numbers, Consumer Reports says "drivers of electric vehicles are saving an average of 50% on maintenance and repair over the life of a vehicle compared to owners of gas-powered vehicles."


----------



## ekim68

Singapore in world first for facial verification



> Singapore will be the first country in the world to use facial verification in its national identity scheme. The biometric check will give Singaporeans secure access to both private and government services.


----------



## ekim68

Cord Cutting Has Utterly Exploded During the Covid Crisis



> The cable industry was already struggling last year, when a record number of cable customers "cut the cord" and flocked to over the air or streaming alternatives. That was before a pandemic came to town. Now, with some sports on hiatus and folks desperate to cut costs, the trend has only accelerated, to the point where 6 million Americans are poised to cut the cord this year alone:


----------



## ekim68

HP's latest Pavilion laptops reuse post-consumer plastic waste 



> HP has announced its first consumer laptops to feature 11th Generation Core processors from Intel, and the first from the company to make use of post-consumer recycled and ocean-bound plastic waste.
> 
> Plastic is relatively inexpensive to produce and fairly durable, characteristics that see it used in a vast array of everyday products. But when it's no longer needed, it can become an environmental disaster if not dealt with responsibly.


----------



## ekim68

Engineered "super-enzyme" gobbles plastic waste at six times the speed 



> Back in 2018, scientists in Japan made the key discovery of a bacterium with a natural appetite for PET plastics. This raised the prospect of a low-cost solution to some of the most common forms of plastic pollution, and now scientists have used this bacterium as the basis for a newly engineered "super-enzyme" that can digest plastic waste six times faster.
> 
> Known as _Ideonella sakaiensis, _the bacterium discovered by scientists at the Kyoto Institute of Technology a couple of years ago showed a remarkable ability to use PET plastics as its energy source. These are the materials used to construct everything from soda to shampoo bottles, with hundreds of millions of tons produced every year, and the team was excited to find that the bacterium could completely break it down within a matter of weeks.


----------



## ekim68

A Police Charity Bought an iPhone Hacking Tool and Gave it to Cops



> The San Diego Police Foundation, an organization that receives donations from corporations, purchased iPhone unlocking technology for the city's police department, according to emails obtained by Motherboard.
> The finding comes as activist groups place renewed focus on police foundations, which are privately run charities that raise funds from Wall Street banks and other companies, purchase items, and then give those to their respective police departments.


----------



## ekim68

Washington emergency responders first to use SpaceX's Starlink internet in the field: 'It's amazing'



> The Starlink satellite internet network that SpaceX is developing has been used in the field by Washington state emergency responders in recent weeks, the first early application of the company's service to be disclosed.
> 
> Washington's state military, which includes its emergency response division, began employing Starlink user terminals in early August to bring internet service to areas devastated by wildfires. User terminals are the small devices on the ground that connect to the satellites. The emergency division has seven Starlink user terminals, which it is deploying with early success.


----------



## ekim68

Denmark: We can slash CO2 by 70% in a decade and still have welfare



> COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Denmark said on Tuesday that it could reach its 2030 climate target of reducing emissions by 70%, one of the world's most ambitious, without compromising its generous welfare benefits.
> 
> Last year, parties across the aisle passed a law committing Denmark to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% from 1990 levels, or around 20 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, within 10 years.


----------



## ekim68

Mercedes-Benz's newest electric city bus uses solid-state batteries



> The new technology has 25-percent greater energy density than lithium-ion.


----------



## ekim68

Ikea is saying goodbye to non-rechargeable batteries



> Ikea will remove all non-rechargeable alkaline batteries from its global home furnishings by October 2021, according to statement from the company emailed Wednesday. Aiming to reduce energy consumption and environmental waste with the move, the home furnishing giant cited the results of recent life-cycle assessment studies showing the environmental impact of alkaline batteries is higher compared with rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries, when used in common household devices.


----------



## ekim68

D-Wave announces launch of new Advantage quantum computer for business use



> Canadian based D-Wave has announced on its blog that it has developed a new quantum computer for use by businesses. Called Advantage, the new system has 5,000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity. The new machine will be made available to business customers over the Internet via the Leap quantum cloud service.


----------



## ekim68

The Apple Watch heart monitor sends too many people to the doctor



> The heart monitoring feature on the Apple Watch may lead to unnecessary health care visits, according to a new study published this week. Only around 10 percent of people who saw a doctor at the Mayo Clinic after noticing an abnormal pulse reading on their watch were eventually diagnosed with a cardiac condition.


----------



## ekim68

Report Says 20 Million U.S. Broadband Complaints Went Unresolved Last Year



> 42 million Americans lack access to any broadband whatsoever. Another 83 million American consumers can only get access to broadband from one ISP, usually Comcast. Tens of millions more are stuck under a broadband duopoly, usually comprising of Comcast/Spectrum and some apathetic telco that refuses to upgrade or repair its aging DSL lines. Data makes it extremely clear the end result of this lack of competition is some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world, and some of the worst customer service of any industry in America.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook rebuts 'The Social Dilemma,' a popular Netflix documentary



> Facebook on Friday offered a rebuttal to the hit Netflix documentary-drama, "The Social Dilemma."
> 
> The movie revealed, perhaps for the first time to some viewers, how social networks use algorithms to keep people coming back. It also addressed how tech companies have influenced elections, ethnic violence and rates of depression and suicide. Some viewers said they were deleting Facebook and Instagram after watching it.


----------



## ekim68

Honda to quit F1 to focus on zero-emission technology



> TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Honda Motor will end its participation as an engine supplier in the FIA Formula One World Championship at the end of the 2021 season to focus on zero-emission technology, it said on Friday.
> 
> The decision was made at the end of September and the company does not intend to return to F1, Chief Executive Takahiro Hachigo said in an online news conference.
> 
> "This is not a result of the coronavirus pandemic but because of our longer-term carbon-free goal," he said.


----------



## ekim68

'Green hydrogen' from renewables could become cheapest 'transformative fuel' within a decade



> "Green hydrogen" made with wind and solar electricity could become the cheapest form of what the Australian government has described as a "transformative fuel" much faster than expected, analysts believe.
> 
> Chinese manufacturers have reported making systems to create hydrogen with renewable energy for up to 80% less than official Australian estimates from just two years ago.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla posts a quarterly record for electric car deliveries 



> After having its operations impacted by the coronavirus through the early and middle parts of the year, Tesla has posted a new quarterly record for deliveries. The automaker shipped just under 140,000 cars in the third quarter of 2020, boding well for its post-pandemic recovery and smashing its previous record set last year.


----------



## ekim68

Poll results: Here's why people are sticking with Windows 7



> Last week, after looking at this site's server logs and some open source data from the United States Government's Digital Analytics Program, I discovered that nearly 10% of the many millions of visitors to these sites are still using Windows 7. Why are so many people continuing to use this operating system, long after Microsoft ended support for it?


----------



## ekim68

Climate lawsuits are finally headed to the Supreme Court



> Major oil companies have played a significant role in heating up the planet for decades. Should they be required to pay for some of the expenses cities, counties, and states have incurred due to climate change? That question has been bouncing around the nation's courts for some time. On Friday, the Supreme Court announced it finally intends to weigh in on the lawsuits - but that may not be a win for environmental groups looking to hold Big Oil accountable.


----------



## ekim68

Mississippi Says AT&T Took $283 Million For A Network It Never Fully Deployed



> We've noted for years that the U.S. simply *adores* throwing billions in tax breaks and subsidies at telecom monopolies in exchange for broadband networks that somehow, mysteriously, only wind up half deployed. AT&T's particularly gifted at this particular grift, routinely promising a massive boost in network investment if it gets merger approval, deregulation, or subsidization. Like most recently when it nabbed a $42 billion tax break from the Trump administration in exchange for not only network investment that never happened -- but 41,000 layoffs.


----------



## ekim68

Comparing US States' GDP to Countries[/quote]


----------



## ekim68

REE demonstrates its wildly innovative vehicle platform of the future



> When we first encountered REE's ultra-modular EV chassis, we struggled to know what to make of it. Speaking to CEO Daniel Barel, we couldn't seem to pin down any specifics. What is it? A flat, modular vehicle chassis in which all steering, suspension, motor, gearbox and braking functions are bundled up into removable, replaceable "corner units" in the wheels.
> 
> These corner units have built-in electronics so that every single function can be fully electronically controlled. It's not just drive-by-wire, it's steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, everything-by-wire. So you can put a steering wheel and pedals in if you want, but it's just as happy to take instructions from an autonomous drive system, or heck, even a remote control. There's no difference as far as the chassis is concerned.


----------



## ekim68

"World's fastest electrodes" triple the density of lithium batteries



> French company Nawa technologies says it's already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long.


----------



## ekim68

Twin-jet flying hypercar promises crazy speed in the street and sky  



> People's concept of the flying car has shifted over the last five years or so as electric VTOL designs have started to receive a ton of money and attention. But some remain unconvinced, and Greg Brown is vehemently among them. eVTOLs, Brown reckons, will be little more than short-range, low-speed helicopter replacements in the near future.
> 
> Brown, who used to fly F-18 carrier jets in the US Navy and is now flying 777s for a major airline, has spent the last 15 years working on a true flying car design - a proper high-speed jet plane crossed with a crazy luxury hypercar.


----------



## ekim68

Renewable player overtakes ExxonMobil in market value



> After decades of embracing fossil fuels, Wall Street appears to be shifting its allegiance to renewable energy, a sharp turn apparent in the contrasting fortunes of NextEra Energy and Exxon Mobil.
> 
> Florida-based NextEra, a big player in wind and solar energy, has overtaken the global oil giant as the most valuable US energy company by market value.


----------



## ekim68

Electric car sales triple in race to meet Europe CO2 rules



> One in 10 new cars sold across Europe this year will be electric or plug-in hybrid, triple last year's sales levels after carmakers rolled out new models to meet emissions rules, according to projections from green policy group Transport & Environment.


----------



## ekim68

Canalys: PC market shipments grow a stellar 13% in Q3 2020 to break 10-year record



> Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7% from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis. This is the highest growth the market has seen in the past 10 years.


----------



## ekim68

German ship completes historic Arctic expedition

The German Research Vessel Polarstern has sailed back into its home port after completing a remarkable expedition to the Arctic Ocean.

The ship spent a year in the polar north, much of it with its engines turned off so it could simply drift in the sea-ice.
The point was to study the Arctic climate and how it is changing

And expedition leader, Prof Markus Rex, returned with a warning. "The sea-ice is dying," he said.


----------



## ekim68

Biggest carbon dioxide drop: Real-time data show COVID-19's massive impact on global emissions



> While the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten millions of lives around the world, the first half of 2020 saw an unprecedented decline in carbon dioxide emissions -- larger than during the financial crisis of 2008, the oil crisis of the 1979, or even World War II.


----------



## ekim68

Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured



> Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule.
> 
> That time, for the record, is 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1. Previously, researchers had dipped into the realm of zeptoseconds; in 2016, researchers reporting in the journal Nature Physics used lasers to measure time in increments down to 850 zeptoseconds. This accuracy is a huge leap from the 1999 Nobel Prize-winning work that first measured time in femtoseconds, which are millionths of a billionths of seconds.


----------



## ekim68

GM to invest more than $2 billion in U.S. manufacturing to increase electric vehicle production




> General Motors





> is investing about $2.2 billion in its U.S. manufacturing operations, largely to increase production of electric vehicles, the company announced Tuesday.
> 
> The investment is the latest for the Detroit automaker as it pivots toward EVs under GM CEO Mary Barra's "triple zero" vision of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion -- an overarching goal for the company.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla starts Full Self-Driving Beta rollout, Elon Musk says it 'will be extremely slow and cautious'



> Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla is starting the rollout of its Full Self-Driving Beta update, which the CEO says "will be extremely slow and cautious."
> 
> We have been expecting the update for a while now.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft says it took down 94% of TrickBot's command and control servers



> TrickBot survived an initial takedown attempt, but Microsoft and its partners are countering TrickBot operators after every move, taking down any new infrastructure the group is attempting to bring up online.


----------



## ekim68

Print These Electronic Circuits Directly Onto Skin



> New circuits can get printed directly on human skin to help monitor vital signs, a new study finds.
> 
> Wearable electronics are growing increasingly more comfortable and more powerful. A next step for such devices might include electronics printed directly onto the skin to better monitor and interface with the human body.


----------



## ekim68

NSA publishes list of top vulnerabilities currently targeted by Chinese hackers



> The US National Security Agency has published today an in-depth report detailing the top 25 vulnerabilities that are currently being consistently scanned, targeted, and exploited by Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups.
> 
> All 25 security bugs are well known and have patches available from their vendors, ready to be installed.


----------



## ekim68

A massive spam attack is ruining public 'Among Us' games



> Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played _Among Us_ to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is affecting most of the game's community. The hack started to spread through the game's userbase on Thursday evening. It causes players to spam their match's text chat with messages that direct people to the YouTube and Discord channels of a person who goes by the pseudonym "Eris Loris," threatening them if they don't subscribe. For good measure, some of the messages also promote President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign.


----------



## ekim68

Fukushima water release could change human DNA, Greenpeace warns



> Contaminated water that could soon be released into the sea from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant contains radioactive carbon with the potential to damage human DNA, environmental rights organization Greenpeace has warned.
> 
> The environmental group claims that the 1.23 million metric tons of water stored at the plant -- scene of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster -- contains "dangerous" levels of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 and other "hazardous" radionuclides, which it says will have "serious long-term consequences for communities and the environment" if the water is released into the Pacific Ocean.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing puts Loyal Wingman robot fighter jet through its paces... on the ground

*



Rise of the Machines

Click to expand...

*


> Boeing has successfully taxied its Loyal Wingman robot fighter jet around an airfield, a key milestone for the aircraft to operate fully autonomously.
> 
> Trials in Australia earlier this week showed that the unmanned aircraft, intended to fly and fight alongside a traditional fighter jet with a human pilot, was able to drive itself around an airport.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project Into Political Ad Targeting



> Facebook Inc. is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad targeting practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the platform without the company's permission.
> 
> The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university's engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them.


----------



## ekim68

Japan's New Leader Sets Ambitious Goal of Carbon Neutrality by 2050



> The announcement, coming weeks after a similar pledge by China, will require a major overhaul of the infrastructure in Japan, which remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels.


----------



## ekim68

US grid-battery costs dropped 70% over 3 years



> In recent years, the cost of solar and wind energy has declined precipitously, which has accelerated the growth of these renewable energy technologies. Increasingly, utilities are now planning for a future grid dominated by solar and wind. That will require changes in grid management and transmission upgrades as well as the addition of storage to smooth out the supply from variable generators.
> 
> Grid storage is still pretty early days, but we're already seeing huge cost reductions as the industry matures. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted this recently, showing that grid-scale battery-project costs in the United States dropped 70 percent in just a few years.


----------



## ekim68

Consumer Reports: Tesla Autopilot a "distant second" to GM Super Cruise



> Cadillac Super Cruise has retained its title as the best driver assistance system on the market, Consumer Reports declared in a new ranking. Super Cruise also won CR's last ranking in 2018. While Super Cruise started out as a Cadillac-only feature, GM is planning to bring it to 22 vehicles by 2023.


----------



## ekim68

World's First Ocean Hybrid Platform Converts Tidal Waves Into Energy



> Energy captured from tidal motion, waves, and currents can be used to produce electricity, providing power to millions of homes in the coming decades. Unlike other renewable energy sources, waves are easily forecasted and available 24/7. There is a tremendous amount of energy in the ocean. Water covers about 70 percent of our planet, and because it is 830 times denser than air, it can carry much more energy than wind per volume.


----------



## ekim68

Spy agency ducks questions about 'back doors' in tech products



> SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency is rebuffing efforts by a leading Congressional critic to determine whether it is continuing to place so-called back doors into commercial technology products, in a controversial practice that critics say damages both U.S. industry and national security.


----------



## 2twenty2

*A 5-story building in Shanghai 'walks' to a new location*
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/shanghai-relocate-building-preservation-intl-hnk-scli/index.html


----------



## ekim68

Happy Halloween....


----------



## ekim68

Apple added a secret button to your iPhone, and you may not have even noticed



> Your iPhone got a new button last month, and you may not have even noticed.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook is losing users in the US and Canada



> The surge in growth Facebook saw at the start of the coronavirus pandemic appears to be slowing down. User growth in the United States in Canada - the company's most lucrative ad market - has declined, Facebook reported as part of its third-quarter earnings.
> 
> The company now has 196 million users in North America, down slightly from 198 million last quarter.


----------



## ekim68

Covid job losses lead MPs to call for trials of universal basic income



> A letter to the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, signed by more than 500 MPs, lords and local councillors says pilot schemes are urgently needed as the pandemic unleashes widespread economic disruption and drives up redundancies at the fastest rate on record this winter. Launching a UBI would mean the state paying every adult a basic sum regardless of their income.
> 
> The letter says issues with the benefit system and the end of the furlough scheme mean Britain is ill-equipped to support people through the financial insecurity of the Covid recession.


----------



## ekim68

Here's How Daylight Saving Time Affects Your Part of the Country



> Daylight saving time was created to benefit Americans, but not every part of the country is affected equally.


----------



## 2twenty2

AI Camera Ruins Soccer Game For Fans After Mistaking Referee's Bald Head For Ball

https://www.iflscience.com/technolo...-after-mistaking-referees-bald-head-for-ball/

YouTube video included


----------



## ekim68

Daylight Saving Time as Americans know it was instituted by corporate lobbies, not farmers



> At some point in elementary school, many American children learn that Daylight Saving Time was originally intended to give farmers an extra hour of light to work the fields.
> 
> That is, in fact, a lie.


----------



## HOBOcs

Sign of the times - Mike you'd appreciate this.


----------



## ekim68

Next week, the US leaves the Paris Agreement. How do we get back in?



> When Americans wake up on November 4, they may not know who the next president of the United States will be - unless Democratic nominee Joe Biden or President Donald Trump wins in a landslide, the country could be in a state of uncertainty for weeks. But there's at least one thing Americans can count on to happen next Wednesday: The U.S. will complete the years-long process, started by President Trump in 2017, to drop out of the Paris climate agreement.


----------



## ekim68

Massachusetts Voters Overwhelmingly Pass Car Right-to-Repair Ballot Initiative



> The 75-25 percent margin on "Question 1," which ensures independent repair shops can continue to work on cars, suggests we overwhelmingly want to be able to fix their things.


----------



## ekim68

Happy 13th birthday, Android!



> Did you know that Android has two birthdays, depending on when you count from? Of course, it was in development for years before the public ever saw it, but it was "born" on either the date of its first commercial release (September 23rd 2008) or the date of its first official introduction by Google on November 5th, 2007. Well, that last date just so happens to line up with today, so happy 13th(ish) birthday, Android.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla to build "humungous" 300-megawatt battery in Australia 



> South Australia's neighboring state of Victoria has upped the ante on grid-scale batteries with the announcement that it's partnering with Tesla to build a colossal 300-megawatt battery for grid stabilization and renewable energy storage.


----------



## ekim68

Merger 'Synergies' Force T-Mobile To Pay $200 Million Fine For Sprint Falsehoods



> T-Mobile has been forced to pay $200 million because Sprint took taxpayer money it didn't deserve to "service" customers that apparently don't exist.


----------



## ekim68

Bentley will ditch internal combustion engines by 2030



> Time is starting to run out for vehicles powered purely by internal combustion engines, and the auto industry knows it. This week Bentley, that bastion of British luxury, became the latest OEM to set a date for that happening-the year 2030. As the company moves into its second century, it has revealed a new plan called "Beyond 100" that it says will "reinvent every aspect of its business to become an end-to-end carbon neutral organization.


----------



## ekim68

Futuristic "Spaceport Japan" concept floated for Tokyo Bay



> A serious-looking consortium of businesses is trying to position Japan as the first Asian space tourism hub, by proposing a futuristic, floating "Spaceport Japan" from which services like Virgin Galactic can operate their sub-orbital joyrides.


----------



## ekim68

Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer



> Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a "deal" and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.
> 
> The company's just beat its own record, converting its "Free ink for life" plan into a "Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working" plan.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX Starlink users provide first impressions and unboxing pictures



> SpaceX Starlink beta users are starting to share their experiences, confirming that the satellite service can provide fast broadband speeds and low latencies in remote areas. A beta tester who goes by the Reddit username Wandering-coder brought his new Starlink equipment and a portable power supply to a national forest in Idaho, where he connected to the Internet with 120Mbps download speeds.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Tequilla shows brand strength, selling out before Elon Musk could even tweet about it



> The Tesla brand has shown its strength this week with its new Tesla Tequilla selling out even before Elon Musk could tweet about it.
> 
> Now the bottles are already getting listed for 4 times the original price.


----------



## ekim68

Virgin Hyperloop completes its first ever passenger test 



> In a landmark moment for the experimental transportation technology, Virgin Hyperloop has welcomed aboard its first ever passengers, albeit only for a short spin along a test track. These first ever human trials of a hyperloop system follow hundreds of unmanned test runs at the company's facility in Nevada, and bode well for its ability to safely transport people through near-vacuum tubes.
> 
> Over the past few years, Virgin Hyperloop has been testing its passenger pods at its 500-meter-long (1,600-ft) track in the Nevada desert, where it has hit speeds of nearly 387 km/h (240 mph) with no one onboard. These magnetically levitating pods travel through near-vacuum tubes and are designed to eventually hit speeds of around 1,200 km/h (745 mph), which would make it possible to travel from LA to San Francisco in just 30 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Six Reasons Why Google Maps Is the Creepiest App On Your Phone



> Google knows where you are, and so do advertisers.


----------



## ekim68

How air pollution affects homeless populations 



> When air quality worsens, either from the smoke and ozone of summer or the inversion of winter, most of us stay indoors. But for individuals experiencing homelessness, that's not always an option. In a new study,


----------



## ekim68

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised



> When recommendation engines promote misinformation during a pandemic, it's a matter of life and death


----------



## ekim68

Employee surveillance software demand increased as workers transitioned to home working



> A new study shows that the demand for employee surveillance software was up 55% in June 2020 compared to the pre-pandemic average. From webcam access to random screenshot monitoring, these surveillance software products can record almost everything an employee does on their computer.


----------



## ekim68

EU plans to increase offshore windfarm capacity by 250%



> The capacity of the EU's offshore windfarms in the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea will be increased by 250%, under a draft plan drawn up by the European commission.
> 
> The move follows Boris Johnson's announcement this year of his intention to generate enough electricity to power every home in the UK within a decade from the country's offshore sites.


----------



## ekim68

1% of people cause half of global aviation emissions - study



> Frequent-flying "'super emitters" who represent just 1% of the world's population caused half of aviation's carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study.
> 
> Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated. The analysis draws together data to give the clearest global picture of the impact of frequent fliers.


----------



## ekim68

Cerebras' wafer-size chip is 10,000 times faster than a GPU



> Cerebras Systems and the federal Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory today announced that the company's CS-1 system is more than 10,000 times faster than a graphics processing unit (GPU).





> These are fruits of the radical approach Los Altos, California-based Cerebras has taken, creating a silicon wafer with 400,000 AI cores on it instead of slicing that wafer into individual chips. The unusual design makes it a lot easier to accomplish tasks because the processor and memory are closer to each other and have lots of bandwidth to connect them, Feldman said. The question of how widely applicable the approach is to different computing tasks remains.


----------



## ekim68

LidarPhone attack converts smart vacuums into microphones



> A team of academics has detailed this week novel research that converted a smart vacuum cleaner into a microphone capable of recording nearby conversations.
> 
> Named *LidarPhone*, the technique works by taking the vacuum's built-in LiDAR laser-based navigational component and converting it into a laser microphone.


----------



## ekim68

US Emissions to Drop 9% in 2020, Putting Country Back on Track for Paris Commitment



> The U.S. economy is on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 9 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, BloombergNEF reported Thursday.
> 
> It's a sign of the impact that COVID-19 shutdowns and the ensuing recession have had on life in the U.S. When workers stayed home and the streets emptied out, it reduced emissions from transportation, which accounted for the largest decline at 4 percent of economywide emissions. The power sector drove another 2.8 percent decline, while reduced industrial activity lowered emissions by another 1.6 percent.


----------



## ekim68

This flight map shows a shocking amount of Thanksgiving travel, despite CDC advice



> Flightradar24 data reveals that more flights are in the air today than on the same travel day two years ago, even though the CDC has recommended against traveling for the holiday.


----------



## Cookiegal

Steppenwolf,

I've deleted the last two posts you made here and given you a warning with the loss of 1 point for trying to incite debate in a Random Discussion thread.

There's no reason to quote a post that's almost 1-1/2 years old to try to incite controversy. This is not the Controversial Topics forum. You've been around long enough to know the difference yet you continuously post inappropriate content helter skelter. You've also been warned about this in the past so if you continue to ignore the guidelines for posting in the various forums then we'll have to ask you to refrain from posting at all.


----------



## ekim68

EU says it could be self-sufficient in electric vehicle batteries by 2025



> BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union could produce enough batteries by 2025 to power its fast-growing fleet of electric vehicles without relying on imported cells, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic said on Tuesday.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's ad-hoc Ring, Echo mesh network can mooch off your neighbors' Wi-Fi if needed - and it's opt-out



> Amazon is close to launching Sidewalk - its ad-hoc wireless network for smart-home devices that taps into people's Wi-Fi - and it is pretty much an opt-out affair.
> 
> The gist of Sidewalk is this: nearby Amazon gadgets, regardless of who owns them, can automatically organize themselves into their own private wireless network mesh, communicating primarily using Bluetooth Low Energy over short distances, and 900MHz LoRa over longer ranges.


----------



## ekim68

1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland



> One per cent of the world's farms operate 70% of crop fields, ranches and orchards, according to a report that highlights the impact of land inequality on the climate and nature crises.
> 
> Since the 1980s, researchers found control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings.


----------



## ekim68

As 'Doonesbury' turns 50, Garry Trudeau picks his 10 defining strips



> In the beginning, while still in college, Garry Trudeau thought he might commit to his syndicated strip "for a year or two." Now, he has reached a rare perch: His "Doonesbury" is one of the few newspaper comics ever to hit the half-century mark as the creation of a single mind.


----------



## ekim68

Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal



> The company has added 427,300 employees in 10 months, bringing its global work force to more than 1.2 million.


----------



## ekim68

Tasmania declares itself 100 per cent powered by renewable electricity



> The Tasmania government has declared that it has become the first Australian state, and one of just a handful of jurisdictions worldwide, to be powered entirely by renewable electricity.
> 
> In a statement released on Friday, Tasmanian energy minister Guy Barnett said that state had effectively become entirely self-sufficient for supplies of renewable electricity, supplied by the state's wind and hydroelectricity projects.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla owners are going to be able to remotely view what their Autopilot cameras can see



> Tesla's Sentry Mode is about to bring things to a whole new level by enabling Tesla owners to remotely see what their cars can see through Autopilot cameras.


----------



## ekim68

AutoX rolls out first fully autonomous taxi fleet in China



> After joining forces with Alibaba's Amap to pilot robo-taxi ride-hailing services in April, and then opening the service to the Shanghai public, AutoX has now launched the first fully driverless fleet in China's Shenzhen megacity.
> 
> As with other autonomous vehicle ride-hailing projects around the world, AutoX RoboTaxis in China have so far had safety drivers ready to take over control of the vehicles should a problem arise. After conducting "driverless stress tests" using 25 vehicles for the last six months or so, the company has now deployed a completely autonomous fleet in downtown Shenzhen.


----------



## ekim68

China turns on nuclear-powered 'artificial sun' (Update)



> China successfully powered up its "artificial sun" nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, state media reported Friday, marking a great advance in the country's nuclear power research capabilities.
> 
> The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China's largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device, and scientists hope that the device can potentially unlock a powerful clean energy source.


----------



## ekim68

Divers discover Nazi WW2 enigma machine in Baltic Sea



> German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine.


----------



## ekim68

One in Six Cadillac Dealers Opt to Close Instead of Selling Electric Cars: Report



> General Motors knows all too well that a fully electric future is coming. As a company, GM wants to have 30 EVs for sale by 2025 and Cadillac will reportedly be leading the Detroit automaker's electric charge in the United States. Recently, it was reported that GM told dealerships to invest in the future or get out of the way. Cadillac has 880 dealerships nationwide, and now, citing sources familiar with the matter, _The Wall Street Journal_ reports that 150 of them have taken a $300,000 to $1,000,000 buyout to cease operations instead of investing $200,000 in charging infrastructure and other updates to their facilities to support the brand's electric future.


----------



## ekim68

China plans rapid expansion of 'weather modification' efforts



> China is planning a rapid expansion of its weather modification programme to cover an area more than one and a half times the size of India, in a move likely to raise concerns among the country's neighbours.
> 
> The decision, announced by the cabinet on Wednesday night, would increase fivefold the world's biggest cloud-seeding operation, which already employs an estimated 35,000 people.


----------



## ekim68

In rare show of solidarity, 14 key nations commit to protect oceans



> When the heads of state of 14 nations sat down together in late 2018 to discuss the grim condition of the world's oceans, there was no certainty that anything consequential would result. The leaders planned 14 gatherings, but met only twice before the pandemic upended their talks.
> 
> So when the group announced this week the world's most far-reaching pact to protect and sustain ocean health, it signalled rather more than a noteworthy achievement in a complicated time. The agreement, negotiated via the nuance-free tool of video conferencing, also offered hope of a renewed era of global accord on climate, where issues grounded in science might finally trump political posturing.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota announces new all-electric SUV, says it's their 'first step' for battery-electric cars



> Toyota announced today that they will be unveiling a new all-electric SUV in the coming months.
> 
> The automaker, which has been seen as a lagger when it comes to all-electric vehicles, says that it's their 'first step' for battery-electric vehicles.
> 
> Toyota has yet to launch an all-electric vehicle outside of China.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Look to Speak taps gaze-tracking AI to help users with impairments communicate



> Google today launched an experimental app for Android that leverages AI to make communication more accessible for people with speech and motor impairments. Called Look to Speak, it tracks eye movements to let people use their eyes to select prewritten, customizable phrases and have them spoken aloud.


Approximately 18.5 million people in the U.S. have a speech, voice, or language impairment.


----------



## ekim68

Old Money at work...

Exxon Holds Back on Technology That Could Slow Climate Change



> Carbon capture can make money for oil giants, and scientists say we need it. Is the industry willing to invest enough?


----------



## ekim68

Lawmakers with stock holdings vote in ways that juice their portfolios, data shows



> Amid calls for stricter regulation of congressional stock ownership, researchers find that financial self-interest outweighs party, ideology and other factors in policy decisions


----------



## ekim68

Google Will Let You Limit the Alcohol and Gambling Ads You See



> It's not very often that Google shows care for anything besides its bottom line these days, but on Thursday, the company made a small step in the right direction by announcing a new setting that lets people limit the alcohol- and gambling-related ads they come across.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk on the problem with corporate America: 'Too many MBAs'



> This "MBA-ization of America," isn't great, Musk said, especially when it comes to product innovation. Big corporate CEOs often get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of their mission, which is to create "awesome" products or services, according to Musk.


----------



## ekim68

Here comes the Google Chrome change that worries ad blocker creators



> Google says it's addressed concerns some Chrome extension developers had with its Manifest v3 technology.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Just Set a New World Record in Solar Cell Efficiency



> Researchers have now hit an efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell category, which is just one of several different types of cells. There are currently a variety of different technologies in use to convert solar energy into electricity.
> 
> For this type of panel, the long-term target of more than 30 percent is now tantalisingly within reach. The latest lab tests edge ahead of the maximum 28 percent efficiency that perovskite/silicon cells have managed up to this point.


----------



## ekim68

Countries roll out 2030 Paris Accord goals amid US absence



> China, the United Kingdom and the European Union all laid out goals to achieve greater emission reductions as part of the Paris climate accord over the weekend at what was likely the last United Nations climate summit without a U.S. presence.


----------



## ekim68

Boring Company proposes massive Vegas expansion following monorail bankruptcy



> Elon Musk's tunneling venture, The Boring Company, is planning a massive citywide expansion of the currently modest underground transportation system it's building in Las Vegas. The startup now wants to build a 10-mile sub-surface "loop" that serves the famous Las Vegas Strip of casino hotels and reaches the city's downtown area as well as McCarran International Airport, all with Tesla vehicles. The Boring Company also wants to build an additional loop that connects properties owned by Caesars Entertainment.
> 
> The proposed new tunnels would make it possible to go from the Las Vegas Convention Center to Mandalay Bay in just three minutes, as opposed to 30 minutes by surface roads during peak traffic hours, the company claims.


----------



## ekim68

New magnetic tape prototype breaks data density and capacity records



> Magnetic tape may seem like a pretty antiquated data storage technology, but its density and capacity is still hard to beat for big data centers. Now, IBM and Fujifilm have teamed up to create a prototype high-density tape cartridge with a record-breaking capacity of 580 TB.


----------



## ekim68

[URL='https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-2021-is-the-year-passwords-die']Microsoft: 2021 is the year passwords die 




> Microsoft





> has been a proponent of passwordless technology for quite some time, saying that it wants traditional and unsafe passwords to die. To that end, it has invested in various solutions over the past few years such as Windows Hello, Microsoft Authenticator, FIDO2 security keys, and a palm vein authentication system, among other things.
> 
> Now, the company has highlighted the strides it made to kill off passwords in 2020, and has stated that it plans to make them a thing of the past for all its customers in 2021.


* *


----------



## ekim68

Facebook now warning users about impacts on ads due to new iOS 14 privacy features



> As we covered here this week, Facebook criticized Apple with a full-page ad in US newspapers due to the new App Store guidelines, which will force apps to offer an option for users not to be tracked across the web. After Apple responded to Facebook, the company started warning iOS users in its official apps about the upcoming changes in advertisements.


----------



## ekim68

Gates versus the pandemic



> WITHOUT THE EFFORTS OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION, THE COVID-19 CRISIS WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY BE WORSE. BUT ITS EXTENSIVE ROLE RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW MUCH WE RELY ON PHILANTHROPY.


----------



## ralfy

"Total US shale production projected to fall in January as DUCs decline: EIA"



> US shale oil expected to fall below 7.5 million b/d in January
> New well productivity per rig continues to decline
> US DUC count dips to 7,330 wells in November


"Peak Oil is Suddenly Upon Us"


----------



## ekim68

*EFF Calls Facebook's Criticism of Apple's Pro-Privacy Tracking Change 'Laughable'*

Facebook's recent criticism directed at Apple over an upcoming tracking-related privacy measure is "laughable," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world.








Facebook has claimed that Apple's new opt-in tracking policy will hurt small businesses who benefit from personalized advertising, but the EFF believes that Facebook's campaign against Apple is really about "what Facebook stands to lose if its users learn more about exactly what it and other data brokers are up to behind the scenes," noting that Facebook has "built a massive empire around the concept of tracking everything you do."
Starting early next year, developers of iPhone and iPad apps will need to request permission from users to track their activity across apps and websites owned by other companies for personalized advertising purposes. Specifically, users will be presented with a prompt to allow or deny tracking as necessary when opening apps on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.








According to the EFF, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach app developers, and instead goes to third-party data brokers like Facebook, Google, and lesser-known firms.


----------



## ekim68

Novel cathode ticks the boxes for a cobalt-free battery future



> Cobalt plays an important role in the performance of today's lithium batteries, though mining the material means exposing workers to dangerous conditions and often degrades natural landscapes and water supplies. In an effort to assist the shift away from this rare and expensive metal, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an alternative nickel-based battery architecture, which they say ticks a few important boxes.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk says Tesla's Full Self-Driving subscription arrives in early 2021



> Tesla is narrowing the time frame for the Full Self-Driving subscription rollout. Elon Musk told Twitter followers that the pay-per-month package is now due to arrive "early next year." In theory, you could add the autonomous (currently semi-autonomous) features without a steep up-front cost in a matter of months.
> 
> You might not want to plan your schedule around that timetable. Tesla previously hoped to offer a Full Self-Driving subscription by the end of 2020, and that's clearly not happening.


----------



## ekim68

With their savvy interfaces, smart features and oodles of VC money, digital banks have become the poster-child for fintech. 



> There are now almost 300 so-called "neobanks" live worldwide, with nearly half concentrated in Europe.
> 
> Meanwhile, new players are continuing to join the ranks, particularly in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. This boom is being fuelled by ongoing investor enthusiasm for the sector, with neobanks raising over $2bn in venture capital globally this year alone.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft declares war on Israeli surveillance company NSO Group



> Back in 2019, Israeli technology company NSO Group found itself embroiled in controversy when it was alleged that its Pegasus program was used to hack WhatsApp. The sophisticated attack technique allowed attackers to inject spyware into Android and iOS devices by simply calling them. The victim is not even required to attend the call in order for the attack to be successful.
> 
> While WhatsApp plugged the vulnerability, it later took NSO Group to court for its malicious actions. The surveillance company has denied wrongdoing multiple times using the defense of immunity since it claims that Pegasus is used on behalf of governments. Following recent reports of Al Jazeera journalists being hacked using software developed by NSO Group, Microsoft and various other corporations have now joined the fight against the Israeli firm.


----------



## ekim68

Nuro gets permit to start commercial autonomous deliveries in California



> Almost three years after revealing its autonomous delivery vehicle, robotics startup Nuro has been given the green light for commercial operations in California. Initially, service needs will be met by fully autonomous Prius vehicles, but the R2 delivery pods won't be far behind.


----------



## ekim68

Laptops, desktop sales see 'renaissance;' shortages won't ease until 2022



> OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007, and manufacturers still are months away from fulfilling outstanding orders, hardware industry executives and analysts said.


----------



## ekim68

Wow, 853 feet tall.... 


World's largest off-shore wind farm to welcome the first 14-MW turbine 



> The Haliade-X was introduced a couple of years ago as a 12-MW turbine capable of producing 45 percent more energy than any other offshore wind turbine on the market. The Haliade-X stretches to an incredible 853 ft (260 meters) in height, with each of its three blades measuring 107 m (351 ft), making them the longest off-shore blades ever made.


----------



## ekim68

Quantum computer makers like their odds for big progress



> For years, quantum computing has been the preserve of academics. New advances, however, are pushing this potentially revolutionary technology toward practical applications.
> 
> At the Q2B conference this month, quantum computer makers Google, IBM, Honeywell, IonQ and Xanadu detailed specific steps they expect by 2024 that will push their machines further down the road of commercial practicality. Those achievements include increasing quantum computers' scale, performance and reliability. Private sector spending on quantum computing products and services will likely more than triple to $830 million in 2024, up from $250 million in 2019, according to a forecast from Hyperion Research.


----------



## ekim68

Good news about the coronavirus vaccine is becoming contagious



> Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated


----------



## ekim68

GMC Hummer Edition 1 electric pickup so popular it might build more, report says



> The people were really into the GMC Hummer EV when the brand finally ripped the cloak off the electric pickup truck earlier this year. So much so that the Hummer EV Edition 1 trim sold out in 10 minutes. Now, GMC is reportedly thinking about building more of them due to overwhelming response.


----------



## ekim68

Could Carbon Dioxide Be Turned Into Jet Fuel?



> The aviation industry has been looking for ways to reduce its global carbon footprint for the past decade, such as purchasing so-called carbon offsets-like tree-planting projects or wind farms-to make up for the carbon dioxide spewed out by high-flying jets. At the same time, airports in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, along with a dozen in Europe, are fueling planes with greener alternative fuels to help reach carbon-reduction goals.
> 
> Now a team at Oxford University in the United Kingdom has come up with an experimental process that might be able to turn carbon dioxide-a greenhouse gas emitted by all gas-burning engines-into jet fuel. If successful, the process, which uses an iron-based chemical reaction, could result in "net zero" emissions from airplanes.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. to allow small drones to fly over people and at night



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Small drones will be allowed to fly over people and at night in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday, a significant step toward their use for widespread commercial deliveries.
> 
> The FAA said its long-awaited rules for the drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, will address security concerns by requiring remote identification technology in most cases to enable their identification from the ground.


----------



## ekim68

New process upcycles plastic waste into a more valuable adhesive



> A team at UC Berkeley has developed a process that turns plastic waste into something more valuable - an adhesive. Based on an engineered catalyst, the inspiration was to find ways to "upcycle" plastics by putting them to new uses while preserving the properties that made them attractive in the first place.


----------



## ekim68

Windows 7: A year after the end-of-support deadline, millions choose not to upgrade



> Microsoft officially ended support for its one-time flagship operating system, Windows 7, at the start of 2020. As the year draws to a close, I ran the numbers to see how many PCs are still running this unsupported OS. Spoiler: It's a big number,


----------



## ekim68

Ten-Year Long Study Confirms No Link Between Playing Violent Video Games as Early as Ten Years Old and Aggressive Behavior Later in Life 



> A ten-year longitudinal study published in the Journal of _Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking_ on a group in early adolescence from as young as ten years old, investigated how playing violent video games at an early age would translate into adulthood behavior (23 years of age). Titled "Growing Up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-Year Study of Longitudinal Growth of Violent Video Game Play in Adolescents" the study found no correlation between growing up playing video games and increased levels of aggression ten years later.


----------



## ekim68

LG wants to put transparent OLEDs in restaurants and subways



> LG's got a transparent OLED display, and if you're wondering how such a device could be useful, the company has a few ideas to share.
> 
> Ahead of the upcoming CES 2021 show, LG shared a few ideas on how its transparent OLED products could fit into real-world situations.
> 
> One idea is having a transparent OLED at a restaurant, where the display would pop up from the bar, between the customer and the waiter, allowing the customer to see the menu and order while still being able to see the waiter.


----------



## ekim68

With little ado, a divided United Kingdom casts off into the Brexit unknown



> LONDON (Reuters) - The United Kingdom began the New Year outside the European Union's orbit on Friday after ending a tempestuous 48-year liaison with the European project, its most significant geopolitical shift since the loss of empire.


----------



## ekim68

Massachusetts to Ban Sale of New Gas-Powered Cars by 2035



> While EVs are still in the single-digit area of overall vehicle sales, they continue to climb and have already surpassed the sales of vehicles with manual transmissions. Now it seems that the electrification investments made by automakers are getting a boost from another part of the country.
> 
> Massachusetts is joining California with a plan to ban the sale of new gasolined-powered cars by 2035.


----------



## ekim68

How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review



> If you come at the nonprofit sector, you'd best not miss.
> 
> Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry-the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)-to private equity firm Ethos Capital. EFF and other leaders in the NGO community sprung to action, writing a letter to ISOC urging it to stop the sale. What follows was possibly the most dramatic show of solidarity from the nonprofit sector of all time. And we won.


----------



## ekim68

Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs



> Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process.


----------



## ekim68

Concern mounts over government cyber agency's struggle to respond to hack fallout



> With Microsoft acknowledging for the first time this past week that suspected Russian hackers behind a massive government security breach also gained access to its source code, pressure is mounting on US officials and cybersecurity experts to explain how the attackers infiltrated various US computer networks, what they did once inside and the steps that are being taken to mitigate the damage.
> 
> As US officials struggle with the fallout, questions are swirling about whether the agency tasked with protecting the nation from cyberattacks is up to the job.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists stretch diamond to improve its electronic properties



> But the experiment wasn't just about stretching diamond for the sake of it - it could pave the way for new electronic components made of diamond. Applying that kind of strain can actually change some of the electronic and photonic properties of a material.
> 
> To find out how much by, the team simulated diamond's electronic properties under different levels of strain, between zero and 12 percent. They found that as the tensile strain increased, the diamond's bandgap decreased, essentially meaning it became more electrically conductive. It peaked at a 2 electronVolt drop when under about 9 percent strain. Using spectroscopy, the scientists verified this bandgap-decreasing trend in the diamond samples.


----------



## ekim68

81,000 UK-owned .eu domains suspended as Brexit transition ends



> The UK lost its right to a .eu website when it left the European bloc, leaving many domain name owners in limbo.


----------



## ekim68

Nearly 30% of working professionals would quit if they had to return to office after pandemic



> Many companies plan to ask their employees to return to the office once a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available later this year.
> 
> Good luck with that.
> 
> Twenty-nine percent of working professionals say they would quit their jobs if they couldn't continue working remotely, according to an online survey of 1,022 professionals by LiveCareer, an online resume and job search consulting service.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese search giant Baidu to make electric cars



> Chinese search giant Baidu plans to make electric vehicles with help from Geely, the country's largest private automaker, according to a new report from _Reuters_. It's the latest Chinese conglomerate to venture into the flourishing electric vehicle market, following shopping giant Alibaba and ride-hailing behemoth Didi Chuxing.


----------



## ekim68

DoorDash Is Hiking Customer Fees to Pay for a Law It Helped Write



> In the months since a coalition of app-based gig companies successfully passed Prop 22 in California, exempting themselves from reclassifying their workers as employees, DoorDash has been silently passing costs onto consumers.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk advises people to ditch Facebook and use Signal 



> Tech CEO Elon Musk has urged his almost 42 million Twitter followers to use secure messaging app Signal instead of Facebook products. In a series of tweets, Musk shared a meme referencing Facebook's role in the spread of misinformation leading to the attack on Congress this week and suggested people should use the Signal app.


----------



## ekim68

Nio EP7 promises 621-mile electric range and quick-swappable batteries



> Chinese Tesla rival Nio has unveiled its first electric sedan following several SUVs and the Nurburgring-torching EP9 supercar. At Nio Day in Chengdu, the company celebrated some 75,000 sales and launched its first autonomous-capable vehicle, the ET7 sedan, as well as a monstrous 150-kWh "production-ready" solid-state battery pack and the second version of its automated battery-swap station, which could effectively top you up in a matter of minutes instead of making you wait for a charge.
> 
> The ET7 is a reasonably tidy, if anonymous-looking four-door starting around the US$70,000 mark. Peak power is a meaty 480 kW (643 hp), split between a 180-kW (241-hp) motor driving the front wheels and a 300-kW (402-hp) unit at the rear. Peak torque is 850 Nm (627 lb-ft), and acceleration will be very quick if unspectacular at 3.9 seconds from 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph).


----------



## ekim68

Coronavirus causes largest U.S. greenhouse gas emissions drop since World War Two: report



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell 10.3% in 2020, the largest drop in emissions in the post-World War II era, as the coronavirus crippled the economy, according to a report released Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.


----------



## ekim68

GM shares hit record high as automaker reveals electric van and delves into flying cars



> Shares of General Motors hit a record high in intraday trading Tuesday after the automaker unveiled a new electric van and revealed potential plans to delve into futuristic flying cars.


----------



## ekim68

The PC market just had its first big growth in 10 years



> The PC was supposed to die 10 years ago, but it's just experienced its first big growth in a decade. Market research firm Canalys reports that PC shipments reached 297 million units in 2020, up an impressive 11 percent from 2019. IDC puts the year at 302 million shipments, up 13.1 percent year over year. Gartner also agrees that 2020 was a big year for PCs and the biggest growth we've seen since 2010.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Xbox's "instant on" feature could consume 4 billion kWh by 2025



> The "instant on" feature on new Xbox Series S/X consoles could suck up a total of 4 billion kWh-the equivalent of a year's operation for a large power plant-from US owners alone through 2025. That's according to a preliminary report released this week from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentally focused nonprofit advocacy group.


----------



## ekim68

Online far-right movements fracture in wake of Capitol riot



> According to researchers who study the real-life effects of the QAnon movement, the false belief in a secret plan for Jan. 20 is irking militant pro-Trump and anti-government groups.


----------



## HOBOcs

Sign of the Times - Just saying.....


----------



## ekim68

Inexpensive battery charges rapidly for electric vehicles, reduces range anxiety



> UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Range anxiety, the fear of running out of power before being able to recharge an electric vehicle, may be a thing of the past, according to a team of Penn State engineers who are looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries that have a range of 250 miles with the ability to charge in 10 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Global sales of electric cars accelerate fast in 2020 despite pandemic 



> Global sales of electric cars accelerated fast in 2020, rising by 43% to more than 3m, despite overall car sales slumping by a fifth during the coronavirus pandemic.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft teams up with Cruise on development of self-driving cars



> Microsoft is looking to leverage its prowess in cloud computing to help usher in the era of autonomous vehicles, with the company announcing a partnership with Cruise, the self-driving arm of General Motors. Described as long-term, the partnership aims to make use of Microsoft's Azure platform as Cruise looks to commercialize its autonomous vehicles in the coming decade.


----------



## ekim68

Kia will lead Apple Car project work under Hyundai Motor, report says



> Increasingly, it seems like the Apple Car is far from dead. Rather, it continues to find new life in a number of reports connecting Korean automaker Hyundai Motor to the project in a potential upcoming partnership announcement. However, it may not be the Hyundai brand that works on the Apple Car, but rather Kia.


----------



## ekim68

FTC fines three ticket scalping companies for illegally using bots



> The Federal Trade Commission issued multimillion-dollar fines against three bot-powered ticket scalping operations. The FTC says these organizations bought over 150,000 event tickets over the past four years, nabbing them with automated tools that evaded online purchasing limits. After reselling these tickets for an estimated $26.1 million, they've been accused of breaking a 2016 anti-bot law - the first time this law has been applied.


----------



## ekim68

Electric vehicles close to 'tipping point' of mass adoption



> Electric vehicles are close to the "tipping point" of rapid mass adoption thanks to the plummeting cost of batteries, experts say.
> 
> Global sales rose 43% in 2020, but even faster growth is anticipated when continuing falls in battery prices bring the price of electric cars dipping below that of equivalent petrol and diesel models, even without subsidies. The latest analyses forecast that to happen some time between 2023 and 2025.


----------



## ekim68

As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China



> The railroad system in Dalian, northern China, collapsed citywide on Tuesday for up to 20 hours after the Adobe Flash programing software stopped running.


----------



## ekim68

Vancouver seaplane company to resume test flights with electric commercial airplane



> A Vancouver seaplane company says its retro-fitted all electric airplane is set to take to the skies for more test flights this year, as it pushes forward with its plans to make commercial air travel cheaper and greener.
> 
> "There's no wavering in our confidence and determination and interest in getting this done," said Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall.


----------



## ekim68

The office as we know it is over-and that's a good thing



> 2021 will be the year we finally get to enjoy the true benefits of the remote work revolution. Herewith, three predictions for a post-office future.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Model S refreshed with a radically redesigned interior and 520-mile range



> The updated electric sedan gets a much-needed interior overhaul with a Knight Rider-like steering wheel.


----------



## ekim68

Flying cars airport of the future to land in England



> LONDON (Reuters) - An airport for flying cars will thrust the English city of Coventry into the future later this year, with a project aimed at demonstrating how air taxis will work in urban centres.
> 
> Urban-Air Port, a British-based start-up, has partnered with car giant Hyundai Motor to develop the infrastructure required for when flying cars take to the skies to ferry around people and goods.


----------



## ekim68

Ford to start building electric Mustangs in China



> Ford is to start building its iconic Mustang cars in China for the first time.
> 
> The US carmaker said its Mustang Mach-E will start being produced there later this year as it looks to tap into China's electric vehicle (EV) market.
> 
> Earlier this month, Tesla started delivering its Model Y to Chinese customers from its Shanghai factory.


----------



## ekim68

Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper



> If the Institute for Print and Media Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology has its way, many loudspeakers of the future will not only be as thin as paper, but will also sound impressive. This is a reality in the laboratories of the Chemnitz researchers, who back in 2015 developed the multiple award-winning T-Book-a large-format illustrated book equipped with printed electronics. If you turn a page, it begins to sound through a speaker invisibly located inside the sheet of paper.


----------



## ekim68

Robinhood raises another $2.4 billion as broker app deals with retail trading frenzy



> Discount online brokerage Robinhood said Monday it has raised another $2.4 billion from investors amid the extreme bouts of market volatility.
> 
> The $3.4 billion it has mobilized since Thursday exceeds the total amount it has raised since its founding in 2013.


----------



## ekim68

The new use for abandoned oil rigs 



> As offshore oil and gas platforms come to the end of their working lives, the remarkable ecosystems beneath the waves come into their own.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's electric trucks from Rivian start delivering goods in LA



> The first of 100,000 electric trucks Rivian is making for Amazon have taken to the streets of Los Angeles, as the e-commerce giant takes the first steps in a low-carbon overhaul of its delivery fleet. The trucks have been rolled out as part of testing along selected routes, with the company hoping to introduce them in more than a dozen other US cities before the year is out.


----------



## ekim68

A New Lens Technology Is Primed to Jump-Start Phone Cameras



> The optics in your smartphone have been pretty much the same for more than a decade. That's about to change.


----------



## ekim68

50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down, economics study says



> Tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue that such measures will "trickle down" and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group - the rich.


----------



## ekim68

Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments



> CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.
> Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state's economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported  Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

GameStop Isn't a Popular Uprising



> An exclusive look at the data indicates that big players are driving the price, not the little guy trading "stonks."


----------



## ekim68

Silicon arches boost structural integrity of high-capacity batteries



> One of the ways scientists hope to boost the performance of today's lithium-ion batteries is by incorporating silicon into the design, which could boost their capacity by as much as 10 times. A research team in Japan has come up with a way of doing this that overcomes the durability issues that have plagued these efforts so far, by relying on an anode component made out of tiny nano-scale arches that provide some much-needed strength.


----------



## ekim68

First-of-a-kind sweat sensor tracks stress levels around the clock



> Human sweat contains all kinds of valuable biomarkers that can be used to track different aspects of human health, such as glucose levels in diabetics or metabolic conditions during exercise, and a new breed of wearable sensors promise to make this a rather simple undertaking. Scientists at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have just developed the first of these designed to continuously monitor stress levels over the course of the day, which they hope will make it easier to spot signs of stress-related disease caused by disruptions to natural hormonal cycles.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft to add 'nation-state activity alerts' to Defender for Office 365



> Microsoft has been alerting users of nation-state attacks since 2016. Alerts will now be added to the Defender for Office 365 dashboard so companies can take quicker action.


----------



## ekim68

'Invisible killer': fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds



> Pollution from power plants, vehicles and other sources accounted for one in five of all deaths that year, more detailed analysis reveals


----------



## ekim68

Chinese spacecraft enters Mars' orbit, joining Arab ship



> BEIJING (AP) - A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday on an expedition to land a rover on the surface and scout for signs of ancient life, authorities announced in a landmark step in the country's most ambitious deep-space mission yet.


----------



## ekim68

Allergy seasons getting longer and more severe thanks to climate change



> For many people, the beauty of spring is countered by the sneezing, runny nose and itchy eyes of allergies that come with the warmer weather. For those people, science has some bad news - climate change seems to be making pollen season longer and more severe.
> 
> The new study, led by scientists at the University of Utah, compiled almost 30 years of measurements from 60 pollen count stations across the US and Canada. They found that by 2018, the pollen season was starting 20 days earlier, lasting 10 days longer, and involving 21 percent higher pollen concentrations than in 1990.


----------



## ekim68

Protein discovery promises powerful new muscle regrowth treatments



> Although muscle stem cells are able to grow and repair torn muscle tissue after we sustain an injury, they become less effective as we age. Now researchers at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University have discovered a novel protein that can trigger the proliferation of these stem cells and promote healing, offering hope not only to those who have torn a muscle, but also the elderly and those suffering severe muscle wasting diseases.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon uses an app called Mentor to track and discipline delivery drivers



> Last week, Amazon triggered privacy concerns when it confirmed it's rolling out AI-enabled cameras in vans used by some of its contracted delivery partners. But the company has for years been using software to monitor and track delivery drivers' behavior on the road.
> 
> Amazon requires contracted delivery drivers to download and continuously run a smartphone app, called "Mentor," that monitors their driving behavior while they're on the job. The app, which Amazon bills as a tool to improve driver safety, generates a score each day that measures employees' driving performance.


----------



## ekim68

Apple will proxy Safe Browsing traffic on iOS 14.5 to hide user IPs from Google



> Apple's upcoming iOS 14.5 release will ship with a feature that will re-route all Safari's Safe Browsing traffic through Apple-controlled proxy servers as a workaround to preserve user privacy and prevent Google from learning the IP addresses of iOS users.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Says "Technical Issues" Were the Cause of Broken Promise to Congress



> Facebook is blaming "technical issues" for its broken promise to Congress to stop recommending political groups to its users. Facebook made the pledge once in October, in the run-up to the presidential election, and then falsely reiterated it had taken the step after rioters overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a deadly event partially coordinated by users on the platform.


----------



## ekim68

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Convinced Americans to Love Gas Stoves



> And why they're scared we might break up with their favorite appliance.


----------



## ekim68

270 addresses are responsible for 55% of all cryptocurrency money laundering



> Criminals who keep their funds in cryptocurrency tend to launder funds through a small cluster of online services, blockchain investigations firm Chainalysis said in a report last week.
> 
> This includes services like high-risk (low-reputation) crypto-exchange portals, online gambling platforms, cryptocurrency mixing services, and financial services that support cryptocurrency operations headquartered in high-risk jurisdictions.


----------



## ekim68

Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online



> Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon's Marketplace are being sold online "in bulk", according to Which?
> 
> The consumer group found 10 websites selling fake reviews from £5 each and incentivising positive reviews in exchange for payment or free products.


----------



## ekim68

Ford Europe will sell only all-electric passenger cars from 2030



> Ford unveiled its first all-electric passenger car back in 2011, giving folks attending the 2012 Geneva Motor Show the first opportunity to get in the driving seat. Other models have of course followed, and now the company's European wing has committed fully to the electric road ahead with plans to sell only 100 percent electrics by 2030.


----------



## ekim68

Chromebooks outsold Macs worldwide in 2020, cutting into Windows market share



> New numbers show 2020 was the first year that Chromebooks outsold Macs, posting impressive market share gains at the expense of Windows. Computers powered by Google's Chrome OS have outsold Apple's computers in individual quarters before, but 2020 was the first full year that Chrome OS took second place. Microsoft's Windows still retained majority market share, but also took a big hit as both Chrome OS and macOS gained share.


----------



## ekim68

Losses to romance scams reached a record $304 million in 2020



> The FTC believes the pandemic limited people's ability to meet in person, which contributed to a spike in successful online romance scams.


----------



## ekim68

The world has lost one-third of its forest, but an end of deforestation is possible



> Shortly after the end of the last great ice age - 10,000 years ago - 57% of the world's habitable land was covered by forest. In the millennia since then a growing demand for agricultural land means we've lost one-third of global forests - an area twice the size of the United States. Half of this loss occurred in the last century alone. But it's possible to end our long history of deforestation: increased crop yields, improved livestock productivity, and technological innovations that allow us to shift away from land-intensive food products gives us the opportunity to bring deforestation to an end and restore some of the forest we have lost.


----------



## ekim68

NVIDIA limits RTX 3060 crypto speeds as it introduces mining cards



> Worried that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be sold out as cryptocurrency miners snap up every GPU in sight? NVIDIA thinks it has a simple way to help: make the new card unattractive to the crypto crowd. The company has revealed that it's cutting the hash rate (mining efficiency) of the RTX 3060 in half for Ethereum miners. The driver software can detect the Ethereum mining algorithm and throttle performance in response.


----------



## ekim68

Hydrogen projects worth $300 billion are dropping green H2 prices fast



> A new Hydrogen Council report sheds some light on hydrogen's rise as a green fuel source. More than 30 countries now have a national H2 strategy and budget in place, and there are 228 projects in the pipeline on both the production and usage sides.
> 
> Europe is leading the way, with 126 projects announced to date, followed by Asia with 46, Oceania with 24 and North America with 19. In terms of gigawatt-scale H2 production projects, there are 17 projects planned, with the largest in Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Chile.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers propose 'ethically correct AI' for smart guns that locks out mass shooters



> A trio of computer scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York recently published research detailing a potential AI intervention for murder: an ethical lockout.
> 
> The big idea here is to stop mass shootings and other ethically incorrect uses for firearms through the development of an AI that can recognize intent, judge whether it's ethical use, and ultimately render a firearm inert if a user tries to ready it for improper fire.


----------



## ekim68

Rare earth magnets from old computers to find use in electric Bentleys 



> Rare earth magnets form an important part of many of today's electronic devices, ranging from wind turbine generators to MRI scanners. Despite their prevalence, only a tiny fraction of these magnets are recycled once they reach the end of their lives, but a new project involving Bentley Motors is intended to steer this trend back in the right direction, by repurposing them for use in luxury vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and Twitter adopt Aussie misinformation code



> A handful of technology giants operating in Australia have agreed on a code of practice that aims to stem disinformation on their respective platforms.
> 
> All signatories -- Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Redbubble, TikTok, and Twitter - have committed to the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. They have also committed to releasing an annual transparency report about their efforts under the code.


----------



## ekim68

Musk: Starlink will hit 300Mbps and expand to "most of Earth" this year



> Starlink broadband speeds will double to 300Mbps "later this year," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter yesterday. SpaceX has been telling users to expect speeds of 50Mbps to 150Mbps since the beta began a few months ago.
> 
> Musk also wrote that "latency will drop to ~20ms later this year." This is no surprise, as SpaceX promised latency of 20ms to 40ms during the beta and had said months ago that "we expect to achieve 16ms to 19ms by summer 2021."


----------



## ekim68

Fuel for world's largest fusion reactor ITER is set for test run



> Nuclear fusion experiments with deuterium and tritium at the Joint European Torus are a crucial dress rehearsal for the mega-experiment.


----------



## ekim68

World's first 3D-printed school planned for Madagascar



> Over the past few years, 3D-printed architecture technology has matured from a hobbyist novelty to being used to create everything from offices to affordable housing - it now seems more a case of _when_, not if, it will become a widespread construction technique. The latest stride in this area concerns a plan to create the world's first 3D-printed school in Madagascar.
> 
> The 3D-printed school is the product of a collaboration between nonprofit Thinking Huts and architecture firm Studio Mortazavi, with Hyperion Robotics lending expertise. It's slated to begin construction sometime this year and Thinking Huts hopes to raise US$350,000 to help that happen.


----------



## ekim68

Fuel for world's largest fusion reactor ITER is set for test run



> A pioneering reactor in Britain is gearing up to start pivotal tests of a fuel mix that will eventually power ITER - the world's biggest nuclear-fusion experiment. Nuclear fusion is the phenomenon that powers the Sun and, if physicists can harness it on Earth, it would be a source of almost limitless energy.


----------



## ekim68

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2021



> This list marks 20 years since we began compiling an annual selection of the year's most important technologies. Some, such as mRNA vaccines, are already changing our lives, while others are still a few years off. Below, you'll find a brief description along with a link to a feature article that probes each technology in detail.


----------



## ekim68

Study points to ship hull coatings as a major source of microplastic pollution



> When we hear about microplastic particles polluting the ocean, the usual suspected sources are degraded consumer plastic goods and synthetic textile fibers from washing machines. A new study, however, suggests that much of the blame lies with protective hull coatings on ships.
> 
> Led by Dr. Barbara Scholz-Boettcher, a team from Germany's University of Oldenburg started by collecting water samples from a region of the North Sea known as the German Bight. The samples were collected in the autumns of 2016 and 2017 from various locations in the bight, which encompasses some of the world's busiest shipping lanes.


----------



## ekim68

Light-emitting tattoo engineered for the first time



> Scientists at UCL and the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) have created a temporary tattoo with light-emitting technology used in TV and smartphone screens, paving the way for a new type of 'smart tattoo' with a range of potential uses.


----------



## ekim68

Plastic bottles holding 2.3 litres are least harmful to the planet



> Using plastic bottles that contain the most liquid for the lowest packaging weight could help reduce plastic waste.


----------



## ekim68

The long, painful path of net neutrality



> People may scream at me for saying this, but net neutrality is one of America's longest and now most pointless fights over technology.
> 
> The principle is sound: Companies like Comcast and AT&T that sell us home internet service shouldn't push some online data to computers and TV sets faster than others. (The internet companies say that it's counterproductive for the government to impose this.)
> 
> So since the Napster era, we've been stuck in an endless loop of arguments, laws and repealed laws.


----------



## ekim68

Firefox's Total Cookie Protection aims to stop tracking between multiple sites



> As part of its war on web tracking, Mozilla is adding a new tool to Firefox aimed at stopping cookies from keeping tabs on you across multiple sites. The "Total Cookie Protection" feature is included in the web browser's latest release - alongside multiple picture-in-picture views (more on that below) - and essentially works by keeping cookies isolated between each site you visit. Or, in Mozilla's words: "By creating a separate cookie jar for every website."


----------



## ekim68

How Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble



> We've all heard the stories of Bitcoin millionaires.
> 
> Elon Musk is the latest.
> 
> His electric car company Tesla made a paper profit of more than $900m (£646m) after buying $1.5bn (£1bn) -worth of the cryptocurrency in early February.
> 
> Its high profile support helped pushed the price of a single Bitcoin to more than $58,000.
> But it isn't just the digital asset's price that has hit an all-time high. So has its energy footprint.


----------



## ekim68

Clever new technique turns underwater cables into earthquake detectors



> Earthquakes and tsunamis are some of the most destructive events humanity faces, they are also unpredictable. With little or no warning, a shift of the Earth's crust or an undersea landslide can inflict death and destruction on a horrific scale across an entire ocean basin.
> 
> For this reason, scientists and engineers are working on more sophisticated and comprehensive detection and early warning systems. A particularly attractive option would be to find a way to turn the Earth's vast network of submarine communication cables into a giant seismic network.


----------



## ekim68

Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company's Business



> Amid a 2018 Turkish military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with Turkey's demand to block the page of a mostly Kurdish militia. "I am fine with this," Sandberg wrote.


----------



## 2twenty2

Banks in Germany Tell Customers to Take Deposits Elsewhere



> The banks say they can no longer absorb the negative interest rates the European Central Bank charges them. The more customer deposits banks have, the more they have to park with the central bank.
> 
> That is creating an unusual incentive, where banks that usually want deposits as an inexpensive form of financing, are essentially telling customers to go away. Banks are even providing new online tools to help customers take their deposits elsewhere.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-in-germany-tell-customers-to-take-deposits-elsewhere-11614594601


----------



## ekim68

Cities are starting to ban new gas stations



> "This is not a ban on the existing gas stations, which are providing all the gas currently needed," Matt Krogh, U.S. oil and gas campaign director for the environmental group Stand.earth, tells Axios.
> 
> "The problem with allowing new gas stations is we don't really need them and they're putting existing gas stations out of business."


----------



## ekim68

Betting on death of petrol cars, Volvo to go all electric by 2030



> LONDON (Reuters) - Volvo's entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of automakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade.


----------



## ekim68

Brief: Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald's, KFC & Pizza Hut



> "The world's largest restaurant chains are placing plant-based meat directly on the plates of millions of customers around the world," he said.
> 
> "With more restaurants and revenue than any other food chains on the planet, McDonald's and Yum! Brands will bring plant-based meat onto the mainstream menus of millions of people. When these restaurant chains move, the entire food industry takes notice."


----------



## ekim68

This Guy Got a Minecraft Server Running on His Canon DSLR



> A programmer who goes by the name Turtius has managed to install and run a Minecraft server on a Canon SL2 (also known as the EOS200D) DSLR camera. Turtius was working on reverse-engineering Canon's network processor when he decided to try and see if it could be done.
> 
> It is important to note that the camera is just the server, not the client. The game itself is running on the computer, the "world" that is displayed in-game is simply connected to the camera. Theoretically, others could connect to the camera's network and join this same Minecraft server via their own computer.


----------



## ekim68

Three Top Russian Cybercrime Forums Hacked



> Over the past few weeks, three of the longest running and most venerated Russian-language online forums serving thousands of experienced cybercriminals have been hacked. In two of the intrusions, the attackers made off with the forums' user databases, including email and Internet addresses and hashed passwords. Members of all three forums are worried the incidents could serve as a virtual Rosetta Stone for connecting the real-life identities of the same users across multiple crime forums.


----------



## ekim68

How to ensure electric cars aren't just for rich people



> In late January, General Motors announced a pledge to only sell electric vehicles by 2035 and make roughly 30 different models of automobile without a traditional combustion engine. A week later, Ford revealed it was pouring more than $20 billion into its EV program and that it would only offer electric cars in Europe by 2030. By 2025, Jaguar will become an all-electric luxury line of cars. Meanwhile, Tesla, the world's biggest EV maker, is building a massive factory near Austin, Texas, where it will build not just sedans and trucks but also, potentially, the batteries.


----------



## ekim68

Senators call on FCC to quadruple base high-speed internet speeds



> The federal government's definition of high-speed broadband has remained stagnant over the last six years, sitting at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up since 2015. But faced with pandemic-fueled network loads and a new push for infrastructure spending, lawmakers are getting ready to upgrade that definition. In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk Is Creating a City in Texas. It Will Be Called Starbase and It Will Be Ruled by 'The Doge' *

*


> If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase , around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX .


----------



## ekim68

Rolls Royce taxis the world's fastest electric aircraft to-be 



> A speedy all-electric aircraft being developed with one eye on the record books has taken another step forward, with Rolls-Royce taking its Spirit of Innovation plane to the runway for the very first time. These first taxi tests of what is designed to become the world's fastest electric plane are an important early demonstration of its cutting edge propulsion systems, which the developers hope can offer a blueprint for not just planes but air taxis and other futuristic forms of urban mobility.


----------



## ekim68

Employment rose among those in Stockton's universal basic income experiment: Study 



> After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children



> A new test of cephalopod smarts has reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence.
> 
> Cuttlefish have been put to a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appear to demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew.


----------



## ekim68

UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews



> Google is failing to do enough to combat fake reviews within its business listings, and must be held to account by a UK watchdog, according to Which?
> 
> The consumer group set up a fake company and bought bogus five-star reviews as part of an investigation.
> 
> In doing so, it was able to tie its sham "customers" to dozens of other highly-rated British firms, including a dentist and a stockbroker.


----------



## ekim68

Lunar "Noah's Ark" concept saves backup of millions of plants and animals 



> In the event of a global catastrophe - which, let's be honest, is seeming more and more likely nowadays - how would we protect the wide variety of plants and animals on Earth? A team of researchers has proposed a rather dramatic solution: a "Noah's Ark" on the Moon that stores millions of samples of seeds, spores, sperm and eggs.
> 
> Extinctions are happening at such an alarming rate that some scientists suggest we're heading into the sixth mass extinction event to occur on Earth. Since human activity is the leading cause of those deaths, it's our responsibility to try to do something to help.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists unlock mysteries of world's oldest 'computer'



> A 2,000-year-old device often referred to as the world's oldest "computer" has been recreated by scientists trying to understand how it worked.
> 
> The Antikythera Mechanism has baffled experts since it was found on a Roman-era shipwreck in Greece in 1901.


----------



## ekim68

Exclusive: Myanmar's first satellite held by Japan on space station after coup



> TOKYO (Reuters) - Myanmar's first satellite is being held on board the International Space Station following the Myanmar coup, while Japan's space agency and a Japanese university decide what to do with it, two Japanese university officials said.


----------



## ekim68

US Air Force is guarding against electromagnetic pulse attacks. Should we worry?



> A U.S. Air Force base in Texas has taken the first steps to guard against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. But what, exactly, is an EMP, and how big is the threat?


----------



## ekim68

Lightning-fast GigaDrive SSD boasts read/write speeds of 2,800 MB/s



> In this world overflowing with data and content, external solid state drives are becoming more and more necessary. Thankfully they're also getting faster, as demonstrated by a new SSD called GigaDrive that boasts read and write speeds of up to 2,800 MB/s thanks to its architecture and Thunderbolt 4- and USB4-compatible port.


----------



## ekim68

A Drone Went Bowling. Hollywood Noticed.



> A drone video shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley was hailed as an instant classic. One Hollywood veteran said it "adds to the language and vocabulary of cinema."


----------



## ekim68

The Greek Alphabet Will No Longer Be Used to Name Hurricanes



> There will be no Hurricane Pi, Rho, Sigma or Tau.
> 
> The Greek alphabet has been retired as a way of identifying tropical storms, the World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday.
> 
> The decision was made after nine Greek letters were pressed into service last year during the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which exhausted the normal list of 21 storm names prepared by the organization.


----------



## ekim68

BofA Global Research: 10 Surprising Facts About Bitcoin



> 10 Surprising Facts About Bitcoin


----------



## ekim68

AT&T lies about Calif. net neutrality law, claiming it bans "free data"



> AT&T lied about California's net neutrality law yesterday when it claimed the law requires AT&T to stop providing "free data" to mobile customers.
> 
> In reality, the California law allows AT&T to continue zero-rating HBO Max, its own video service, as long as it exempts all competing video services from data caps without charging the other video providers. But instead of zero-rating all video without collecting payments from its competitors in the online-video business, AT&T decided it would rather not exempt anything at all.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter asks: when should we cut off rule-breaking world leaders?



> (Reuters) - Twitter Inc said on Thursday it will seek public input on when and how it should ban world leaders, saying it was reviewing policy and considering whether the leaders should be held to the same rules as other users. Social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook Inc have been under scrutiny for the way they handle accounts of politicians and government officials, particularly following their ban on former U.S. President Donald Trump's account for inciting violence after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.


----------



## ekim68

Study indicates pen & paper beats stylus & screen for memory retention 



> An intriguing new study from a team of Japanese researchers suggests handwriting on paper leads to greater brain activity and memory retention compared to handwriting with a stylus on a tablet. The researchers hypothesize the richer spatial details of writing on paper may explain why it could enhance the encoding of information in the brain.


----------



## JCooper121

ekim68 said:


> Elon Musk Is Creating a City in Texas. It Will Be Called Starbase and It Will Be Ruled by 'The Doge'


This Starbase city will also contain a new SpaceX factory that should be created in response to a growing demand for Starlink equipment: dishes, routers, hardware, etc. I think that Musk plans to make Texas a new technology center, and it's great.


----------



## ekim68

Bitcoin is a mouth hungry for fossil fuels



> To get a bitcoin, you need a computer frantically spitting out random numbers. The more numbers you spit out, the greater the chances of stumbling upon the secret lucky number. Computers doing this consume *a lot* of electricity - it's an enormous quantity of work you need to prove you did to get awarded the coin thing. It's called 'proof of work'.


----------



## ekim68

First tidal-powered EV charging point installed in Shetland Islands 



> Nova Innovation has announced the installation of the first electric vehicle charge point powered by tidal energy, which is located on the island of Yell in the Shetlands.
> 
> The evolt charge point has been installed at Cullivoe harbor by the shores of Bluemull Sound, a strait between the northern Shetland islands of Unst and Yell. It's being operated by ChargePlace Scotland, the national EV charging network owned and operated by the Scottish Government.


----------



## ekim68

Germ-killing, wound-healing, low-cost bandage made from durian husks 



> Although not a _huge_ seller everywhere, durian fruit is consumed in great quantities in countries like Singapore. Scientists there have now developed a method of using its otherwise-discarded husks to create cheap, eco-friendly, antibacterial hydrogel bandages.
> 
> First of all, hydrogel bandages themselves are nothing new. Typically applied directly to post-surgical wounds, they help reduce scarring by keeping the wound site hydrated during the early stages of the healing process. By contrast, regular gauze dressings allow the area to dry out.


----------



## ekim68

OpenAI's Sam Altman: Artificial Intelligence will generate enough wealth to pay each adult $13,500 a year



> Artificial intelligence will create so much wealth that every adult in the United States could be paid $13,500 per year from its windfall as soon as 10 years from now.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T lobbies against nationwide fiber, says 10Mbps uploads are good enough



> AT&T is lobbying against proposals to subsidize fiber-to-the-home deployment across the US, arguing that rural people don't need fiber and should be satisfied with Internet service that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds.


----------



## ekim68

Graphene made from old tires helps strengthen concrete



> Researchers at Rice University have developed a new process to convert old tires into graphene, which can then be used to make concrete. Not only is it more environmentally friendly, but the team says the resulting concrete is substantially stronger.


----------



## ekim68

Humble Motors presents a 1,020hp SUV with 80 square feet of solar roof



> Another Californian EV startup has unveiled an electric concept SUV - but this time, it's built to do between 10-60 miles (16-96 km) per day on pure sunlight. The Humble One will rock more than 80 square feet of solar panels to self-charge even when unplugged.


----------



## ekim68

Synthetic organism undergoes cell division in breakthrough study



> For the first time, a team of scientists has created a synthetic single-celled organism that can divide and grow like a regular living cell. This breakthrough could lead to designer cells that can produce useful chemicals on demand or treat disease from inside the body.


----------



## ekim68

Feds say man broke into public water system and shut down safety processes



> Federal prosecutors have indicted a Kansas man for allegedly logging into a computer system at a public water system and tampering with the process for cleaning and disinfecting customers' drinking water.


----------



## ekim68

Spongey filter releases purified lake water when set in the sun



> Ironically, many of the places that most require water purification have the least-developed infrastructure. That's where a new filtration device comes in, as it's activated by the sun - and it's said to perform better than other solar-powered purification systems.


----------



## ekim68

Opinion: Which world leader has the worst pandemic record? The competition is fierce.



> A catastrophic pandemic and a calamitous presidency combined to give the United States the world's worst pandemic death toll. That was essentially confirmed by Deborah Birx, President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force coordinator, who told CNN that most deaths in the United States could have been prevented.
> 
> And yet - cold comfort - Trump might not have been the worst leader of the pandemic. Others arguably botched the crisis even worse than Trump did, and the list tells you a lot about the state of global governance.


----------



## ekim68

Bitcoin mining emissions in China will hit 130 million tonnes by 2024



> The carbon emissions associated with mining bitcoin have accelerated rapidly in China, and they will soon outstrip the total annual emissions of mid-sized European countries.
> 
> Analysis by Guan Dabo at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues suggests that the total carbon footprint of bitcoin mining in China will peak in 2024, releasing around 130 million metric tonnes of carbon.


----------



## ekim68

Cosmic rays causing 30,000 network malfunctions in Japan each year



> TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Cosmic rays are causing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 malfunctions in domestic network communication devices in Japan every year, a Japanese telecom giant found recently.
> 
> Most so-called "soft errors," or temporary malfunctions, in the network hardware of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. are automatically corrected via safety devices, but experts said in some cases they may have led to disruptions.


----------



## ekim68

Broadband use surged more than 30% during pandemic, industry group says



> Broadband use surged 30% to 40% during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, and even reached 60% in some areas, an industry group has concluded. Although the internet shouldered the load without much problem, you might consider upgrading your own network equipment to avoid issues.


----------



## ekim68

UPS plans to start deliveries via eVTOL in 2024



> UPS has signed a deal to buy up to 150 eVTOL aircraft from Vermont's Beta Technologies, and is expecting to begin using them for time-sensitive zero-emissions deliveries in certain markets in 2024, taking off and landing on-site at UPS depots.
> 
> Beta's Alia aircraft is an interesting design inspired by the shape of the Arctic tern; a transitioning fixed-wing aircraft with four large, drag-minimizing VTOL props mounted on bars extending forward and backward from the wings, and a single pusher prop on the back for efficient cruising on the wing.


----------



## ekim68

Sask. government to roll out $150 annual tax for passenger electric vehicles



> The Saskatchewan government will implement a new tax for passenger electric vehicles, according to its 2021-22 budget.
> 
> The announcement was made Tuesday. The new $150 annual tax on passenger electric vehicles (EVs) will take effect Oct. 1, 2021.
> 
> In a press release, the government said the reason for this tax is that EVs do not contribute to highway maintenance through the provincial fuel tax, which is meant to preserve and improve Saskatchewan's highway system.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Neuralink has a monkey play Pong with its mind



> Elon Musk's startup Neuralink has shown off the latest version of its brain-machine interface, which a monkey uses to wirelessly play Pong with its mind. The demonstration is both another step forward for the ambitious company and a fascinating look at the current state of the technology, which, amongst other things, could offer sufferers of paralysis a way to regain control of their limbs.


----------



## ekim68

A wireless brain-computer interface has been successfully tested on humans for the first time



> Scientists have demonstrated the first human use of a wireless brain-computer interface, a potential breakthrough for people with paralysis.
> 
> While traditional BCIs are tethered to users via cables, the new system - called BrainGate - replaces the cords with a small transmitter affixed atop a users' head. The unit then connects to an electrode array implanted in the brain's motor cortex.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. suicides dropped last year, defying pandemic expectations



> The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic - the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data.
> 
> Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Boring Company Las Vegas Loop proves quite boring in first rides - no Autopilot yet



> Elon Musk's Boring Company has allowed the media a first look at the Las Vegas Loop, and it proved to be, well, quite boring.
> 
> The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, The Boring Company's first full-scale loop project, has been completed, and it's about to launch commercially.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla drastically increases price of Solar Roof



> Tesla appears to have drastically increased the price of its Solar Roof tiles in an update to its configurator and quote estimates.
> 
> After years of delays, the Tesla Solar Roof is finally gaining momentum with a sharp rise in installations over the last few quarters.


----------



## ekim68

The FCC wants you to test your internet speeds with its new app



> The Federal Communications Commission has released a new speed test app to help measure internet speeds across the country, available on both Android and iOS.
> 
> The FCC Speed Test App works similarly to existing speed-testing apps like Ookla's and Fast by Netflix, automatically collecting and displaying data once users press the "start testing" button. According to the FCC, the data collected through the app will inform the agency's efforts to collect more accurate broadband speed information and aid its broadband deployment efforts.


----------



## ekim68

Ford's BlueCruise self-driving tech did a 110,000-mile road trip



> Ford is determined to counter GM's Super Cruise with its own take on hands-free highway driving, and that means conducting a rather extensive set of real-world tests. The automaker has revealed that it spent last year conducting the "mother of all road trips" for its upcoming BlueCruise system, sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a collective 110,000-mile journey across the US and Canada.


----------



## ekim68

Water-worried Vegas wants useless grass a thing of the past



> LAS VEGAS (AP) - A desert city built on a reputation for excess and indulgence wants to become a model for restraint and conservation with a first-in-the-nation policy banning grass that nobody walks on.


----------



## ekim68

Novel Alzheimer's treatment clears brain plaques with light and oxygen 



> Research into what causes Alzheimer's and how it might be treated involves a number of possibilities, but one scientists are continually coming back to is brain plaques playing a central role in driving the disease. It follows that researchers are investigating ways to destroy these plaques or prevent them from forming, and scientists at the University of Tokyo have come up with a novel approach to this problem involving injectable, oxygenated atoms that are activated by infrared light.


----------



## ekim68

Dying oil companies' parting gift: millions in cleanup costs[/kurl]



> One Texas oil and gas company left the state responsible for almost $10 million after its 2019 bankruptcy.


----------



## ekim68

California to hunt greenhouse gas leaks and superemitters with monitoring satellites



> In December 2016, soon after advisers to President Donald Trump threatened to shut off NASA's climate-observing satellites, California Governor Jerry Brown made a famous promise: "If Trump turns off the satellites," he said while addressing a geoscience meeting, "California will launch its own damn satellites." That promise is now a reality, with California and partners set to launch by 2023 two satellites to spot and monitor plumes of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. If all goes right, dozens more could follow.


----------



## ekim68

478-mile Mercedes EQS brings top-of-range electric luxury



> Fast-building its EQ family, Mercedes-Benz brings all-electric power to the flagship of the brand: the S-Class. After months of teasing, it has finally given the all-new EQS a proper world premiere. The electric sedan explores the highest echelons of the electric market with a range that pushes 500 miles, a sleek, slippery design that Mercedes defines as the world's most aerodynamic, and more tech than some Silicon Valley zip codes.


----------



## ekim68

Covid-19 Pushes India's Middle Class Toward Poverty



> The pandemic sent 32 million people in India from the middle class last year. Now a second wave is threatening the dreams of millions more looking for a better life.


----------



## ekim68

Would be so cool if everyone normalized these pesky data leaks, says data-leaking Facebook in leaked memo



> Facebook wants you to believe that the scraping of 533 million people's personal data from its platform, and the dumping of that data online by nefarious people, is something to be "normalised."


----------



## ekim68

FTC issues stern warning: Biased AI may break the law



> In a blog post this week, the Federal Trade Commission signaled that it's taking a hard look at bias in AI, warning businesses that selling or using such systems could constitute a violation of federal law.
> 
> "The FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive practices," the post reads. "That would include the sale or use of - for example - racially biased algorithms."


----------



## ekim68

Mall department stores were struggling. The pandemic has pushed them to the edge of extinction.



> Nearly 200 department stores have shuttered in the past year, and another 800 - roughly half the country's remaining mall-based locations - are expected to fold within five years


----------



## ekim68

Happy Earth Day...... 


Earth Day 2021


----------



## ekim68

Europe Proposes Strict Rules for Artificial Intelligence



> The European Union unveiled strict regulations on Wednesday to govern the use of artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind policy that outlines how companies and governments can use a technology seen as one of the most significant, but ethically fraught, scientific breakthroughs in recent memory.


----------



## ekim68

How much blame should Tesla accept if customers misuse its products?



> A recent crash linked to misuse of Tesla's Autopilot feature has started some heated arguments


----------



## ekim68

Samsung's New Upcycling Program Allows You To Turn an Old Galaxy Phone Into a New IoT Device



> Usually, when a phone gets worn down, you recycle it or trade it in for a new one. But with its new upcycling program, Samsung is trying to help people convert old Galaxy phones into new IoT devices.


----------



## ekim68

Starlink is a global ISP built at ZERO COST to SpaceX, enabling NASA's Artemis launch



> There is lots of good news lately for SpaceX, especially NASA choosing the Hawthorne, CA-based company to build a $2.89 billion lunar lander for NASA's Artemis Moon landing slated for 2024. Key to that single-source contract, which eliminates two competitors including Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, was SpaceX's willingness to restructure payments to fit the $750 million appropriated by Congress this fiscal year for the project. Already the lowest Artemis bidder, Elon Musk's company was willing to make the deal work for the customer, which is unusual thinking for space contractors, with many asking, _Where did SpaceX get the money?_
> 
> They got the money from your phone bill.


----------



## ekim68

Honda aims for 100% EV sales by 2040, zero road fatalities by 2050 



> Like Volkswagen, Toyota, Jaguar and other big names in auto-manufacturing, Honda is making moves away from fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, declaring a new strategy to sell only electric vehicles in major markets by 2040. This will start with vehicles built on a new EV architecture later this decade, and also incorporates some lofty ambitions around road safety.
> 
> Honda's new commitment to electrification was announced by CEO Toshihiro Mibe on Friday, and forms part of the company's wider goal of achieving carbon neutrality across its entire operation by 2050.


----------



## ekim68

Experimental ankle exoskeleton increases walking speed by 40 percent 



> Engineers at Stanford University are developing a prototype ankle exoskeleton to help people walk faster. That may sound like another weird novelty gadget, but it's designed for the serious purpose of helping those whose gait is slowing down due to age or infirmity.
> 
> As people get older, they tend to walk slower. Part of this is that they realize that there's no point in hurrying, but there's also the onset of neuromuscular degeneration or general wear and tear. As a result, older people and those suffering from various conditions find themselves walking frustratingly slower than they'd like.


----------



## ekim68

Most Americans Would Take a Pay Cut to Keep Working From Home



> Some workers will go back to the office after the pandemic, but not enough to save central business districts from permanent drops in spending that will permanently remake American downtowns.
> 
> That is one of the worrisome findings of a new working paper on remote work, which reports 11 months of survey data on more than 30,000 Americans' shifting arrangements with their employers.


----------



## ekim68

First ever FDA-approved brain-computer interface targets stroke rehab



> A novel device designed to help stroke patients recover wrist and hand function has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Called IpsiHand, the system is the first brain-computer interface (BCI) device to ever receive FDA market approval.
> 
> The IpsiHand device consists of two separate parts - a wireless exoskeleton that is positioned over the wrist, and a small headpiece that records brain activity using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes. The system is based on a discovery made by Eric Leuthardt and colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine over a decade ago.


----------



## ekim68

Breaking Point: How Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook Became Foes



> The chief executives of Facebook and Apple have opposing visions for the future of the internet. Their differences are set to escalate this week.


----------



## ekim68

Security firm Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware



> Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said today it discovered new malware that appears to have been developed by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
> 
> Kaspersky said it discovered the malware in "a collection of malware samples" that its analysts and other security firms received in February 2019.
> 
> While an initial analysis did not find any shared code with any previously-known malware samples, Kaspersky has recently re-analyzed the files and said it found that "the samples have intersections of coding patterns, style and techniques that have been seen in various Lambert families."


----------



## ekim68

China to report first population drop in five decades



> China is poised to report its first population decline in five decades following a once-in-a-decade census, the Financial Times newspaper said, citing sources familiar with the matter.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon Launches Another Union-Busting Campaign



> Amazon has embarked on a campaign to derail a nascent union drive at its warehouses in Staten Island on the heels of a historic union election at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, which the union lost in early April.
> 
> On Monday, Amazon began displaying anti-union messaging on TV screens at one of its Staten Island warehouses, known as JFK8, which employs more than 5,000 workers.


----------



## ekim68

A Chinese company has started charging for fully driverless rides



> Baidu, China's leading search engine, is often compared to Google. And just as Google has spun off Waymo to commercialize self-driving technology, so Baidu is developing self-driving technology of its own. On Thursday, the Chinese search giant announced the launch of what it is calling China's first paid autonomous vehicle service, known as Apollo Go.
> 
> Arguably, the service is better described as a shuttle service than a taxi service. Customers are picked up and dropped off from one of eight predefined stations. The initial service area is 2.7 square kilometers-a little over one square mile. The longest route in the network is 5 km (3 miles). That makes the service a lot smaller than the Waymo One taxi service in Phoenix, which has a service area of around 50 square miles.


----------



## ekim68

Telecom goes to war with New York over low-income broadband law



> Trade groups representing AT&T, Verizon and other telecom companies are opening fire on a new law requiring them to provide discounted internet service to low-income households in New York.


----------



## ekim68

"Long overdue": The Senate just passed $35 billion for clean drinking water.



> A massive, bipartisan clean water infrastructure bill passed the Senate 89-2 on Thursday. The Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act would create a $35 billion fund for states and tribes to improve water systems - 40 percent of which would go to underserved, rural, and tribal communities.


----------



## ekim68

Four distinct variants of Alzheimer's identified in brain imaging study



> A new international study has found four distinct patterns of toxic protein spread in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. The findings indicate these patterns correspond with particular symptoms, and the researchers hypothesize these four variants could respond to different treatments.
> 
> The research focused the accumulation and spread of a toxic protein in the brain called tau. Alongside amyloid beta, another protein known to be implicated in neurodegeneration, the spread of tau has been associated with cognitive decline seen in Alzheimer's.


----------



## ekim68

Shutdown of Austin fab during freeze cost Samsung at least $268 million



> Samsung lost at least $268 million due to damaged products after its semiconductor fabrication plant in Austin was shutdown during the February's Texas freeze, according to the company.
> 
> Samsung executives said the company's semiconductor business saw profits fall in the first quarter, mainly due to disruptions and product losses caused by the shutdown.


----------



## ekim68

About 1.5 million people still pay for AOL - but now they get tech support and identity theft services instead of dial-up internet



> The famed internet company that once bought Time Warner for $182 billion and used to make billions of dollars annually selling dial-up modem access, still has a monthly subscription service called AOL Advantage.


----------



## ekim68

America is running low on chicken. Blame covid-19, a sandwich craze and huge appetite for wings.



> It's not like we weren't warned. The doomsayers predicted this months ago: "A MASSIVE CHICKEN WING SHORTAGE IS BREWING," blared the headline of one trade publication in early February.
> 
> But it turned out to be so much worse.
> 
> Bloomberg News, on Thursday: "Fried-Chicken Craze Is Causing U.S. to Run Low on Poultry."


----------



## ekim68

Wood burners: Sale of coal and wet wood restricted in England



> Curbs on the sale of house coal and wet wood for household burning in England have come into force under new rules aimed at cutting air pollution.
> 
> People will still be able to use stoves and open fires but they will need to burn cleaner alternatives.
> 
> These are the first restrictions on what people can burn in their homes since the clean air acts of the 1950s.


----------



## ekim68

Pandora says laboratory-made diamonds are forever



> The world's biggest jeweller, Pandora, says it will no longer sell mined diamonds and will switch to exclusively laboratory-made diamonds.


----------



## ekim68

World's longest suspension footbridge lets walkers get some mountain air



> Those nervous of heights should probably steer clear of the newly completed 516 Arouca bridge in Portugal. As its name suggests, the tourist attraction runs high above a river for 516 m (1,692 ft) and is hailed as the world's longest pedestrian suspension bridge by Portuguese officials.


----------



## ekim68

Adobe Flash: These updates will remove it from your Windows 10 PCs, for good



> Microsoft is preparing to issue two more Windows 10 updates in June and July that will eliminate unsupported Adobe Flash Player from Windows PCs for good.
> 
> The update KB4577586 called "Update for Removal of Adobe Flash Player" has been available as an optional update since October and now looks set for a broader deployment.


----------



## ekim68

When Autonomous Cars Teach Themselves to Drive Better Than Humans



> A few weeks ago, the CTO of Cruise Tweeted an example of one of their AVs demonstrating a safety behavior where it moves over to make room for a cyclist. What's interesting about this behavior, though, is that the AV does this for cyclists approaching rapidly from behind the vehicle, something a human is far less likely to notice, much less react to. A neat trick-but what does it mean, and what's next?


----------



## ekim68

IBM's new 2-nm chips have transistors smaller than a strand of DNA 



> In a shining example of the inexorable march of technology, IBM has unveiled new semiconductor chips with the smallest transistors ever made. The new 2-nanometer (nm) tech allows the company to cram a staggering 50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail.
> 
> The current industry standard is chips with 7-nm transistors, with some high-end consumer devices, such as Apple's M1 processors, beginning to make the move to 5 nm. And experimental chips have shrunk as small as 2.5 nm.


----------



## ekim68

Analytics Suggest 96% of Users Leave App Tracking Disabled in iOS 14.5



> An early look at an ongoing analysis of Apple's App Tracking Transparency suggests that the vast majority of iPhone users are leaving app tracking disabled since the feature went live on April 26 with the release of iOS 14.5.


----------



## ekim68

'It's like the embers in a barbecue pit.' Nuclear reactions are smoldering again at Chernobyl



> Thirty-five years after the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded in the world's worst nuclear accident, fission reactions are smoldering again in uranium fuel masses buried deep inside a mangled reactor hall. "It's like the embers in a barbecue pit," says Neil Hyatt, a nuclear materials chemist at the University of Sheffield. Now, Ukrainian scientists are scrambling to determine whether the reactions will wink out on their own-or require extraordinary interventions to avert another accident.


----------



## ekim68

It's not a 'labor shortage.' It's a great reassessment of work in America.



> Hiring was much weaker than expected in April. Wall Street thinks it's a blip, but there could be much deeper rethinking of what jobs are needed and what workers want to do on a daily basis.


----------



## ekim68

Linux Foundation launches open source agriculture infrastructure project



> The Linux Foundation has lifted the lid on a new open source digital infrastructure project aimed at the agriculture industry. The AgStack Foundation, as the new project will be known, is designed to foster collaboration among all key stakeholders in the global agriculture space, spanning private business, governments, and academia.
> 
> As with just about every other industry in recent years, there has been a growing digital transformation across the agriculture sector that has ushered in new connected devices for farmers and myriad AI and automated tools to optimize crop growth and circumvent critical obstacles, such as labor shortages.


----------



## ekim68

Electric cars 'will be cheaper to produce than fossil fuel vehicles by 2027'



> Electric cars and vans will be cheaper to produce than conventional, fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2027, and tighter emissions regulations could put them in pole position to dominate all new car sales by the middle of the next decade, research has found.
> 
> By 2026, larger vehicles such as electric sedans and SUVs will be as cheap to produce as petrol and diesel models, according to forecasts from BloombergNEF, with small cars reaching the threshold the following year.


----------



## ekim68

Impossible Burgers are coming to US schools



> Impossible Foods has secured Child Nutrition Labels for its Impossible Burger products, which means they can now be part of school nutrition programs in the US. To obtain the CN Labels, USDA's Food and Nutrition Services had to evaluate the plant-based meat's product formulation, as well as the company's quality control procedures and manufacturing processes.


----------



## ekim68

Buying an Electric Vehicle? Here Is Some Advice.



> Buying an electric car can be exciting and bewildering. Consider what kind of car you want and need and where you will charge.


----------



## ekim68

Mahle's cheap, highly efficient new EV motor uses no magnets



> The new Mahle design uses no magnets, instead using powered coils in its rotor. Unlike previous efforts, it transfers power to the spinning rotor using contactless induction - so there are basically no wear surfaces. This should make it extremely durable - not that electric motors have a reputation for needing much maintenance.


----------



## ekim68

Disney Patents Blockchain-Based Movie Distribution System to Stop Pirates



> As a prime content producer, Disney has a vested interest in keeping pirates at bay. The entertainment company is involved in various enforcement initiatives and a few days ago, added a new anti-piracy patent to its arsenal. With a blockchain-based distribution system, Disney hopes to make it harder for pirates to intercept films being distributed to movie theaters.


----------



## ekim68

Confronting Disinformation Spreaders on Twitter Only Makes It Worse, MIT Scientists Say



> Of all the reply guy species, the most pernicious is the correction guy. You've seen him before, perhaps you've even been him. When someone (often a celebrity or politician) tweets bad science or a provable political lie, the correction guy is there to respond with the correct information. According to a new study conducted by researchers at MIT, being corrected online just makes the original posters more toxic and obnoxious.


----------



## ekim68

Tiny, Wireless, Injectable Chips Use Ultrasound to Monitor Body Processes



> Columbia Engineers develop the smallest single-chip system that is a complete functioning electronic circuit; implantable chips visible only in a microscope point the way to developing chips that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle to monitor medical conditions


----------



## ekim68

Nuclear reactions at Chernobyl are spiking in an inaccessible chamber



> Scientists monitoring the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine have seen a surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex. They are now investigating whether the problem will stabilise or require a dangerous and difficult intervention to prevent a runaway nuclear reaction.


----------



## ekim68

Novel concrete battery could let buildings store their own energy 



> Like regular concrete, it starts with a cement-based mixture, but one spiked with small amounts of short carbon fibers to add conductivity and flexural strength. Also incorporated into the mix are a pair of carbon fiber meshes, one coated in iron to act as the battery's anode and the other coated in nickel to act as the cathode. As the battery's two electrodes, these ferry electrons back and forward as the device is charged and discharged.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Calls Links To Depression Inconclusive. These Researchers Disagree



> Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' biggest fear as a parent isn't gun violence, or drunk driving, or anything related to the pandemic.
> 
> It's social media.


----------



## ekim68

Twenty firms produce 55% of world's plastic waste, report reveals



> Twenty companies are responsible for producing more than half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe, new research reveals.


----------



## ekim68

ADM Buries Corn Plant Emissions Equal to 1.2 Million Cars



> (Bloomberg) -- Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one of the world's biggest grain traders, is injecting carbon dioxide released by its corn plants underground, using commercial-scale technology that's the first of its kind.
> 
> The company just completed a project with the University of Illinois proving that its methods to capture carbon are safe, according to a Wednesday release. That will aid its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% against a 2019 baseline.


----------



## ekim68

Milrem combat robots support live-fire exercise in Estonia



> In a glimpse into the battlefield of the future, the Estonian Defence Force has carried out a live-fire exercise where two Milrem Robotics THeMIS combat robots provided troops with situational awareness, support fire, and casualty evacuation.


----------



## ekim68

Crypto-mining gangs are running amok on free cloud computing platforms



> Over the course of the last few months, some crypto-mining gangs have switched their modus operandi from attacking and hijacking unpatched servers to *abusing the free tiers of cloud computing platforms*.
> 
> Gangs have been operating by registering accounts on selected platforms, signing up for a free tier, and running a cryptocurrency mining app on the provider's free tier infrastructure.


----------



## ekim68

College Credit For Playing Video Games? At Some California Campuses, It's Happening



> At least six Cal State campuses and nearly all of the University of California campuses have created esports programs since 2015, in which students host and compete in live tournaments, sometimes funded by corporate sponsors.


----------



## ekim68

Germany aims to get self-driving cars on the roads in 2022



> German lawmakers greenlit a bill that would allow for some autonomous vehicles to hit public roads as early as next year. But those looking for a driverless joyride on the Autobahn will still have to wait.


----------



## ekim68

Morphing computer chip repels hundreds of professional DARPA hackers



> Engineers have designed a computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its microarchitecture every few milliseconds. Known as Morpheus, the puzzling processor has now aced its first major tests, repelling hundreds of professional hackers in a DARPA security challenge.


----------



## ekim68

Fisker to build first all-electric popemobile for Pope Francis 



> After unveiling its long-awaited Ocean SUV at CES last year, electric vehicle startup Fisker is turning its attention to papal transport, revealing plans to develop a purpose-built all-electric vehicle for Pope Francis. The car will be based on the Ocean, which the company says is well-suited to such applications, and is expected to be delivered to His Holiness next year.


----------



## ekim68

Redditors Aim to 'Free Science' From For-Profit Publishers



> A group of Redditors came together in a bid to archive over 85 million scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down, according to a report by _Gizmodo_.


----------



## ekim68

Google's first all-electric Street View car rolls out in Dublin



> Google has teamed up with Jaguar Land Rover for its first ever all-electric Street View vehicle, which is now being rolled out in Dublin. The modified Jaguar I-Pace will also be used as part of a new initiative to map air quality in the city, using mobile air sensors to collect data as it roams the streets over the coming 12 months.
> 
> Jaguar launched its all-electric I-Pace SUV in 2018, packing a 90-kWh battery pack onboard for a range of around 240 miles (386 km). In adapting it for use as a Google Street View vehicle, the company's engineers had to add special rooftop mountings for the camera and new glass in the rear window to incorporate wiring and switchgear for special Street View controls.


----------



## ekim68

Scammy iOS app discovered that refuses to open unless you give it a good review



> App developer and scam app hunter Kosta Eleftheriou's latest discovery is a real doozy, an iOS app that refuses to function before you give it at least a 3-star review in the App Store.


----------



## ekim68

The Boring Company tests its 'Teslas in Tunnels' system in Las Vegas



> Elon Musk's Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June.
> 
> Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk's solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels - a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company.


----------



## ekim68

Industry groups sue to stop Florida's new social media law



> Two tech industry organizations have sued Florida over its newly passed rules for social networks. NetChoice and the CCIA - which represent Amazon, Google, Intel, Samsung, Facebook, and other tech giants - say SB 7072 violates private companies' constitutional rights.
> They're asking a court to prevent the law from taking effect, calling it a "frontal assault on the First Amendment."


----------



## ekim68

Fans and athletes are together again, but the honeymoon's already over



> So much for romanticizing the reopening of sports venues.
> The games bring us together, so close a fan at Madison Square Garden can spit on Trae Young.


----------



## ekim68

Batteries used in hearing aids could be key to the future of renewable energy



> If necessity is the mother of invention, potential profit has to be the father. Both incentives are driving an effort to transform zinc batteries from small, throwaway cells often used in hearing aids into rechargeable behemoths that could be attached to the power grid, storing solar or wind power for nighttime or when the wind is calm. With startups proliferating and lab studies coming thick and fast, "Zinc batteries are a very hot field," says Chunsheng Wang, a battery expert at the University of Maryland, College Park.


----------



## ekim68

Iran Bans Crypto Mining After Months of Blackouts



> Iran banned bitcoin mining this week, after four months of continuous blackouts partially due to what officials say is a huge energy suck from illegal mining.
> 
> President Hassan Rouhani said at a cabinet meeting Wednesday that a drought in the region was responsible for crippling the country's supply of hydroelectric power. But, he said, the huge amount of illegal bitcoin mining that happens in Iran was tapping a staggering 2 gigawatts of power each _day_ from the already-stressed grid. (Legal operations, meanwhile, used somewhere between 200 and 300 megawatts.)


----------



## ekim68

The chip shortage is pitting bitcoin miners against gamers



> In the niche world of customers for high-end semiconductors, a bitter feud is pitting bitcoin miners against hardcore gamers. At issue is the latest line of NVIDIA graphics cards-powerful, cutting-edge chips with the computational might to display the most advanced video game graphics on the market.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook's AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them.



> Just days after violent conflict erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories, both Facebook and Twitter copped to major faux pas: The companies had wrongly blocked or restricted millions of mostly pro-Palestinian posts and accounts related to the crisis.
> 
> Activists around the world charged the companies with failing a critical test: whether their services would enable the world to watch an important global event unfold unfettered through the eyes of those affected.


----------



## ekim68

Google and Harvard map brain connections in unprecedented detail 



> A browsable 3D map of just one millionth of the cerebral cortex has been created using 225 million images and a whopping 1.4 petabytes of data.





> The human brain is the most ridiculously complex computer that's ever existed, and mapping this dense tangle of neurons, synapses and other cells is nigh on impossible. But engineers at Google and Harvard have given it the best shot yet, producing a browsable, searchable 3D map of a small section of human cerebral cortex.


----------



## ekim68

World's first commercial hydrogen fuel cell ferry is "98% complete" 



> Switch Maritime says its Sea Change ferry is nearly built and ready to go to work in the San Francisco Bay in Q3 this year. Powered by compressed hydrogen gas running through a fuel cell, it'll be the first of its kind, running for two days on a tank.
> 
> The Sea Change is a 72-ft (22-m) passenger ferry, a marine-grade aluminum catamaran capable of carrying 84 passengers. Its twin 300-kilowatt (400-hp) electric motors will propel it to a top speed of 22 knots (25 mph/41 km/h).


----------



## ekim68

Facebook to end special treatment for politicians after Trump ban



> Facebook plans to end its controversial policy that mostly shields politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users, a sharp reversal that could have global ramifications for how elected officials use the social network.


----------



## ekim68

Bitcoin 2021: World's Largest Cryptocurrency Conference Coming To Wynwood



> MIAMI (CBSMiami) - On Wednesday, crews were putting the final touches on the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, the world's largest-ever crypto-currency conference to be held this weekend at the Mana Convention Center in Wynwood.


----------



## ekim68

BYD launches an electric school bus with two-way charging 



> As big diesel-burning behemoths that move slowly through areas crowded with small children, school buses are a type of vehicle that is ripe for electrification. Chinese automotive giant BYD is now lending its expertise to the matter with the launch of a battery-electric bus with innovative bi-directional charging tech that could cut into the carbon footprint of the schools that it services.
> 
> The new Type-D bus from BYD joins the number of electric school buses we've seen over the last few years, from Daimler and Canada's Lion Bus, among others. Available in lengths of 35, 38 and 40 ft (10, 11.5 and 12 m), the eco-friendly student-mover can seat up to 84 and features dual motors powered by a lithium-iron-phosphate battery that allows for 155 miles (250 km) of travel on each charge.


----------



## ekim68

Assistive tech for seniors uses finger-buzzes to prevent falls



> As a senior's sense of balance deteriorates, their chances of experiencing a serious fall increase accordingly. Help may be on the way, however, in the form of a system that buzzes the user's fingertip in order to keep them upright.


* 
*


----------



## ekim68

Denmark parliament approves giant artificial island off Copenhagen



> Plans for an artificial island to house 35,000 people and protect the port of Copenhagen from rising sea levels have been approved by Danish MPs.
> 
> The giant island, named Lynetteholm, would be connected to the mainland via a ring road, tunnels and a metro line.


----------



## ekim68

New tech cheaply produces lithium and H2, while desalinating seawater



> But as with other metals like uranium, land-based lithium reserves pale in comparison to what's out there in the sea. According to researchers at Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), there's about 5,000 times as much lithium in the oceans as there is in land deposits, and a newly developed technology could start extracting it cheaply enough to make the big time - while producing hydrogen gas, chorine gas and desalinated water as a bonus.


----------



## ekim68

How Amazon became an engine for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories



> Search for "vaccines" on Amazon's bookstore, and a banner encourages shoppers to "learn more" about COVID-19, with a link to the Centers for Disease Control. But the text almost vanishes amid the eye-catching book covers spreading out below, many of which carry Amazon's orange "bestseller" badge.


----------



## ekim68

How your phone's low power mode actually works



> Smartphone battery life is a precious resource: If you don't manage it carefully, you might find yourself unable to make calls, take photos, or check social media by the end of the night. A dead phone is pretty much useless until you can find a charging point.
> 
> To extend your phone's battery capacity, Android and iOS both have a special battery-saving mode that helps your handset hang on just a little longer.


----------



## ekim68

1,000-foot multi-rotor floating Windcatchers to power 80,000 homes each



> Norway's Wind Catching Systems (WCS) has made a spectacular debut with a colossal floating wind turbine array it says can generate five times the annual energy of the world's biggest single turbines - while reducing costs enough to be immediately competitive with grid prices.
> 
> Standing more than 1,000 ft (324 m) high, these mammoth Windcatcher grids would deploy multiple smaller turbines (no less than 117 in the render images) in a staggered formation atop a floating platform moored to the ocean floor using established practices from the oil and gas industry.


----------



## ekim68

US PC shipments soar 73% in the first quarter as Apple falls from top spot



> With increased demand from the pandemic, Canalys reports that U.S. PC shipments were up 73% over the same period last year. That added up to a total of 34 million units sold. While Apple had a good quarter with sales up 36%, it was surpassed by HP, which sold 11 million units in total with annual growth up an astonishing 122.6%.


----------



## ekim68

Ultra-high-density hard drives made with graphene store ten times more data



> Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Center have shown.


----------



## ekim68

Ships releasing alkalinizing agents could buy time for Great Barrier Reef 



> The increasing buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reshaping the environment in many ways beyond the ongoing rise of global temperatures. Some major ones relate to the ocean, which is becoming not just warmer but also more acidic, threatening to degrade the world's coral reefs. Researchers have put forward an interesting way of preventing some of this damage, through a study demonstrating how releasing an alkalinizing agent from shipping lanes could protect much of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.


----------



## ekim68

Victory! New York Senate Passes Landmark Right to Repair Bill



> "In passing this bill, the New York Senate proved they're not afraid to stand up to powerful interests by fighting for the rights of all New Yorkers to fix, and truly own, their devices," said Kerry Maeve Sheehan, U.S. policy lead for iFixit. "This is a major win for small repair businesses throughout the state, for the environment, for low income communities, and for everyone who just wants to be able to fix their stuff."


----------



## ekim68

Apple says its new logon tech is as easy as passwords but far more secure



> With passkeys in iCloud Keychain, the iPhone maker joins Microsoft and Google in advocating for passwordless authentication.


----------



## ekim68

Extraordinary new material shows zero heat expansion from 4 to 1,400 K 



> Australian researchers have created what may be one of the most thermally stable materials ever discovered. This new zero thermal expansion (ZTE) material made of scandium, aluminum, tungsten and oxygen did not change in volume at temperatures ranging from 4 to 1400 Kelvin (-269 to 1126 °C, -452 to 2059 °F).
> 
> That's a wider range of temperatures, say scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), than any other material demonstrated to date, and it could make orthorhombic Sc1.5Al0.5W3O12 (catchy name, eh?) a very handy tool for anyone engineering something that needs to work in extremely varied thermal environments.


----------



## ekim68

How the Mormon church unlocked medical pot for deep red states



> Despite the national popularity of legalizing marijuana, 14 states - mostly in the Deep South and the Great Plains - have not embraced it for medical use. Triangulating around growing support and nudged along by the personal touch of its members, the Mormon church helped greenlight a medical marijuana program industry advocates may use to succeed in deeply conservatives places like Idaho or Kansas.


----------



## ekim68

How an Army of Goats Could Help Prevent California Wildfires



> California has unleashed an army of goats to munch away at overgrown brush and grass throughout the state in hopes of reducing the risk of wildfires this summer.


----------



## ekim68

Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down



> Many people who have found fame on TikTok are struggling with mental health issues.


----------



## ekim68

These 5 countries are home to more than half the world's forests



> As scientists and engineers work on technological solutions to capture and store carbon from human activity, our forests store as much as 45% of all carbon on land.
> 
> Yet, just when we need more trees to cut greenhouse gas emissions, a new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN FAO) finds that the world has lost 178 million hectares of forest since 1990. That is an area equivalent to the size of Libya.


----------



## ekim68

"Great resignation" wave coming for companies



> Companies that made it through the pandemic in one piece now have a major new problem: more than a quarter of their employees may leave.


----------



## ekim68

Peruvians re-weave Incan string bridge frayed in pandemic



> LIMA, June 15 (Reuters) - Peruvians from the Huinchiri community in Cusco region are rebuilding a 500-year-old Incan hanging bridge, made using traditional weaving techniques to literally string a crossing together spanning the Apurimac river far below.


----------



## ekim68

Inflation Is Here: Fast Food Bosses Make $5,460 An Hour



> CEOs of the 10 key fast-service restaurants, including *Chipotle Mexican Grill* (CMG), *Restaurant Brands* (QSR) and *McDonald's* (MCD), took home an average paycheck of $11.4 million for 2020. That works out to $5,460 an hour, up roughly 21% from the previous year. Investor's Business Daily analyzed the pay of the 10 top comparable fast-casual restaurants collected by S&P Global Market Intelligence.


----------



## ekim68

Covid doom predictions that never happened



> Unfortunately, many of the bad predictions about COVID-19 came true. The people who saw cases ramping up exponentially, and warned that this was going to be a mass death event, were right, while the people who minimized the threat and waved it away were wrong. And a lot of people are dead because we didn't listen to the former.
> 
> But economic predictions are a different story.


----------



## ekim68

Bombshell Report Finds Phone Network Encryption Was Deliberately Weakened



> A weakness in the algorithm used to encrypt cellphone data in the 1990s and 2000s allowed hackers to spy on some internet traffic, according to a new research paper.
> 
> The paper has sent shockwaves through the encryption community because of what it implies: The researchers believe that the mathematical probability of the weakness being introduced on accident is extremely low. Thus, they speculate that a weakness was intentionally put into the algorithm. After the paper was published, the group that designed the algorithm confirmed this was the case.


----------



## ekim68

Nielsen Now Knows When You Are Streaming



> Nielsen on Thursday announced that it had moved a step closer toward cracking one of the great questions of the modern entertainment world: How big, exactly, is streaming?


----------



## ekim68

The global chip shortage is creating a new problem: More fake components



> From face masks to hand sanitizer and onto vaccine passports: almost all of the products that have been in high demand during the past few months have inevitably provided an opportunity for fraudsters looking to make easy money from counterfeits.
> 
> It is not surprising, therefore, that industry experts are looking at the growing global chip shortage with a degree of anxiety.


----------



## ekim68

California Roars Back: Governor Newsom Announces Largest State Tax Rebate in American History

_



Two-thirds of Californians set to benefit from Golden State Stimulus checks amounting to nearly $12 billion in total - the largest state tax rebate in American history

Click to expand...

_


----------



## ekim68

Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams



> If someone created a flying machine capable of tracking you down by listening for your voice, you might be creeped out.
> 
> But what if you were pinned under a pile of rubble after a natural disaster and first responders couldn't locate you? Maybe then a human-seeking drone wouldn't be such a terrible idea.
> 
> That concept is the focus for engineers at Germany's Fraunhofer FKIE institute, who've built a drone prototype designed to find people by detecting human screams and listening for other signs of distress.


----------



## ekim68

Extorted by ransomware gangs? The payments may be tax-deductible



> As ransomware attacks surge, the FBI is doubling down on its guidance to affected businesses: Don't pay the cybercriminals. But the U.S. government also offers a little-noticed incentive for those who do pay: If you pay a ransom, it may be tax deductible.


----------



## ekim68

New method converts carbon into graphene or diamond in a flash 



> Researchers at Rice University have developed a way to turn carbon from a variety of sources straight into useful forms such as graphene or diamond. The technique uses a "flash" of electricity to heat the carbon, converting it into a final form that's determined by the length of the flash.


----------



## ekim68

A CCTV Company Is Paying Remote Workers in India to Yell at Armed Robbers



> In a short CCTV video, a clerk at a small convenience store can be seen taking a bottle of coffee from a cooler and drinking it. When he returns to the cash register, an unseen person's voice emits from a speaker on the ceiling and interrogates him about whether he scanned and paid for the item.
> 
> In another video, a cashier is standing behind the counter talking to someone just out of frame. There's a 'ding' sound, and the voice from above questions the cashier about who the other man is-he's there to give the cashier a ride at the end of his shift-then orders the man to stand on the other side of the counter.


----------



## ekim68

Stress study shows graying hair is reversible 



> History is littered with anecdotal evidence of the relationship between stress and graying hair, from Marie Antionette's overnight transformation following her capture, to US presidents taking on more salt than pepper during their tenure. A new study has produced first-of-a-kind scientific evidence of this connection, identifying proteins in human hairs that seem to drive this process, while also demonstrating how it might even be reversed.


----------



## ekim68

AI helps restore Rembrandt's Night Watch masterpiece



> Created in 1642 by the Dutch master, the huge picture was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 to fit between two doors in Amsterdam town hall.
> 
> The city's Rijksmuseum has now added the missing scenes from a small, early copy of the original.
> 
> It used artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic Rembrandt's style.


----------



## ekim68

Quantum birds: Shedding light on the mechanism of magnetic sensing in birds



> Humans perceive the world around them with five senses-vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Many other animals are also able to sense the Earth's magnetic field. For some time, a collaboration of biologists, chemists and physicists centered at the Universities of Oldenburg (Germany) and Oxford (UK) have been gathering evidence suggesting that the magnetic sense of migratory birds such as European robins is based on a specific light-sensitive protein in the eye. In the current edition of the journal _Nature_, this team demonstrate that the protein cryptochrome 4, found in birds' retinas, is sensitive to magnetic fields and could well be the long-sought magnetic sensor.


----------



## ekim68

Strategy Analytics: Half the World Owns a Smartphone



> According to new research from Strategy Analytics, half the world's entire population now owns a smartphone in June 2021. Some 4 billion people use a smartphone today. It has taken 27 years to reach this historic milestone.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft's Shareholders Demand Right-to-Repair



> The computer giant's shareholders are demanding it investigate how right-to-repair can build a more sustainable world.


----------



## ekim68

Genome study discovers ancient coronavirus epidemic 20,000 years ago



> An incredible new study, published in the journal _Current Biology_, is presenting evidence to suggest a major coronavirus outbreak struck humans in East Asia around 20,000 years ago. The international team of scientists found distinctive genomic marks indicating local populations faced a long viral epidemic that only finally dissipated a few thousand years ago.


----------



## ekim68

As Stick Shifts Fade Into Obscurity, Collectors See Opportunity



> They're not extinct yet, but the end is coming for stick-shift cars.
> 
> For the 1980 model year, 35 percent of cars produced for sale in the United States had manual transmissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Today, the share is about 1 percent. And just 18 percent of American drivers can drive a stick, according to U.S. News and World Report.
> 
> This relative scarcity has collectors and enthusiasts salivating. They are pushing up the values of late-model sports cars with a clutch pedal and, in the process, creating a new class of collectible cars.


----------



## ekim68

The economics of dollar stores



> A visual explainer of the numbers behind America's ubiquitous bargain-basement chains.


----------



## ekim68

World's first transient pacemaker dissolves in the body after use 



> In a breakthrough that could greatly ease the burden for patients recovering from cardiac surgery, scientists have developed a new type of temporary pacemaker that never needs to be removed. The world-first device does away with lead and batteries in favor of fully biocompatible materials, and is therefore able to harmlessly dissolve in the body once its served its purpose.


----------



## ekim68

Fronius rolls out its first customer SolHub solar-to-hydrogen station 



> Well-respected Austrian solar energy company Fronius has broken ground on its first customer green hydrogen hub, giving us a good look at what it'll take to run a fleet of vehicles on green hydrogen produced entirely on-site using solar panels.


----------



## ekim68

Oklo has a plan to make tiny nuclear reactors that run off nuclear waste



> The face of nuclear energy is changing, and one of the companies working to redefine what nuclear energy looks like is Oklo. The 22-person Silicon Valley start-up has a plan to build mini-nuclear reactors, powered by the waste of conventional nuclear reactors and housed in aesthetically pleasing A-frame structures.


----------



## ekim68

Quantum-computing startup Rigetti to offer modular processors



> Rigetti's computers rely on a technology called a "transmon," which is based on a superconducting wire loop linked to a resonator. It's the same qubit technology used by large competitors like Google and IBM. The state of one transmon can influence that of its neighbors during calculations, an essential feature of quantum computing. To an extent, the topology of connections among transmon qubits is a key contributor to the machine's computational power.


----------



## ekim68

Gas leak responsible for 'eye of fire' in Mexican waters, says oil company



> A blaze on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico resembling a large "eye of fire" has been brought under control, according to Mexico's state oil company Pemex.
> Orange flames resembling molten lava were pictured on social media and dubbed an "eye of fire" on social media because of the blaze's circular shape, as it raged a short distance from a Pemex oil platform.


----------



## ekim68

Thinking about selling your Echo Dot-or any IoT device? Read this first



> Like most Internet-of-things (IoT) devices these days, Amazon's Echo Dot gives users a way to perform a factory reset so, as the corporate behemoth says, users can "remove any... personal content from the applicable device(s)" before selling or discarding them. But researchers have recently found that the digital bits that remain on these reset devices can be reassembled to retrieve a wealth of sensitive data, including passwords, locations, authentication tokens, and other sensitive data.


----------



## ekim68

California tests off-the-grid solutions to power outages



> When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid.
> 
> Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation's largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system.


----------



## ekim68

New study highlights the virality of hate



> A new research article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) doesn't bode well for efforts to fight political extremism and polarization. The paper's authors analyzed 2,730,215 Twitter and Facebook posts published by members of the news media and U.S. Congresspeople, and came to the conclusion that the quickest way to social media success is to attack members of the "out-group."


----------



## ekim68

Audacity Is Being Called Spyware After Privacy Policy Update



> Anyone deciding to download the free and open-source audio editor Audacity is being warned that the software may now class as spyware due to recent updates to its privacy policy.


----------



## ekim68

How big business exploits small business



> Major corporations really want you to know how much they care about small businesses - as long as those small businesses don't compete with them or cause them too much trouble.


----------



## ekim68

America used fewer fossil fuels in 2020 than it has in three decades



> Americans gobbled up fewer fossil fuels in 2020 than they have in three decades, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal dropped by 9 percent last year compared to 2019, the biggest annual decrease since the EIA started keeping track in 1949.


----------



## ekim68

Ever Given: Ship that blocked Suez Canal sets sail after deal signed



> A huge container ship that blocked the Suez Canal in March - disrupting global trade - is finally leaving the waterway after Egypt signed a compensation deal with its owners and insurers.
> 
> The Ever Given weighed anchor shortly after 11:30 local time (09:30 GMT) and headed north towards the Mediterranean escorted by tugs.


----------



## ekim68

Privacy-Focused Tech Companies Call for Ban on Targeted Advertising



> DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, Protonmail and others say "businesses can thrive without privacy-invasive practices" and advertising can be done without spying on users.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous Saildrone maps miles of seafloor in successful maiden voyage



> As it stands, something like 80 percent of the seafloor remains unmapped, despite oceans covering 70 percent of the globe. That would be a lot of terrain for humans to survey, but lately we're seeing how sophisticated, ocean-going robots might do most of the heavy lifting. One particularly interesting example is the Saildrone Surveyor, which has just successfully proved its mapping capabilities across a maiden voyage between San Francisco and Hawaii.


----------



## ekim68

Vinyl Is More Popular Than Ever. Surprisingly, That's a Problem



> Pressing plants can't keep up with unprecedented demand, and big box chains are selling LPs now, resulting in devastating delays.


----------



## ekim68

Lightyear One hits the track for 710-km single-charge test drive 



> In development since 2017, the Lightyear One solar EV made it to the pre-production prototype stage a couple of years later and promised a per-charge range of 725 km (450 miles) on the WLTP cycle. Now the development team has taken its validation prototype to a test track in Germany, where it clocked up 710 km on a single charge of the 60-kWh battery.
> 
> Where the Sion family car from Germany's Sono Motors has solar cells integrated into the hood, roof, doors and rear, the Lightyear One five-seater packs PV panels into its roof and hood only.


----------



## ekim68

Uber and Lyft Can't Find Drivers Because Gig Work Sucks



> Drivers told Motherboard they're never coming back because of horrific working conditions before and during the pandemic.


----------



## ekim68

Barry Diller Headed 2 Hollywood Studios. He Now Says The Movie Business Is Dead



> Barry Diller made his name in the film industry as the chairman and CEO of two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures and what was then 20th Century Fox. Now, he is declaring the industry dead.


----------



## ekim68

Several inhalable COVID-19 vaccines move to human trials



> A new study in the journal _Science Advances _presents the latest research demonstrating the potential effectiveness of an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine is one of several in development designed to be administered through a nasal spray.


----------



## ekim68

'In the End We Felt Betrayed': Vietnamese Veterans See Echoes in Afghanistan]



> Those who continued fighting for South Vietnam in 1975 know what it's like when an American-made military is suddenly left with little support.


----------



## ekim68

Rent prices are soaring as Americans flock back to cities 



> 33 percent rent increases and bidding wars on rentals are the new norm in some parts of America as reopening comes with big price hikes.


----------



## ekim68

EV deal shows 'Lithium Valley' could be for real



> If all goes to plan, General Motors Co.'s future electric cars will rely on batteries made from a broiling-hot, brownish fluid that gushes from the California desert.
> 
> The contours of that future emerged on Friday, when GM struck a deal with a little-known company called Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to supply the country's largest domestic automaker with tons of lithium from a desolate area called the Salton Sea.


----------



## ekim68

Data transmission speed record clocks blistering 319 Terabits per second



> The world record for fastest internet speed has been utterly shattered as Japanese engineers have demonstrated a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s) through optical fibers. The record was set over more than 3,000 km (1,864 miles) of fibers, and is apparently compatible with existing cable infrastructure.
> 
> It's hard to overstate just how incredibly fast that transmission speed is. It's almost twice the previous record of 178 Tb/s, set less than a year ago, and seven times faster than the record before that - 44.2 Tb/s from an experimental photonic chip. NASA gets by with "only" 400 Gb/s, and it absolutely demolishes speeds currently available to consumers: the fastest home internet connections top out at 10 Gb/s in parts of Japan, New Zealand and the US.


----------



## ekim68

United and Mesa to Buy Electric Planes for Short Trips



> The deal for 200 electric aircraft developed by Sweden's Heart Aerospace is the latest bet on new technology to curb emissions


----------



## ekim68

First ever thought-to-speech brain implant successfully trialed 



> After more than a decade of development researchers at UC San Francisco have demonstrated, for the first time, a brain implant turning neural activity into full words. The first participant in the trial, a paralyzed man in his 30s, can now speak with a vocabulary of 50 words by simply thinking about vocalizing words.


----------



## ekim68

Gas Sellers Reaped $11 Billion Windfall During Texas Freeze


----------



## ekim68

US offers $10 million reward for info on state-sponsored hackers disrupting critical infrastructure



> Today's announcement comes after the US has seen an increase in cyber activity targeting its critical infrastructure sectors, including a spike in ransomware incidents. Some of these attacks, such as those on JBS Foods and Colonial Pipeline, impacted US food and fuel supply for days, even creating a small panic among the US population in certain areas.


----------



## ekim68

China Is Pulling Ahead in Global Quantum Race, New Studies Suggest



> When a team of Chinese scientists beamed entangled photons from the nation's Micius satellite to conduct the world's first quantum-secured video call in 2017, experts declared that China had taken the lead in quantum communications. New research suggests that lead has extended to quantum computing as well.


----------



## ekim68

Sea walls might just make floods someone else's problem, study suggests



> Protecting the coasts in the United States from the impacts of climate change comes with a hefty price tag. But new research shows that using sea walls to safeguard land can just make the rising tides a problem somewhere else.


----------



## ekim68

MECCA, How the holy city has changed over the past 100 years



> Central to the Muslim pilgrimage is the Grand Mosque of Mecca which houses the Kaaba, a cube-shaped structure elegantly draped in black silk with verses of the Quran woven into it with gold and silver threads.


----------



## ekim68

Novel nanoparticles react to radiotherapy to kill cancer from within



> Radiation therapy is currently one of the best treatments we have against cancer, but it could benefit from being more targeted to spare healthy cells. Now, researchers in Japan have developed nanoparticles that can penetrate tumors and kill them from within, after being activated by external X-rays.


----------



## ekim68

A Drought So Dire That a Utah Town Pulled the Plug on Growth



> Groundwater and streams vital to both farmers and cities are drying up in the West, challenging the future of development.


----------



## ekim68

World's thinnest magnet is just a single atom thick



> In a breakthrough that could open up exciting new possibilities in computing and electronics, scientists in the US have developed a two-dimensional magnetic material that is the thinnest in the world. The magnet is just a single atom thick and, unlike similar materials developed previously, is able to function at room temperature, which, among other applications, could allow data to be stored at much higher densities.


----------



## ekim68

China unveils new 600 km/h ultra-fast maglev train



> China has produced the first of a new breed of maglev trains capable of speeds up to 600 km/h (373 mph), or nearly half the speed of sound. It says these will be the fastest ground transport services available on the planet.


----------



## ekim68

China Plans to Build the World's First Waterless Nuclear Reactor



> Government researchers in China unveiled their design for a commercial molten salt nuclear reactor that is expected to be the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling, a report by South China Morning Post (SCMP) explains.
> 
> As the reactor won't need water it can be deployed in desert regions, allowing operators to utilize otherwise desolate spaces in order to provide energy for large populations.


----------



## ekim68

Society is right on track for a global collapse, new study of infamous 1970s report finds



> Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn't a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported
> 
> In that report - published in the bestselling book "The Limits to Growth" (1972) - a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization was bound to collapse if corporations and governments continued to pursue continuous economic growth, no matter the costs. The researchers forecasted 12 possible scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and personal welfare would plummet.


----------



## ekim68

Ford's vehicles to offer autonomous ride-hailing through Lyft 



> Back in 2017, Ford made a significant investment in an artificial intelligence startup called Argo that harbored big ambitions in the self-driving vehicle space. The pair are now bringing Lyft into the fold in an effort to deploy autonomous ride-hailing on a commercial scale, with the first rides to take place later this year.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Wants You to Connect With God. On Facebook.



> Facebook, which recently passed $1 trillion in market capitalization, may seem like an unusual partner for a church whose primary goal is to share the message of Jesus. But the company has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ.


----------



## ekim68

RNA breakthrough inspires high-yield, drought-tolerant rice, potatoes



> July 22 (UPI) -- Thanks to a breakthrough in RNA manipulation, crop scientists have developed new potato and rice varieties with higher yields and increased drought tolerance.
> 
> By inserting a gene responsible for production of a protein called FTO, scientists produced bigger rice and potato plants with more expansive root systems.


----------



## ekim68

Nuclear power's reliability is dropping as extreme weather increases



> With extreme weather causing power failures in California and Texas, it's increasingly clear that the existing power infrastructure isn't designed for these new conditions. Past research has shown that nuclear power plants are no exception, with rising temperatures creating cooling problems for them. Now, a comprehensive analysis looking at a broader range of climate events shows that it's not just hot weather that puts these plants at risk-it's the full range of climate disturbances.


----------



## ekim68

Disruptive iron-air grid-scale battery is 10% the cost of lithium



> Boston's Form Energy is building a commercial-scale pilot of a remarkable new grid-scale battery project that could make a huge contribution to long-term energy storage as the world moves away from fossil fuels. These simple iron-air batteries store up to 100 hours of energy at a tenth the cost of a lithium battery farm.


----------



## ekim68

Power regulations cut off select Dell PCs from certain U.S. states



> Better hope you're not an Alienware gamer in California.


----------



## ekim68

The 'world's most powerful tidal turbine' starts to export power to the grid



> A tidal turbine weighing 680 metric tons and dubbed "the world's most powerful" has started grid-connected power generation at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, an archipelago located north of mainland Scotland.
> 
> The news marks another major step forward for the U.K.'s nascent marine energy sector.


----------



## ekim68

48 Advocacy Groups Call on the FTC to Ban Amazon Surveillance



> The open letter uses Amazon as a case study to argue that corporate surveillance technologies cause immense harm and fall under the FTC's authority to ban.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands of scientists warn climate tipping points 'imminent'



> Thousands of scientists have repeated calls for urgent action to tackle the climate emergency, warning that several tipping points are now imminent.
> 
> The researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said in an article published in the journal BioScience on Wednesday that governments had consistently failed to address "the overexploitation of the Earth", which they described as the root cause of the crisis.


----------



## ekim68

As China Boomed, It Didn't Take Climate Change Into Account. Now It Must.



> China's breathtaking economic growth created cities ill-equipped to face extreme weather. Last week's dramatic floods showed that much will have to change.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese hacking group APT31 uses mesh of home routers to disguise attacks



> A Chinese cyber-espionage group known as APT31 (or Zirconium) has been seen hijacking home routers to form a proxy mesh around its server infrastructure in order to relay and disguise the origins of their attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street is buying up family homes. The rent checks are too juicy to ignore



> Housing markets are hotter than ever, and big money is getting in on the act.
> 
> Pension funds, investment firms and Wall Street banks are snapping up family homes in Europe and the United States at a rapid pace as prices rocket higher, looking for alternatives to lockdown-hit office parks and shopping malls, and betting that a permanent increase in remote working following the coronavirus pandemic will keep demand for suburban houses elevated.


----------



## ekim68

Proposed federal standard would require cars to 'prevent or limit operation' by impaired drivers



> A little-noticed provision in the infrastructure deal would mandate new in-car technology to stop drunk driving before it starts


----------



## ekim68

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings



> An Australian Court has decided that an artificial intelligence can be recognised as an inventor in a patent submission.


----------



## ekim68

Worldwide per Capita GDP 



> "In 1990, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty, which was 36% of the world's population at the time. Over the last 30 years, the number has been steadily decreasing - by 2030, an estimated 479 million people will be living in extreme poverty, which according to UN population estimates, will represent only 6% of the population."


* 
*


----------



## ekim68

Young people get their knowledge of tech from TV, not school



> Schools need to do better to compete with media, films and games to be the place where kids learn about tech.


----------



## ekim68

We Tested Ford's BlueCruise Hands-Free Driving and Here's What It's Like



> General Motors got the jump on its rivals when it unveiled Super Cruise back in 2018, taking features like adaptive cruise control and lane centering to new heights with a hands-free mode that only works on certain premapped highways. Now Ford is getting into the hands-free game with its BlueCruise technology suite.
> 
> Is this a case of better late than never? Join us as we take an in-depth look at how BlueCruise works and - based on our seat time in an F-150 and a Mustang Mach-E - what it's like on real American roads.


----------



## ekim68

Russian Disinformation Targets Vaccines and the Biden Administration



> A new campaign appears to be spreading falsehoods about the potential for forced inoculations against Covid-19.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. judge says Florida can't ban cruise ship's 'vaccine passport' program



> Aug 8 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has allowed Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NCLH.N)todemand that passengers show written proof of coronavirus vaccination before they board a ship, dealing a major blow to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's effort to ban "vaccine passports."


----------



## ekim68

Good stuff.. :up:


Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free to all



> The United Kingdom currently has one of the highest rates of open-access publication in the world, with many researchers posting their research papers on websites that make them publicly available for free. But the country's leading funding agency today announced a new policy that will push open access even further by mandating that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read upon publication.


----------



## ekim68

Vodafone latest UK carrier to reintroduce roaming charges in Europe after Brexit



> Vodafone has announced it will reintroduce roaming charges in Europe for UK mobile customers from January next year. It's the latest UK carrier to reintroduce the fees after the country's departure from the European Union, and it follows a similar U-turn from EE in June. All major carriers in the country previously said they had no plans to introduce roaming fees in Europe after the Brexit vote.


----------



## ekim68

TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app



> TOKYO -- A global survey of downloads in 2020 shows TikTok, a video-sharing app developed in China, on top of the list of social media providers for the first time since the study was first conducted in 2018.


----------



## ekim68

Ocean Cleanup's biggest system sweeps into Great Pacific Garbage Patch



> Since it first emerged with the bold vision of cleaning plastics from the seas way back in 2013, the Ocean Cleanup Project has made many tweaks to the design of its trash-catching barriers. The latest might be the most significant one yet, with the team switching from a passive design that relied on the forces of the ocean to one powered by active propulsion, which they see as a far more efficient way forward.


----------



## ekim68

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40



> It is 40 years today since the IBM Model 5150 was unleashed upon the world, creating a tsunami of beige that washed over offices everywhere.
> 
> IBM was famously late to the game when the Model 5150 (or IBM PC) put in an appearance. The likes of Commodore and Apple pretty much dominated the microcomputer world as the 1970s came to a close and the 1980s began. Big Blue, on the other hand, was better known for its sober, business-orientated products and its eyewatering price tags.


----------



## ekim68

The Lucrative Business of Stoking Vaccine Skepticism



> Now, vaccine skeptics with large followings are turning to crowdfunding platforms-both the relatively obscure GiveSendGo and the decidedly mainstream GoFundMe-to monetize their activities, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.


----------



## ekim68

Most of the power sector's emissions come from a small minority of plants



> The world seems to be simultaneously on fire and flooding, and the latest expert report indicates that we've just about run out of time to avoid even more severe climate change. All of that should have us looking for ways to cut carbon emissions as quickly and economically as possible.
> 
> Some good news in that regard came via the recent release of a paper that looks at how much each power plant contributes to global emissions. The study finds that many countries have many power plants that emit carbon dioxide at rates well above either the national or global average. Shutting down the worst 5 percent of this list would immediately wipe out about 75 percent of the carbon emissions produced by electricity generation.


----------



## ekim68

T-Mobile apparently lied to government to get Sprint merger approval, ruling says



> T-Mobile apparently lied to government regulators about its 3G shutdown plans in order to win approval of its merger with Sprint, according to a ruling in a proceeding in front of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The ruling issued Friday ordered T-Mobile "to show cause why it should not be sanctioned by the commission for violating" a CPUC rule with "false, misleading, or omitted statements."


----------



## ekim68

IKEA starts selling renewable energy to households in Sweden



> STOCKHOLM, Aug 17 (Reuters) - IKEA, the world's biggest furniture brand, is branching out into selling renewable energy to households, starting with home market Sweden in September.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo begins work on dedicated Texas hub for self-driving trucks



> Alphabet-owned Waymo is looking to gain a strong foothold in the nascent autonomous freight industry, today announcing plans to build a dedicated hub for its self-driving trucks in the state of Texas. The facility will serve as the company's primary base as it scales up operations across the southern US, and will be designed to support commercial services along some of the region's major thoroughfares.


----------



## ekim68

Rise of cryptocurrencies can be traced to Nixon abandoning gold in 1971



> Few dates in economic history classify as turning points but one of them was 15 August 1971 when Richard Nixon went on TV to announce that the US would no longer exchange dollars held by foreign governments for gold.


----------



## Wino

ekim68 said:


> Rise of cryptocurrencies can be traced to Nixon abandoning gold in 1971


When I was working for a Philippine Gold/Copper Mining operation from mid to late 70's, they offered paying half my wages in gold bullion and held on deposit in Hong Kong Bank. Gold was around $91 oz. then and was near $200 when I left in late 1979. I'm very sad I did not take them up on the offer. However, my savings were earning around 15-18% at the time. Beats todays .05 to .40% !


----------



## ekim68

Sounds like your life story would make a good book..  (As an aside, I was in the Philippines in the early 70's as a sailor..)


----------



## ekim68

The World's Largest Computer Chip



> In the race to accelerate A.I., the Silicon Valley company Cerebras has landed on an unusual strategy: go big.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla unveils Dojo supercomputer: world's new most powerful AI training machine



> At its AI Day, Tesla unveiled its Dojo supercomputer technology while flexing its growing in-house chip design talent.
> 
> The automaker claims to have developed the fastest AI training machine in the world.


----------



## ekim68

THE METHANE HUNTERS



> Frackers in America's largest oil field are letting massive amounts of natural gas spill into the atmosphere. Scientists and activists are trying to find the leaks and get them plugged before they cook the planet further.


----------



## ekim68

Nearly half of the U.S. migrated to IPv6



> Nearly half of the U.S. (48.33%) has migrated to IPv6, ranking the U.S. fourth in percentage of users who have migrated to the latest version of the Internet Protocol. India leads the world, with 61.67% of Indians having adopted IPv6.


----------



## ekim68

Study: Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans



> The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the last 35 years.


----------



## ekim68

Judge dismisses objections to spaceport in Scotland from billionaire who also wants to build spaceport in Scotland



> Scotland has taken another step towards commercial vertical launch capability with the dismissal of objections instigated by Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen.


----------



## ekim68

Japanese scientists produce first 3D-bioprinted, marbled Wagyu beef 



> The world of lab-grown meats is fast filling with all kinds of tasty bites, from burgers, to chicken breasts, to a series of increasingly complex cuts of steak. Expanding the scope of cultured beef are scientists from Japan's Osaka University, who have leveraged cutting-edge bioprinting techniques to produce the first lab-grown "beef" that resembles the marbled texture of the country's famed Wagyu cows.


----------



## ekim68

Alphabet's drones delivered 10,000 cups of coffee and 1,200 roast chickens in the last year



> Google isn't the only company breaking into drone delivery. UPS, Uber and technology giants such as Amazon are also working on drone deliveries, though regulators continue to hash out standards and rules for the industry.


----------



## Wino

ekim68 said:


> Alphabet's drones delivered 10,000 cups of coffee and 1,200 roast chickens in the last year


Anyone paying for drone coffee has to be daft.🤪


----------



## ekim68

World's first mobile MRI machine detects strokes that require surgery



> Last year we learned of an interesting medical device that could play a significant role in expanding access to MRI imaging, by literally placing the technology on wheels. This world-first portable MRI machine proved its potential in early trials, and a new Yale-led study has built on this success by using it to detect cases of stroke in need of surgical intervention, with a high degree of accuracy.


----------



## Wino

ekim68 said:


> World's first mobile MRI machine detects strokes that require surgery


Having had three TIA's since 2012, this is a great improvement in MRI. Particularly under the current over crowding of ER's with covid non-vaxed idiots. I expect the equipment cost savings to hospitals will not be extended to patients.


----------



## ekim68

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years



> On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup soliciting feature suggestions for a free Unix-like operating system he was developing as a hobby.
> 
> Thirty years later, that software, now known as Linux, is everywhere.


----------



## ekim68

Real-world tests show life-saving potential of defibrillator drones



> Drones may prove to be a more expedient means of delivering many items, but a number of research projects have demonstrated that dropping defibrillators off to heart attack victims could have life-saving consequences. A new study from a Swedish team of researchers has now deployed this technology in real-world scenarios for the first time. On average, the unmanned aircraft arrived well ahead of ambulance crews, with the medical device safely in tow.


----------



## ekim68

Fired NY credit union employee nukes 21GB of data in revenge



> Juliana Barile, the former employee of a New York credit union, pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution's computer systems without authorization and destroying over 21 gigabytes of data in revenge after being fired.


----------



## ekim68

The US Space Force's secretive X-37B space plane: 10 surprising facts



> Six X-37B missions have launched to date.


----------



## ekim68

Yahoo is Yahoo once more after new owners complete acquisition



> Say goodbye to Verizon Media


----------



## ekim68

This Room Could Wirelessly Charge All Your Devices



> What if your smartphone or laptop started charging as soon as you walked in the door? Researchers have developed a specially built room that can transmit energy to a variety of electronic devices within it, charging phones and powering home appliances without plugs or batteries.


----------



## ekim68

Take a look at AT&T's 'Flying COWs' - drones that returned cell service to Hurricane Ida-hit Louisiana


----------



## ekim68

A New Navy Weapon Actually Stops You From Talking



> The U.S. Navy has successfully invented a special electronic device that is designed to stop people from talking. A form of non-lethal weapon, the new electronic device effectively repeats a speaker's own voice back at them, and only them, while they attempt to talk.


----------



## ekim68

Climate Change Is Bankrupting America's Small Towns



> FAIR BLUFF, N.C. - It has been almost five years since Hurricane Matthew flooded the small town of Fair Bluff, on the coastal plain of North Carolina. But somehow, the damage keeps getting worse.


----------



## ekim68

Lawsuits say Siri and Google are listening, even when they're not supposed to



> The lawsuits allege the technology is turning on when not activated and using the information for marketing.


----------



## ekim68

How food waste is huge contributor to climate change



> Households squander about 70% of the UK's 9.5m tonnes of waste food every year. About a third of all the world's food goes to waste, and producing, transporting and letting that food rot releases 8-10% of global greenhouse gases. If food waste were a country, it would have the third-biggest carbon footprint after the US and China, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.


----------



## ekim68

Zero-emission freight ship uses swappable containers as its batteries 



> Large container ships that carry goods all over the world are massive sources of pollution, and we've seen some interesting ideas around how to curtail their emissions, such as massive sails and hydrogen powertrains. One Dutch company is turning this type of thinking inward, deploying an innovative battery-swapping container ship on the country's inland shipping routes to take a bite out of the sector's sizable carbon emissions.


----------



## ekim68

The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books



> Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do.


----------



## ekim68

Duck learned to say "You bloody fool," providing scientists new insight into the evolution of vocal language



> It looks like a duck and talks like a duck talking like a human. A duck named Ripper who lives in Australia's Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve learned to say "You bloody fool," providing further evidence to scientists that ducks can imitate human speech.


----------



## ekim68

New efficiency record edges flexible solar cells closer to the mainstream 



> Solar cells fashioned into thin and flexible films might not just open up new possibilities in the generation of renewable energy, but could also drive down manufacturing costs. One team of scientists in Switzerland has been working to bring the technology's efficiency up to the levels offered by rigid solar cells, and have taken another step toward this goal by setting a new record of 21.4 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Animals 'shapeshifting' in response to climate crisis, research finds



> Warm-blooded animals are changing beaks, legs and ears to adapt to hotter climate and better regulate temperature


----------



## ekim68

World's largest direct air capture plant starts absorbing CO2 in Iceland



> An ambitious startup looking to eat into the world's carbon emissions has just taken its biggest bite yet, flicking the switch on the largest direct air capture and CO2 storage plant on the planet. Climework's latest facility is designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it away permanently underground through a pioneering mineralization process, and features a novel modular design that will be key to the company's plans of scaling up.


----------



## ekim68

Harvard study links poor office air quality with reduced cognitive function



> New research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has found a correlation between air quality in office environments and workers' cognitive function. The international study found low ventilation rates and increased levels of particulate matter were linked with reduced performance on cognitive tests.


----------



## ekim68

The Screen in Your Car Is Beckoning



> "Today's infotainment systems can be as distracting-if not more so-than personal electronic devices," says Jennifer Homendy, the newly confirmed chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. The federal government blames distraction for around 10 percent of the 38,680 annual traffic fatalities in the United States, but that's almost certainly an underestimate, since people aren't inclined to admit they were fiddling with a phone or a navigation system prior to a crash.


----------



## ekim68

Spider-Man surpasses Batman and Superman as world's most valuable comic



> The most valuable comic in the world has always been _Action Comics #1_ (the first appearance of Superman and the beginning of the entire superhero genre) … until a few hours ago when a copy of _Amazing Fantasy No. 15_ (the first appearance of Spider-Man) sold for US$3,600,000 at Heritage Auctions. This is big news as it represents tectonic movement within the massive comic collecting industry.


----------



## ekim68

Pro-China misinformation operation attempting to exploit US Covid divisions, report says



> A pro-Chinese government online influence operation is targeting Americans in an effort to exploit divisions over the Covid-19 pandemic and "physically mobilize protestors in the US in response," according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant and experts at Google.
> 
> The operation, which initially attempted to discredit pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, has expanded into a "global campaign that's operating in seven languages, on at least 30 social media platforms and across 40+ website & forums," experts at Mandiant and Google say, noting parallels to the Russian disinformation campaign around the 2016 presidential election.


----------



## ekim68

Students to embark on 3,000-km road trip in "solar house on wheels"



> The Solar Team from TU Eindhoven has built a number of super-efficient, solar-powered vehicles over the years to compete in World Solar Challenges, and has now raised the roof on its latest design. The Stella Vita camper will hit the road later this month for a 3,000-kilometer trip through Europe.


----------



## ekim68

Boeing: Directors to face investor lawsuit over fatal crashes



> Boeing's board of directors must face a lawsuit from shareholders over two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max plane, a US judge has ruled.
> 
> Morgan Zurn said the first crash was a "red flag" about a key safety system on the aircraft "that the board should have heeded but instead ignored".


----------



## ekim68

Apple says motorcycle vibrations can damage iPhone cameras



> Hold off on purchasing that iPhone mount for your motorbike. In a new Apple Support post first seen by _MacRumors_, the tech giant has warned that high amplitude vibrations, "specifically those generated by high-power motorcycle engines" transmitted through handlebars, can damage its phones' cameras.


----------



## ekim68

New York to ban sale of all gas-powered vehicles in the state by 2035



> New York is aiming to ban the sale of all gas-powered vehicles in the state by 2035. A bill amending the state's environmental conservation law was passed by the state's Senate and Assembly and signed by Governor Kathy Hochul last week.
> 
> Under the new law, 100% of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks will have zero emissions by 2035.


----------



## ekim68

Michelin's airless passenger car tires get their first public outing



> Their internal spokes are hugely tunable to meet desired performance characteristics. You can individually tune their stiffness under acceleration, braking, cornering and bump handling forces. The bump handling characteristics can even be tuned to eliminate the need for separate suspension in some types of vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous Fleet concepts set course for Royal Navy's next 50 years 



> The Royal Navy has released an outline of its vision of how its Future Autonomous Fleet will operate over the next half century, including green aircraft carriers, underwater command centers, and robotic warships.


----------



## ekim68

Rivian's first R1T electric pickup truck rolls off the production line 



> The era of the all-electric pickup truck has drawn a great deal closer today, with the very first vehicle rolling off the production line at Rivian's factory in Illinois, as revealed by CEO RJ Scaringe on Twitter. The arrival of the R1T comes just a few years after the EV-startup introduced its first models, and sees Rivian beat a couple of other key players in the space to the punch.


----------



## ekim68

FCC Wants Landlords to Stop Screwing Up Your Internet



> The FCC has announced it's investigating deals the broadband industry strikes with landlords that block broadband competition in apartment complexes, condos, and developments. While the FCC passed rules in 2008 attempting to prevent such deals, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have exploited massive loopholes in the restrictions for more than a decade.


----------



## ekim68

A cave full of ancient Indigenous paintings sold for more than $2 million. The Osage Nation says it belongs to them



> More than 1,000 years ago, Indigenous people journeyed into a dark cave on the land now called Missouri and painted nearly 300 detailed images on its walls.
> 
> The cave was a sacred space, where tribes performed ceremonies, made sense of the universe and buried their dead. A millennium later, the paintings contained within it continue to offer clues about how those civilizations lived and what they believed.
> 
> On Tuesday, Picture Cave -- as it's commonly known -- sold at auction for $2.2 million. And for the Osage Nation, whose ancestors created much of the artwork in the cave, the sale came as a huge blow.


----------



## ekim68

It's getting harder for people to believe that Facebook is a net good for society



> At this point, it isn't exactly surprising that social media platforms like Facebook can have negative effects on society. For years, journalists, politicians, social scientists - and even biologists and ecologists - have been raising concerns about the influence Facebook has on our collective well-being. And Facebook has always defended itself by insisting that it is a net good to society because of how it brings people together.
> 
> But a new series of reports from the Wall Street Journal, "The Facebook files," provides damning evidence that Facebook has studied and long known that its products cause measurable, real-world harm - including on teenagers' mental health - and then stifled that research while denying and downplaying that harm to the public.


----------



## 2twenty2

In Finland, scientists are growing coffee in a lab

https://www.fastcompany.com/90677435/what-if-your-coffee-came-from-a-bioreactor-not-the-bean-belt


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce's all-electric aircraft completes 15-minute maiden voyage



> Rolls-Royce, best known in aviation for its jet engines, has taken an all-electric airplane on its maiden voyage. The "Spirit of Innovation" completed a 15 minute flight, marking "the beginning of an intensive flight-testing phase in which we will be collecting valuable performance data on the aircraft's electrical power and propulsion system," the company announced.
> 
> Rolls Royce said the one-seat airplane has "the most power-dense battery pack every assembled for an aircraft." The aircraft uses a 6,000 cell battery pack with a three-motor powertrain that currently delivers 400kW (500-plus horsepower), and Rolls-Royce said the aircraft will eventually achieve speeds of over 300 MPH.


----------



## ekim68

How Pharmacists Are Dealing With the Surge of Shady Ivermectin Prescriptions



> Last week, a patient entered Rachel Lee's pharmacy in an affluent San Diego neighborhood to ask about his ivermectin prescription. She had braced herself for this moment since her pharmacy started getting calls about the drug's availability.
> 
> "I was like, 'Oh great, here it is. Here's my first one,' " said Lee, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her job at a national chain pharmacy.
> 
> The prescription lacked a diagnosis code, which many pharmacists use to ensure a drug is prescribed for valid medical reasons. The prescribing doctor was licensed outside of the state, in Florida. When she called the doctor's office for more information, an employee said the ivermectin was for prophylactic COVID treatment. Lee turned the patient away.


----------



## ekim68

Sears closes its last department in Illinois, its home state



> Almost one hundred years ago, in 1925, Sears moved beyond its catalog business and opened its first department store in Chicago. Now, the chain's last Illinois department store is shutting its doors.


----------



## ekim68

Factbox: China crackdown wipes hundreds of billions off top companies' values



> SHANGHAI, Sept 13 (Reuters) - China's regulatory crackdown has ensnared sectors from technology to education to property, wiping hundreds of billions off the market capitalisations of some of its largest companies and putting investors on alert over who may be next.


----------



## ekim68

Glow-in-the-dark plants could act as passive lighting for public spaces 



> A decent chunk of energy usage goes towards lighting, so scientists at MIT are developing a new kind of passive lighting - glow-in-the-dark plants. In the latest experiment, the team has made them glow much brighter than the first generation plants, without harming their health.
> 
> The emerging field of "plant nanobionics" involves embedding nanoparticles into plants to give them new abilities. Past work by the MIT team has created plants that can send electrical signals when they need water, spinach that could be used to detect explosives, and watercress that glows in the dark.


----------



## ekim68

Thorens spins out new turntables to tap into the rise of vinyl



> For the last few years, music consumption on vinyl has enjoyed a steady rise and after a bit of a dip during COVID-19 lockdowns last year, vinyl records have registered a 94 percent increase in revenue according to the Mid-Year Music Industry Revenue Report recently released by the Record Industry Association of America - cashing in some US$467 million is sales.
> 
> Of course music streaming shadows vinyl sales by a significant margin (accounting for 84 percent of total revenues and ringing in almost $6 billion during the first six months of this year), but if you're looking to join the vinyl resurgence, hi-fi brand Thorens has released a couple of new turntables to get you in a spin.


----------



## ekim68

The pandemic made our workweeks longer



> The average American's workweek has gotten 10% longer during the pandemic, according to a new Microsoft study published in _Nature Human Behaviour_.


----------



## ekim68

EU plans to legislate for common phone charger despite Apple grumbles



> BRUSSELS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - The European Commission will on Thursday present a legislative proposal for a common charger for mobile phones, tablets and headphones, a person familiar with the matter said - a move likely to affect iPhone maker Apple (AAPL.O) more than its rivals.


----------



## ekim68

Jewel E offers the longest range of any electric double decker bus



> A new entrant has rolled into the electric bus game and might just take things to the next level, taking the shape of a big and bright red people-mover with claims of unparalleled range. The newly introduced Jewel E electric bus boasts the largest battery and longest range of any electric double decker bus in the world, with testing to kick off later this year.
> 
> We're seeing some interesting developments when it comes to electrification of bus transport, from the 40-ft (12-m) behemoth being developed by BYD in China, to long-range versions capable of covering 600 miles (965 km) on a single charge, to the zero-emission school buses taking shape in California. BYD also actually developed the world's first electric double decker bus for use in London, which rolled out in 2016 with a 345-kWh battery pack offering a 190-mile (305-km) range.


----------



## lochlomonder

ekim68 said:


> Thorens spins out new turntables to tap into the rise of vinyl


What a blast from the past. I was a real audiophile back in the day, and Thorens was always known for producing quality turntables. As for me, I stuck with a famed Scottish brand and purchased a Linn Axis turntable as the basis of my system, since the Sondek LP12 was out of my price range.


----------



## ekim68

As an aside, here's a good read about another turntable maker.. 


Fender lets the music spin on with special edition turntable



> Fender has partnered with Mobile Fidelity Electronics (MoFi) for a limited run belt-drive turntable that rocks a design inspired by the Fender Precision Bass and high-end components based on MoFi's award-winning UltraDeck record spinner.


----------



## lochlomonder

ekim68 said:


> As an aside, here's a good read about another turntable maker..
> 
> Fender lets the music spin on with special edition turntable


Nice! What a beautiful finish to the wood, too.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists use AI to create drug regime for rare form of brain cancer in children



> Scientists have successfully used artificial intelligence to create a new drug regime for children with a deadly form of brain cancer that has not seen survival rates improve for more than half a century.
> 
> The breakthrough, revealed in the journal Cancer Discovery, is set to usher in an "exciting" new era where AI can be harnessed to invent and develop new treatments for all types of cancer, experts say.


----------



## ekim68

Lithium-carbon battery lets electric mopeds recharge in 90 seconds



> German outfit Mahle has teamed up with battery-maker Allotrope Energy to put forward a new fast-charging solution for electric vehicles. The duo's novel lithium-carbon battery borrows elements from the world of supercapacitors to deliver charge times that are on par with the refueling process for internal combustion-powered vehicles, and offers a few other environmental benefits while it's at it.
> 
> "Range anxiety is often quoted as the main barrier to electric vehicle adoption, but if the battery could be recharged in the same time it takes to refuel a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle, much of that worry goes away," says Dr Mike Bassett, Mahle Powertrain's Head of Research.


----------



## ekim68

Explorers add 8 miles to world's longest known cave system



> The world's longest known cave system just set a new record after surveyors spent hours mapping an additional 8 miles (13 kilometers) of the passageways at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.
> 
> The corridors at Mammoth Cave now measure a whopping 420 miles (676 km) in length, according to the National Park Service (NPS). That's about the distance between New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina.


----------



## ekim68

Chemical discovery gets reluctant seeds to sprout



> Seeds that would otherwise lie dormant will spring to life with the aid of a new chemical discovered by a UC Riverside-led team.
> 
> Plants have the ability to perceive drought. When they do, they emit a hormone that helps them hold on to water. This same hormone, ABA, sends a message to seeds that it isn't a good time to germinate, leading to lower crop yields and less food in places where it's hot - an increasingly long list as a result of climate change.


----------



## ekim68

Ford recalls Mustang Mach-E over risk of glass roof falling off after mocking Tesla for same issue



> Ford has issued a recall of 5,000 Mustang Mach-E electric SUVs in Canada over a risk of the glass roof and windshield potentially coming loose and falling off.
> 
> Ironically, the automaker mocked Tesla for the same problem just a year ago.


----------



## 2twenty2

India bans shoes at teacher exams after 10 caught with Bluetooth devices in their flip flops

https://torontosun.com/news/world/g...ht-with-bluetooth-devices-in-their-flip-flops


----------



## ekim68

World's biggest clean energy project to power Singapore from Australia 



> A colossal US$22 billion infrastructure project will send Australian sunshine more than 3,100 miles (5,000 km) to Singapore, via high-voltage undersea cables. Opening in 2027, it'll be the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in history.
> 
> Australia's Northern Territory has abundant space and Sun; Singapore is pressed for space, and looking to transition to renewable power. The two could soon be connected in one of the largest and most ambitious renewable energy projects ever attempted.


----------



## ekim68

The Cost of Insuring Expensive Waterfront Homes Is About to Skyrocket



> New federal flood insurance rates that better reflect the real risks of climate change are coming. For some, premiums will rise sharply.


----------



## ekim68

The 20 Fastest Growing Jobs in the Next Decade



> The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predictions


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce plans to stop making gas-powered cars by 2030



> Another major automaker has revealed plans to move entirely to electric vehicles within the next decade. Rolls-Royce is the latest one to make the pledge, following other luxury brands such as Jaguar, Lincoln and Bentley.
> 
> Spectre, Rolls-Royce's first EV (and one that sounds like it's rolling off the set of a James Bond film), will arrive in the last quarter of 2023.


----------



## ekim68

Phone companies must now block carriers that didn't meet FCC robocall deadline



> In a new milestone for the US government's anti-robocall efforts, phone companies are now prohibited from accepting calls from providers that did not comply with a Federal Communications Commission deadline that passed this week. "Beginning today, if a voice service provider's certification and other required information does not appear in the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database, intermediate providers and voice service providers will be prohibited from directly accepting that provider's traffic," the FCC said yesterday.


----------



## ekim68

Google Maps tracks global warming with new "Fire" layer, Tree Canopy tool



> Google Maps is getting a few new features to help people better understand our burning planet. The first is a new "fire" layer in the main map view, which will let you view the exact boundaries of a wildfire just as easily as you can look up the current traffic patterns. Google has done fire information before as part of the "crisis response" website, but with climate change making "Fire Season" a yearly occurrence in dry areas like Australia and the Western US, wildfires will now be a top-level Maps feature.


----------



## ekim68

New insights into how magnetic brain stimulation can improve memory 



> New research led by a team from the University of Glasgow is shedding light on how specifically targeted pulses of magnetic stimulation to the brain can improve episodic memory. The work found inhibiting activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex enhances memory formation.
> 
> The new research arose out of a prior study that delivered unexpected findings. The initial investigation was looking at what goes on in a person's brain when they are trying to voluntarily forget a piece of information. As memory control is known to be influenced by activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the previous study was analyzing whether voluntary forgetting can be enhanced by stimulating that particular brain region.


----------



## ekim68

California DMV gives Cruise and Waymo OK to charge for rides



> The autonomous vehicle developers Cruise and Waymo both got a little closer to running true driverless robotaxi services in and around San Francisco. In May, both Waymo and Cruise applied to the California Department of Motor Vehicles for deployment permits (as opposed to the testing permits that have allowed non-commercial operations). On Thursday, the DMV issued autonomous deployment permits to both companies, which is a necessary step if the robotaxis are to charge passengers for their rides.


----------



## ekim68

The World Wants Greenland's Minerals, but Greenlanders Are Wary



> The island has rare elements needed for electric cars and wind turbines. But protesters are blocking one project, signaling that mining companies must tread carefully.


----------



## ekim68

Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers: the End is Nigh



> Just in time for autumn, a guide to what you need to know about the most polluting form of machinery still in legal use in the US. It won't be for long.


----------



## ekim68

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed as 'whistleblower' behind leaked documents that plunged the company into scandal



> Former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen has been revealed as the source behind tens of thousands of pages of leaked internal company research, which she says show that the company has been negligent in eliminating violence, misinformation and other harmful content from its services, and that it has misled investors about these efforts.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew



> A trove of leaked documents, published by The Wall Street Journal, hints at a company whose best days are behind it.


----------



## ekim68

World's fastest EV charger adds 100 km of range in 3 minutes



> Limiting how long depleted electric vehicles need to be plugged in for will go a long way toward driving their adoption, and bit by bit we are seeing advances that shave valuable minutes off the waiting times. Technology company ABB is making inroads in this area, having just announced what is claimed to be the world's fastest electric vehicle charger, capable of delivering 100 km (62 miles) of range in a matter of minutes.
> 
> ABB's new Terra 360 is billed as the most powerful EV charger in the world, and is positioned as a solution for refueling stations, urban charging stations, retail parking and commercial electric vehicle fleets.


----------



## ekim68

Telegram founder says over 70 mln new users joined during Facebook outage



> (Reuters) - Messaging app Telegram gained over 70 million new users during Monday's Facebook (FB.O) outage, its founder Pavel Durov said on Tuesday, as people worldwide were left without key messaging services for nearly six hours.


----------



## ekim68

The nation's largest public library system is ending late fees forever



> The largest public library system in the country has become the latest to eliminate all late fees.


----------



## ekim68

Google is about to turn on two-factor authentication by default for millions of users



> In May, Google announced plans to enable two-factor authentication (or two-step verification as it's referring to the setup) by default to enable more security for many accounts. Now it's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and Google is once again reminding us of that plan, saying in a blog post that it will enable two-factor for 150 million more accounts by the end of this year.


----------



## ekim68

Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest



> The Mycelium Mesh Project is testing DIY networks that can be quickly deployed on trees or lamp posts during a political uprising.


----------



## ekim68

Can We Suck Up Enough CO2 to Cool the Planet?



> Klaus Lackner's lab at Arizona State University looks as if an artificial Christmas tree exploded. Seemingly every surface is covered by white shreds of material, some small, some large, some slim, some thick. They look like plastic, but have the feel of stiff leather. And they are, according to Lackner, the head of the university's Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, our best hope for avoiding catastrophic climate change.
> 
> Lackner's resin strips absorb carbon dioxide when they're dry and release it when they're wet. In cooperation with the Dublin-based company Carbon Collect and his colleagues at Arizona State, he wants to build an artificial forest in the desert: 1,200 CO2-eating columns, each up to 30 feet tall, that could capture 100 tons of carbon dioxide per day - the equivalent of sucking up the emissions of about 8,000 cars. The white shreds will form the leaves of the "mechanical trees," passively absorbing CO2 as the wind passes through them.


----------



## ekim68

Google and YouTube will cut off ad money for climate change deniers



> Advertisers, publishers, and YouTube creators can no longer monetize content that denies the existence of climate change


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft: Russia behind 58% of detected state-backed hacks



> BOSTON (AP) - Russia accounted for most state-sponsored hacking detected by Microsoft over the past year, with a 58% share, mostly targeting government agencies and think tanks in the United States, followed by Ukraine, Britain and European NATO members, the company said.


----------



## ekim68

Norway to hit 100 per cent electric vehicle sales early next year



> Analysis shows the last new petrol or diesel car sold in Norway will come as early as April, 2022 - three years ahead of the government's target.


----------



## ekim68

136 countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate after Ireland drops its opposition



> A group of 136 countries have agreed to a global treaty that would tax large multinationals at a minimum rate of 15% and require companies to pay taxes in the countries where they do business.


----------



## ekim68

A rare feat: Material protects against both biological and chemical threats



> A Northwestern University research team has developed a versatile composite fabric that can deactivate both biological threats, such as the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and chemical threats, such as those used in chemical warfare. A material that is effective against both classes of threats is rare.


----------



## ekim68

Climate change is making Texas hotter, threatening public health, water supply and the state's infrastructure



> Climate data also show that the state is experiencing extreme rainfall - especially in eastern Texas - bigger storm surges as seas rise along the Gulf Coast and more flooding from hurricanes strengthened by a warming ocean, the report says.
> 
> Those trends are expected to accelerate in the next 15 years, according to the report, which analyzes extreme weather risks for the state and was last updated in 2019.


----------



## ekim68

'Stalkerware' Apps Are Proliferating. Protect Yourself.



> These spyware apps record your conversations, location and everything you type, all while camouflaged as a calculator or calendar.


----------



## ekim68

FBI: Killings soared nearly 30 percent in 2020, with more slayings committed with guns



> Killings in the United States jumped nearly 30 percent last year, according to FBI data released Monday that indicates a growing number of gun-related slayings during the pandemic.
> 
> The FBI said murder and manslaughter rose 29.4 percent - the largest one-year increase since the federal government began compiling national figures in the 1960s.


----------



## grandma77

ekim68 said:


> The nation's largest public library system is ending late fees forever


what will they do if people don't return books/other items?


----------



## ekim68

Germany unveils first self-driving train



> German rail operator Deutsche Bahn and industrial group Siemens on Monday unveiled the world's first automated, driverless train in the city of Hamburg, billing it as more punctual and energy efficient than traditional trains.
> 
> Four such trains will join the northern city's S-Bahn rapid urban rail network and start carrying passengers from December, using the existing rail infrastructure.


----------



## ekim68

Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web



> From sex to free speech, what goes online is increasingly up to financial companies


----------



## ekim68

Why does the internet keep breaking?



> I doubt Mark Zuckerberg reads the comments people leave on his Facebook posts.
> 
> But, if he did, it would take him approximately 145 days, without sleep, to wade through the deluge of comments left for him after he apologised for the meltdown of services last week.


----------



## ekim68

Volocopter's massive cargo drone lifts off in public for the first time 



> Since introducing the VoloDrone in 2019, Volocopter has carried out regular test flights in closed airfields around Germany. Like the Volocopter itself, the giant drone uses 18 rotors, a battery and electric motors to hoist itself into the air, using a rail attachment system in between its landing gear to carry payloads of up to 200 kg (440 lb) over a 40-km (24-mile) range.


----------



## ekim68

20 Years Later, Xbox Creator Apologizes To AMD CEO For Last-Minute Switch To Intel - "Pure Politics"



> The original Xbox was released 20 years ago next month, and to mark the upcoming anniversary, the console's designer has apologized to AMD's engineers and its CEO for Microsoft's last-minute decision to drop AMD for rival Intel.


----------



## ekim68

Zephyr S pseudo-satellite drone hits record altitude of 76,100 ft



> Airbus' high-endurance stratosphere drone, the Zephyr S, has set a new altitude record for an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) in its class, soaring to 76,100 ft (23,915 m) in the skies over Arizona during two flights totaling 36 days aloft.
> 
> The latest test flights of the solar-powered High Altitude Platform System (HAPS) were aimed at not only setting new records, but also the more practical goals of moving the Zephyr S to operational status.


----------



## ekim68

An Empire of Dying Wells



> Old oil and gas sites are a climate menace. Meet the company that owns more of America's decaying wells than any other.


----------



## ekim68

People talk about the cost of that big federal bill but don't know what's in it. So we'll tell you



> The most glaring flaw in media coverage of Washington is that it focuses heavily on process and seldom on substance. That's certainly been the case with coverage of the Build Back Better Act, the comprehensive reform package now being dickered over on Capitol Hill.
> 
> If you're following the debate via the news, you probably have heard about the measure's overall price tag, most often placed at $3.5 trillion; the media aren't always careful to specify that that's the estimate of spending over 10 years.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. pursues a unique solution to fight hackers. It revolves around esports.



> As the United States seeks to shore up its defenses against cyberattacks, the country is seeking to harness the skills of some of the country's most promising young minds using a model that mirrors competitive video gaming, also known as esports.


----------



## ekim68

Radiant aims to replace diesel generators with small nuclear reactors



> California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water.


----------



## ekim68

Fisher Price's Iconic Toy Telephone Now Actually Makes Phone Calls



> As companies trip over themselves to get retro toys back on shelves for nostalgic adults, Fisher-Price is taking a different route. Its iconic Chatter Telephone has been enjoyed by toddlers for 60 years now, and to celebrate that anniversary, Mattel has turned the toy into a fully-functional smartphone accessory that can actually be used to place or take phone calls.


----------



## ekim68

12 Predictions for the Future of Music



> Let me peer into my crystal ball, and predict the next decade in music. I'm brave (or foolhardy) enough to tell you what I see-but you may want to sit down first. If you earn your living from music, some of these changes might come as a shock.
> 
> But don't blame me, I'm merely the messenger. It's the bloody crystal ball that's cranky.


----------



## ekim68

Flexible alloy prevents steel corrosion and repairs itself when damaged



> Scientists at Rice University have cooked up a new alloy with a unique and diverse set of attributes that could prove highly effective at protecting steel from corrosion. The novel coating not only prevented rusting in submerged slabs of common steel, but is flexible and proved capable of healing itself when damaged.
> 
> The new anti-corrosion coating is made of a lightweight sulfur-selenium alloy, and according to the material scientists behind it, combines desirable qualities from currently available solutions. This means an ability to block moisture and chlorine like zinc- and chromium-based coatings, an ability to protect steel under seawater-like conditions like polymer-based coatings, and an ability to fend off microbe-induced corrosion.


----------



## ekim68

The Amazon's Little Tipping Points



> Some scientists fear we are nearing a point of no return in the Amazon rainforest, which exerts power over the carbon cycle like no other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Evidence is mounting that in certain areas, localized iterations of irreversible damage may already be happening. Reuters has tracked three decades-long observations of the region to give a real-world view of degradation once only predicted by computer simulations.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk's Boring Company gets green light for Las Vegas tunnel system



> Elon Musk's Boring Company just won approval from local officials to move forward with building a network of vehicle tunnels underneath Las Vegas. Dubbed the "Vegas Loop," the system will allow passengers to hitch rides in Teslas to and from places like the hotel casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, the city's new football stadium, the Las Vegas Convention Center, and McCarran International Airport.


----------



## ekim68

Vinyl Is Selling So Well That It's Getting Hard to Sell Vinyl



> Left for dead in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry's most popular and highest-grossing physical format. Getting them manufactured, however, is increasingly a challenge.


----------



## ekim68

Ocean Cleanup moves beyond testing and outlines a system 3x the size



> Having only just returned from a trial campaign that yielded massive hauls of plastic waste, the Ocean Cleanup Project is now moving beyond testing and kicking off its first operational mission. This will involve redeploying its System 002 collection barrier while simultaneously developing an even larger one, fleets of which it says will eat up 50 percent of Great Pacific Garbage Patch every five years.


----------



## ekim68

The animals that may exist in a million years, imagined by biologists



> Fully aquatic whale-rats. Praying mantises the size of dogs. Scientists imagine the future evolution of life on Earth.


----------



## ekim68

How Long Can We Play?



> And what does that question even mean to you? Inside the quest to prolong athletic mortality.


----------



## ekim68

Chinese EV maker Xpeng touts flying car that can also operate on roads; plans for 2024 rollout



> GUANGZHOU, China - HT Aero, an affiliate of Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng, publicized a flying car on Sunday that it says can also drive on roads.
> 
> The company says it plans a rollout in 2024. The car is not yet commercially available.


----------



## ekim68

This Alaskan Air Base Will Host An Experimental Mini Nuclear Reactor



> The U.S. Air Force recently announced that it has picked Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska as the base to host a new small nuclear reactor as part of a pilot program. The U.S. military, as a whole, together with the Department of Energy has been increasingly looking into micro-reactor designs as possible ways to meet ever-growing electricity demands, including for units on the battlefield, as well as to help cut costs and improve general operational efficiency by reducing reliance on fossil fuels.


----------



## ekim68

Hertz aims to have largest EV rental fleet in North America by end of 2022 



> For many business travelers, the first item on the agenda after clearing passport control is to secure a rental car. Hertz is looking to give such folk easier access to electric vehicle hire, confirming an initial order of 100,000 Tesla Model 3s.


----------



## ekim68

The 'Dune' Screenplay Was Written in MS-DOS



> Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.
> 
> In the brutal future of Frank Herbert's _Dune_, computers are outlawed and high level computations are done by specially trained and bred humans called mentats. In Herbert's world, there's something elegant about old solutions to new problems. Good then that Oscar winning _Dune_ screenwriter Eric Roth banged out the screenplay using the MS-DOS program Movie Master.


----------



## ekim68

Unique Aussie box-wing eVTOL promises radical efficiency and huge range



> Australian company AMSL Aero is preparing to start flight tests on what it claims will be the world's most efficient eVTOL design, and one of the most affordable. This box-wing beauty, the Vertiia, will travel up to 1,000 km (620 miles) on a tank of hydrogen, carrying five people or 500 kg (1,100 lb) of cargo at a quick cruise speed of 300 km/h (186 mph).


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> Hertz aims to have largest EV rental fleet in North America by end of 2022


More on this: 
Uber partners with Hertz to offer 50,000 Tesla rentals to U.S. ride-hail drivers


----------



## ekim68

Apple's Privacy Rules to Blame for Facebook's Lower Than Expected Quarterly Growth, Says Zuckerberg



> Apple's privacy rules are "negatively affecting" Facebook, and its business, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed during its most recent earnings call.


----------



## ekim68

Finnish scientists create 'sustainable' lab-grown coffee



> Latte drinkers may in the future be sipping on java sourced from a petri dish rather than a plantation, say scientists behind a new technique to grow what they hope to be sustainable coffee in a lab.
> 
> "It's really coffee, because there is nothing else than coffee material in the product," Heiko Rischer tells AFP, pointing to a dish of light brown powder.


----------



## ekim68

Already, 18 weather disasters costing at least $1 billion each have hit the U.S. this year



> This year is on pace to be one of the most active and costliest years for disasters in the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft to work with community colleges to fill 250,000 cyber jobs



> Oct 28 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) on Thursday said it plans to work with community colleges across the United States to fill 250,000 cybersecurity jobs over the next four years.


----------



## ekim68

Location Data Firm Got GPS Data From Apps Even When People Opted Out



> Huq, an established data vendor that obtains granular location information from ordinary apps installed on people's phones and then sells that data, has been receiving GPS coordinates even when people explicitly opted-out of such collection inside individual Android apps, researchers and Motherboard have found.
> 
> The news highlights a stark problem for smartphone users: that they can't actually be sure if some apps are respecting their explicit preferences around data sharing.


----------



## ekim68

Are We on the Verge of Chatting with Whales?



> An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.


----------



## ekim68

A Colorado Firm Claims It Can Triple the Power of Electric Engines



> The team started from scratch, looking at the various components of the electric motor. Comprised of a gearbox, a power delivery system, and a main motor, these components are usually housed separately to allow sufficient cooling space, without which could result in engine failure.
> 
> However, using advances in material science and electronics, coupled with the ability to 3D-print structures such as copper, the team managed to put all components together into a single housing that weighs just 33 pounds (15 kg) without impacting their cooling needs.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla Sentry Mode live camera on mobile also has a talkback-to-vandal feature



> Tesla released a new car safety & security feature earlier this week that enables Tesla owners to remotely view what's happening around their vehicles in real-time using their mobile phones. This feature is called Sentry Mode Live Camera Access (read release notes & requirements).


----------



## ekim68

Apple's Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect



> OAKLAND, Calif - Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers, AirPod wireless headphones with longer battery life and HomePod Mini speakers in three more colors.
> 
> But a different and unheralded Apple release is garnering so much interest that it has become the company's most back-ordered new product: a $19, 6.3-by-6.3-inch cloth to wipe smudges and fingerprints off screens.


----------



## ekim68

Scammers Are Using Fake Job Ads to Steal People's Identities 



> From Facebook to LinkedIn to Indeed, ads are popping up that promise well-paying jobs - if applicants provide their Social Security numbers and other details up front. Scammers then use the information to apply for unemployment benefits.


----------



## ekim68

High-speed laser writing method could pack 500 terabytes of data into CD-sized glass disc



> WASHINGTON - Researchers have developed a fast and energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass. These tiny structures can be used for long-term five-dimensional (5D) optical data storage that is more than 10,000 times denser than Blue-Ray optical disc storage technology.


----------



## ekim68

The US Copyright Office just struck a blow supporting the right to repair



> The US Copyright Office is expanding a legal shield for fixing digital devices, including cars and medical devices. This morning, the office submitted new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars breaking software copy protection. The resulting rules include a revamped section on device repair, reflecting renewed government pressure around "right to repair" issues.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is letting non-Tesla EVs use its Supercharger network for the first time



> Tesla launched a pilot project in the Netherlands this week in which non-Tesla electric vehicles will be allowed to use its Supercharger network, representing the first time that the automaker is opening up its proprietary charging stations to EVs from other companies.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce plans to stop making gas-powered cars by 2030



> Another major automaker has revealed plans to move entirely to electric vehicles within the next decade. Rolls-Royce is the latest one to make the pledge, following other luxury brands such as Jaguar, Lincoln and Bentley.


----------



## ekim68

Super-efficient linear compressor could vastly reduce air con power use



> So compressor efficiency is set to be a very big deal in the coming decades, and by proxy, that makes Magtor's Magtorpressor a device worth looking into - because this Maltese company claims its demonstrator units are already delivering 90 percent more pressure than the average air compressor for the same power consumption, and some 29 percent more than the best current devices on the market.
> 
> How? Well, Magtor does away with the rotating crank and piston assembly used by today's standard reciprocating designs, replacing it with a much simpler linear oscillating design capable of compressing air in both directions as it moves back and forth.


----------



## ekim68

Can ocean cleanup boats power themselves by turning plastic into fuel?



> With the amount of plastic swirling around in the ocean, wouldn't it be handy if the boats charged with cleaning it up could use the trash to fuel their own operations? A new study has crunched the numbers on such an approach and found that ships carrying reactors to convert the waste into "blue diesel" could indeed power themselves, which would reduce the need for trips back to shore and the associated burning of fossil fuels.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo will start operating in New York City



> Much of Waymo's self-driving vehicle use has largely focused on warm climates, but it's about to give those machines a harsher trial. Waymo will start driving its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica vans in New York City on November 4th. This and a later wave of Jaguar I-Pace EVs will rely on human drivers to map streets and learn from the environment, and there aren't any immediate plans to offer driverless rides to passengers. However, Waymo clearly hopes to use this knowledge for its long-term autonomy goals in various cities.


----------



## ekim68

A little nostalgia: 


The high cost of software in the 1980s…


----------



## ekim68

Traditional Samoan plant rivals anti-inflammatory effects of ibuprofen



> Researchers have identified the anti-inflammatory mechanism behind a plant used for centuries in traditional Samoan medicine. The new study found the plant, known as matalafi, is as effective at reducing inflammation as ibuprofen.


----------



## ekim68

New report shows that 10 Facebook pages are responsible for 69% of climate denial posts



> A new report from the Center For Countering Digital Hate analyzed nearly 7,000 top-performing climate denial Facebook posts from the last year, and found that 69% of them came from the same 10 pages:


----------



## ekim68

Coal could find new use in eco-friendly desalination tech



> The burning of coal may be falling out of favor as a means of generating heat and electricity, but that doesn't mean the material no longer has any valuable uses. According to a new study, it could be utilized in the desalination of seawater.
> 
> In a project led by Assoc. Prof. Andrea Fratalocchi, a team at Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) explored the use of a material known as carbonized compressed powder (CCP). It is created by grinding coal or charcoal into a powder, then compressing that powder back into a solid which is more porous than the original material - it can also be molded to a desired shape.


----------



## ekim68

Missing N.C. teen found after using TikTok hand sign alerting she was in danger



> The 16-year-old girl used hand signals known "to represent violence at home - I need help - domestic violence," authorities said.


----------



## ekim68

Debate over daylight saving time drags on in Europe



> LONDON -- This week could have been the first time that Europe did not have to observe the seasonal time change since it came into law across the region nearly two decades ago.


----------



## ekim68

The Demand for Money Behind Many Police Traffic Stops



> Busted taillights, missing plates, tinted windows: Across the U.S., ticket revenue funds towns - and the police responsible for finding violations.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Trafficking of plastic waste is on the rise and criminal groups are profiting



> WASHINGTON -
> Americans like to think they are recycling their plastic takeout food containers, cutlery and flimsy grocery bags when they toss them into those green or blue bins. But, too often, that waste is shipped overseas, sometimes with the help of organized crime groups, where it litters cities, clogs waterways or is burned, filling the air with toxic chemicals.


----------



## ekim68

Portugal makes it illegal for your boss to text you after work in 'game changer' remote work law



> Under the new rules, employers could face penalties for contacting workers outside of office hours. Companies will also have to help pay for expenses incurred by remote working, such as higher electricity and internet bills.
> 
> But the amendments to Portugal's labour laws have limits: they will not apply to companies with fewer than ten employees.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce gets funding to develop mini nuclear reactors



> Rolls-Royce has been backed by a consortium of private investors and the UK government to develop small nuclear reactors to generate cleaner energy.


----------



## ekim68

Mobile H2O generator pulls drinking water from air for off-grid nomads



> For over a decade, Israeli atmospheric water generator (AWG) company Watergen has been one of the players working to refine and grow air-to-water technology that can efficiently pull water vapor out of the air and collect it as fresh, filtered drinking water. Its previous work has focused heavily on large installations to supply communities, businesses and households, and its latest innovations shrink the water-harvesting tech into a form portable enough for overlanders, RVers, tiny home dwellers and other off-grid explorers.


----------



## ekim68

Google Caught Hackers Using a Mac Zero-Day Against Hong Kong Users



> Google researchers caught hackers targeting users in Hong Kong exploiting what were at the time unknown vulnerabilities in Apple's Mac operating system. According to the researchers, the attacks have the hallmarks of government-backed hackers.
> On Thursday, Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the company's elite team of hacker hunters, published a report detailing the hacking campaign.


----------



## ekim68

Why this $500,000 Apple-1 Computer was a bargain



> One of the first personal computers ever sold - a 1976 Apple-1 - fetched US$500,000 at auction yesterday, but it might well be one of the auction bargains of the year.
> 
> The beautifully restored, fully-functioning 1976 computer is one of just six fully-assembled Apple-1 computers sold by Californian computer store, The Byte Shop. It was sold exactly as it appears above, with a Panasonic monitor and Datanetics keyboard in an enclosure of Hawaiian koa wood.


----------



## ekim68

The Truth About Those Dollar Stores



> Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree are billion-dollar brands taking over the discount/value retail space, as the category is called, and are sweeping the country. About 75 percent of us live within 5 miles of one of Dollar General's 17,683 stores, the company says. Only about 60 percent of us live that close to a hospital.


----------



## ekim68

Zombie river? London's Thames, once biologically dead, has been coming back to life



> In 1858, sewage clogging London's Thames River caused a "Great Stink." A century later, parts of the famed waterway were declared biologically dead.
> 
> But the latest report on "The State of the Thames" is sounding a surprisingly optimistic note.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea tests system for controlling air taxis



> SEOUL, Nov 11 (Reuters) - South Korea demonstrated a system for controlling urban air mobility vehicles (UAM) on Thursday, which it hopes will serve as taxis between major airports and downtown Seoul as soon as 2025, cutting travel time by two-thirds.
> 
> Last year, South Korea announced a roadmap to begin commercial urban air travel by 2025. The transport ministry estimates such services could cut travel time for distances between 30-50km (19-31 miles) from an hour by car to 20 minutes by air.


----------



## ekim68

Natural gas customers in Texas get stuck with $3.4 billion cold-snap surcharge



> Texans will be paying for the effects of last February's cold snap for decades to come, as the state's oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm.
> 
> The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years.


----------



## ekim68

The Quiet Scientific Revolution That May Solve Chronic Pain



> Chronic pain is both one of the world's most costly medical problems, affecting one in every five people, and one of the most mysterious. In the past two decades, however, discoveries about the crucial role played by glia - a set of nervous system cells once thought to be mere supports for neurons - have rewritten chronic pain science.
> 
> These findings have given patients and doctors a hard-science explanation that chronic pain previously lacked. By doing so, this emerging science of chronic pain is beginning to influence care - not by creating new treatments, but by legitimizing chronic pain so that doctors take it more seriously.


----------



## ekim68

Russia may have just shot down its own satellite, creating a huge debris cloud



> The seven astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station sheltered inside their respective spacecraft, a Crew Dragon and Soyuz, on Monday morning as the orbiting laboratory passed through an unexpected debris field.
> 
> This was not a pre-planned collision avoidance maneuver in low Earth orbit, in which the station would use onboard propulsion to move away. Rather, the situation required the astronauts to quickly take shelter.


----------



## ekim68

More on that....


NASA chief Bill Nelson condemns Russian anti-satellite test 



> NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has condemned a Russian anti-satellite test on Monday (Nov. 15) that put the International Space Station at risk of colliding with the resulting debris.


----------



## ekim68

Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than it does on TVs themselves



> In the simplistic account of what many call "surveillance capitalism," the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."


----------



## ekim68

Crypto nerds are trying to buy the U.S. Constitution, because of course they are



> On Thursday, November 18, Sotheby's is auctioning off "an exceptionally rare and extraordinarily historic" first printing of the U.S. Constitution. Only thirteen copies remain, besides the one located in Washington D.C.'s National Archives museum, from the original printing of 500 that the founders issued for submission to the Continental Congress. It's the first time in 30 years that this one has become available for purchase, following the 1997 death of its last winner, New York real estate developer S. Howard Goldman. It's expected to fetch between $15 million and $20 million in the auction-unless, of course, it instead fetches the equivalent in Ethereum.


----------



## ekim68

Liquid-to-vapor-cooled cable beats the heat for 5-minute EV charging



> Limiting how long electric vehicles need to be plugged in for before returning to the road is an important factor in driving their adoption, and much research focuses on reducing these charging times. A new advance leverages an alternative cooling technology to take the heat out of the charging cable, allowing it to handle the type of current needed to charge up an electric car in under five minutes.


----------



## ekim68

No, the real inflation rate isn't 15 percent



> Jordan Peterson and Jack Dorsey are touting a bogus theory about the inflation rate.


----------



## ekim68

The end of "click to subscribe, call to cancel"? One of the news industry's favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says



> Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the call-to-cancel policy ranged from "an annoyance" and "ridiculous" to "shady" and "oppressive."


----------



## ekim68

Russian ransomware gangs start collaborating with Chinese hackers



> There's some unusual activity brewing on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, where hackers appear to be reaching out to Chinese counterparts for collaboration.
> 
> These attempts to enlist Chinese threat actors are mainly seen on the RAMP hacking forum, which is encouraging Mandarin-speaking actors to participate in conversations, share tips, and collaborate on attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Space Force satellite jammers would shut down enemy communications temporarily



> WASHINGTON - U.S. military officials and analysts have warned that China and Russia are building an arsenal of weapons designed to interfere with space-based capabilities of the United States.
> 
> The United States meanwhile is building its own capabilities to counter enemies' space assets. Most of those systems are classified but the Space Force has made public its plans to deploy advanced electronic jammers to disrupt enemies' satellite communications signals.


----------



## ekim68

Starbucks links with Amazon Go for first cashier-less cafe



> NEW YORK, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Starbucks Corp's (SBUX.O) newest cafe lacks one element most customers are used to seeing: cashiers.
> 
> The global coffee chain on Thursday opened its first ever location in partnership with Amazon Go (AMZN.O), the e-commerce giant's brick-and-mortar convenience store, where customers can sit at a table with a latte or grab a sandwich from a shelf and walk out.


----------



## ekim68

Visualizing the Race for EV Dominance



> Tesla has reigned supreme among electric car companies, ever since it first released the Roadster back in 2008.
> 
> The California-based company headed by Elon Musk ended 2020 with 23% of the EV market and recently became the first automaker to hit a $1 trillion market capitalization. However, competitors like Volkswagen hope to accelerate their own EV efforts to unseat Musk's company as the dominant manufacturer.


----------



## ekim68

First electric autonomous cargo ship launched in Norway



> Zero emissions and, soon, zero crew: the world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, a small but promising step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint.
> 
> By shipping up to 120 containers of fertilizer from a plant in the southeastern town of Porsgrunn to the Brevik port a dozen kilometres (about eight miles) away, the much-delayed Yara Birkeland, shown off to the media on Friday, will eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fuelled by polluting diesel.


----------



## 2twenty2

Some Tesla owners unable to unlock cars due to server errors

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...s-unable-to-unlock-cars-due-to-server-errors/


----------



## ekim68

Ford plans to produce 600,000 EVs a year by the end of 2023



> Ford has ambitions to become the biggest US-based EV manufacturer someday, and that means greatly ramping up its production. Company CEO Jim Farley has announced that the automaker is planning to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year by the end of 2023, which will double the number of EVs it originally intended to manufacture. According to _Automotive News_, production will be spread across the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning and E-Transit.


----------



## ekim68

Sci-Hub: Researchers File Intervention Application To Fight ISP Blocking



> Last December, academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit demanding that Indian ISPs block access to Sci-Hub and Libgen for copyright infringement. The ongoing case now includes an intervention application from a group of social science researchers who say that blocking the platforms would result in a great societal loss to the country.


----------



## ekim68

Will Real Estate Ever Be Normal Again?



> In Austin, Texas, and cities around the country, prices are skyrocketing, forcing regular people to act like speculators. When will it end?


----------



## ekim68

Welcome to the golden age of scammers



> Everything is a grift nowadays.
> 
> There are individual scammers, sure, and there always have been: the Billy McFarland's of the see-and-be-seen party circuit, or the Bernie Madoffs of the world of wealth management (or mismanagement). Yet increasingly the headline-making cons of the moment seem like full-fledged cosmologies - personal, professional and political belief systems. And the adherents are trying to fool others even as they fool themselves.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce's electric plane hits 387 mph to lay claim as world's fastest



> An aircraft developed by Rolls-Royce to smash the speed record for an all-electric plane looks to have done just that, within three years of the being announced. The Spirit of Innovation took to the skies at a UK Ministry of Defence testing site last week were it reached a maximum speed of 623 km/h (387.4 mph), which Rolls-Royce says not only makes it the fastest electric aircraft, but the world's fastest electric vehicle of any kind.


----------



## ekim68

Rooftop solar helps send South Australia grid to zero demand in world first



> South Australia on Sunday became the first gigawatt scale grid in the world to reach zero demand when the combined output of rooftop solar and other small non-scheduled generators exceeded all the local customer load requirements.
> 
> The landmark event was observed by several energy analysts, including at Watt Clarity and NEMLog, where Geoff Eldridge noted that a number of measures for South Australia demand notched up record minimums for system normal conditions.


----------



## ekim68

Intel's chip recovery plan could restore US manufacturing prowess 



> The chipmaker's come-from-behind strategy is risky and will take years, even with government subsidies.


----------



## ekim68

Norway Is Running Out of Gas-Guzzling Cars to Tax



> The oil producing nation is learning what happens after a country fills its roads with electric vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

DroneDek mailbox designed to securely accept deliveries-by-drone 



> As a package-carrying delivery drone approached the client's house, it would home in on the exact GPS coordinates being transmitted by the DroneDek box itself. Upon reaching that location, the hovering aircraft would then transmit an encrypted security code to the box, which would slide open its motorized top loading door in response.
> 
> The drone would then lower the package into the box, using a retractable tether. Once the package was in place and the tether was out of the way, the loading door would close and lock. And while the drone _could_ simply turn around and fly back to its base, it could also land on the box to wirelessly recharge its battery if necessary.


----------



## ekim68

Virtual real estate plot sells for record $2.4 million



> LONDON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - A patch of virtual real estate in the online world Decentraland sold for a record $2.4 million worth of cryptocurrency, the buyer crypto investor Tokens.com (COIN.NLB) and Decentraland said on Tuesday.
> 
> Decentraland is an online environment - also called a "metaverse" - where users can buy land, visit buildings, walk around and meet people as avatars.


----------



## HOBOcs

hmmm ....a new reality (or not)


----------



## ekim68

UK report concludes crabs, octopuses and lobsters are sentient beings



> A new animal welfare bill moving through UK parliament will now include crabs, octopuses, and lobsters after an independent research review concluded decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs should be considered sentient beings. The review found strong scientific evidence these invertebrates are capable of feelings such as pain and distress.


----------



## 2twenty2

Happy Birthday! Mike


----------



## ekim68

Thanks 2twenty2, another milestone...


----------



## ekim68

Living walls found to drastically reduce heat loss in older buildings



> Along with benefits such as air purification and noise reduction, "living walls" are also claimed to help regulate the temperature within new buildings which they're built into. A recent study now indicates that they have the same effect when added to much older, existing structures.
> 
> Led by Dr. Matthew Fox, a team at Britain's University of Plymouth started by installing a plant-filled living wall facade on one section of the west-facing exterior wall of a pre-1970s building on the campus.


----------



## ekim68

The World Needs to Crack Battery Recycling, Fast



> The shift to electric vehicles is exciting, but it will leave us with thousands of tonnes of spent batteries.


----------



## ekim68

Study shows people who believe in astrology tend to be less intelligent and more narcissistic



> A trio of psychologists at Lund University has found via online questionnaire, that people who believe in astrology tend to be less intelligent than the norm and more narcissistic. In their paper published in the journal _Personality and Individual Differences_, Ida Andersson, Julia Persson and Petri Kajonius describe their study and what they learned from it.


----------



## ekim68

Germany to force ISPs to give discounts for slow Internet speeds



> A new regulation coming in the form of an amendment in the Telecommunications Act of Germany could radically change the relationship between consumers and internet service providers.
> 
> According to the draft, users will be able to test their internet speeds and, if there's a too large deviation between their real-world results and what their ISPs promised, they will be eligible for a bill discount.


----------



## ekim68

How to read a jellyfish's mind



> The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections. Understanding the precise circuits of brain cells that orchestrate all of our day-to-day behaviors-such as moving our limbs, responding to fear and other emotions, and so on-is an incredibly complex puzzle for neuroscientists. But now, fundamental questions about the neuroscience of behavior may be answered through a new and much simpler model organism: tiny jellyfish.
> 
> Caltech researchers have now developed a kind of genetic toolbox tailored for tinkering with Clytia hemisphaerica, a type of jellyfish about 1 centimeter in diameter when fully grown. Using this toolkit, the tiny creatures have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated.


----------



## ekim68

Nissan lays out $17.6 billion plan to electrify its future



> Nissan is the latest automaker to announce a plan to spend gobs of money on an ambitious electrification strategy. The company said it will spend 2 trillion yen (around $17.6 billion) over the next five years to accelerate the roll-out of electric vehicles. And to emphasize that point, Nissan unveiled a pack of delightful EV concepts, including an adorable pickup truck, an outdoorsy SUV, and a sleek sports car.


----------



## ekim68

South Korea will use VR to determine if the elderly can keep driving



> The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) is pushing for the implementation of conditional licenses for elderly drivers by 2025, Yonhap News reports.
> 
> That in and of itself is, well… boring. But the real story is about _how_ they'll determine who gets to keep their license: _virtual reality._


----------



## ekim68

This browser extension shows how many brands on Amazon are actually just Amazon



> A new browser extension promises to show you which products in your Amazon search results are sold by brands that are either owned by or are exclusive to Amazon, giving you a better idea of who's selling what you're buying. It's called Amazon Brand Detector, and it uses a list of Amazon brands created by _The Markup_, along with filters and other techniques (detailed here) to detect and highlight products that are a part of Amazon's Our Brands program.


----------



## ekim68

Barbados, Formally Casting Off the Queen, Becomes a Republic



> The island nation swore in its first president, ending nearly 400 years of British rule. Prince Charles and Rihanna were on hand to witness the ceremony.


----------



## ekim68

Could Roads Recharge Electric Cars? The Technology May Be Close.



> In July, the Indiana Department of Transportation and Purdue University announced plans to develop the world's first contactless wireless-charging concrete pavement highway segment.
> 
> The project is being undertaken by an engineering research center called Advancing Sustainability Through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification (ASPIRE). It is funded by the National Science Foundation.


----------



## ekim68

Debt collectors can now hound you on social media



> If you're behind on your bills, beware of any stranger attempting to "friend" you. It could be a debt collector taking advantage of new federal rules approved by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that allow them to use social media to communicate with debtors. The new rule went into effect on Tuesday


----------



## ekim68

Biggest Public Companies (by Country)



> I guess we should not be surprised to see what types of firms dominate the list: It's mostly Tech and Communications and Finance firms, with a handful of discretionary and luxury retailers, mixed in with a few energy/mineral companies to round out the list.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Makes Breakthrough in the Quest to Use DNA as Data Storage



> What do these advantages mean in real-world terms? Well, the International Data Corporation predicts data storage demands will reach nine zettabytes by 2024. As Microsoft notes, only one zettabyte of storage would be used if Windows 11 were downloaded on 15 billion devices. Using current methods, that data would need to be stored on millions of tape cartridges. Cut the tape and use DNA, and nine zettabytes of information can be stored in an area as small as a refrigerator (some scientists say every movie ever released could fit in the footprint of a sugar cube). But perhaps a freezer would be a better analogy, because data stored on DNA can last for thousands of years whereas data loss occurs on tape with 30 years and even sooner on SSDs and HDDs.


----------



## ekim68

Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead



> CR tested 126 products from McCormick, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other popular brands. Almost a third had heavy metal levels high enough to raise health concerns.


----------



## ekim68

US military has reportedly acted against ransomware groups



> Up until about nine months ago, reining in ransomware attacks was seen as the responsibility of law enforcement agencies, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of US Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, told the New York Times. But attacks like the ones on Colonial Pipeline and JBS beef plants have been "impacting our critical infrastructure," Nakasone said, leading federal agencies to ramp up the gathering and sharing of intelligence on ransomware groups.


----------



## ekim68

That radio DJ you hear might already be a robot



> OAKLAND/LOS ANGELES, Calif., Dec 2 (Reuters) - Andy Chanley, the afternoon drive host at Southern California's public radio station 88.5 KCSN, has been a radio DJ for over 32 years. And now, thanks to artificial intelligence technology, his voice will live on simultaneously in many places.
> 
> "I may be a robot, but I still love to rock," says the robot DJ named ANDY, derived from Artificial Neural Disk-JockeY, in Chanley's voice, during a demonstration for Reuters where the voice was hard to distinguish from a human DJ.


----------



## ekim68

China 'modified' the weather to create clear skies for political celebration - study



> Chinese weather authorities successfully controlled the weather ahead of a major political celebration earlier this year, according to a Beijing university study.
> 
> On 1 July the Chinese Communist party marked its centenary with major celebrations including tens of thousands of people at a ceremony in Tiananmen Square, and a research paper from Tsinghua University has said an extensive cloud-seeding operation in the hours prior ensured clear skies and low air pollution.


----------



## ekim68

"Functional cure" for type 1 diabetes passes first human trials 



> A pair of new studies are reporting results from a landmark type 1 diabetes human clinical trial testing the safety and efficacy of an implantable device containing stem cells designed to mature into insulin-secreting cells. The experimental implant was found to be safe, well-tolerated and mildly effective, offering promising signs that with further optimization the treatment could present diabetics with a "functional cure."


----------



## ekim68

Global destruction from climate change will be recorded in Earth's black box



> In a post-apocalyptic future, should civilization as we know it collapse from environmental catastrophe, a new crop of "intelligent" beings might not have to search for clues - a recording of our demise will be readily available in Earth's Black Box, planned for a 2022 build in Australia.
> 
> Maybe far-fetched and just a pipe dream, but according to c/net, University of Tasmania researchers, along with marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO, is about to build a black box "the size of a city bus, made of 3-inch-thick steel and topped with solar panels." The goal of the structure is to record "every step we take" as we move closer to global collapse. The recorder "is already in beta and has already begun collecting information at its website."


----------



## ekim68

Intel is taking its self-driving company Mobileye public in 2022



> Intel announced that it will take public its self-driving technology company Mobileye, the Israeli company it acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017. The chipmaker said that by listing Mobileye's shares on the stock market, it hopes to unlock more value for Intel's shareholders. Intel will remain the majority shareholder in Mobileye.


----------



## ekim68

New York City, Facing Housing Crisis, Targets Owners of Illegal Airbnbs



> New legislation will require hosts of short-term rentals to register with the city - the latest move in a long battle between New York and the rental companies.


----------



## ekim68

First-of-a-kind study shows plastic's toxic effects on human cells



> With plastic waste turning up everywhere from Arctic snowfall to Antarctic sea ice, and the world's tallest mountain in between, we're seeing more researchers shift their gaze toward the potential impacts on human health. The latest discovery in this space looks at the volume of plastics we regularly consume through food and water and how this might impact human cells, finding that the concentrations we are exposed to can potentially have toxic effects.
> 
> The body of knowledge around the ways plastics might influence our health is building rapidly on the back of research probing their effects on the human body. Much of this centers on plastic that has broken down in the ocean into tiny fragments known as microplastics, which studies have shown are consumed by marine creatures and can then travel up the food chain.


----------



## ekim68

It's a bird... and a plane? Africa's own bizarre "NVTOL" birdoplane


----------



## ekim68

Birds Aren't Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory.



> What Birds Aren't Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It's Gen Z's attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism.


----------



## ekim68

Native Americans' farming practices
may help feed a warming world



> 'We've had 5,000 years of farmers trying out different strategies for dealing with heat, drought and water scarcity. We need to begin to translate that.'


----------



## ekim68

The internet is tricking our brains



> Researchers are finding that the intersection of Google, smartphones and our memories is starting to mess with how we judge our own abilities.


----------



## ekim68

Coastal creatures found living aboard floating trash in the open ocean



> Some of the ways plastic waste is reshaping the marine ecosystem are quite insidious, such as the tiny particles that organisms can consume and send traveling up the food chain. Others are plain to see, such as the larger pieces of trash that form the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A new study has shown creatures typically inhabiting coastal areas are hitching rides out to sea aboard this trash, and are able to not just survive out in the open ocean, but thrive hundreds of miles away from home.


----------



## ekim68

The corporate climate migration has begun



> Companies large and small, some with longtime roots in their neighborhoods, are on the hunt for new real estate that is less prone to weather and climate extremes.
> 
> *Why it matters:* The corporate migration underway indicates vulnerable communities may see an exodus of large employers in the coming decades as oceans encroach. Inland areas prone to flooding or wildfires mare see similar challenges.


----------



## ekim68

Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds



> Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.
> 
> The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.


----------



## ekim68

First FDA-approved eye drops to replace reading glasses go on sale



> The first FDA-approved eye drops to treat age-related blurry near vision (presbyopia) has gone on sale in the US, offering a potential alternative to reading glasses for the estimated 128 million Americans affected by this common condition.


----------



## ekim68

Dell's Luna laptop concept is all about repairability



> Called "Concept Luna," the proof-of-concept laptop dreamed up by Dell's design team has a number of unusual features that are intended to make repair and maintenance easy. No screwdrivers or glue solvents are needed to pry loose a broken keyboard or peel off a cracked screen; both components simply pop free after a pair of keystones holding them in place are removed. The entire system contains far fewer screws than a typical Dell laptop, reducing the time needed to replace components. And you'll never have to worry about replacing a broken fan, because there isn't one: a shrunken-down motherboard placed in the top cover allows the laptop to passively cool itself.


----------



## ekim68

How Beijing Influences the Influencers



> Millions have watched Lee and Oli Barrett's YouTube dispatches from China. The father and son duo visit hotels in exotic locales, tour out-of-the-way villages, sample delicacies in bustling markets and undergo traditional ear cleanings.
> 
> The Barretts are part of a crop of new social media personalities who paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China - and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing's authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus.


----------



## ekim68

Smart roof coating reflects heat in summer and traps it in winter



> Berkeley Lab engineers have developed a roof coating that can keep a building warmer or cooler, depending on the weather. When it's warm out, the material will reflect sunlight and heat, but this radiative cooling automatically switches off in winter, reducing energy use for both heating and cooling.


----------



## ekim68

2021: World's Biggest Companies 



> The United States has 65% of the top 100's total market capitalization, 59 companies in all. China was a distant second with 14 companies on the top 100 list.


----------



## ekim68

IBM and Samsung's low-energy chips could see phone batteries last a week



> IBM and Samsung have unveiled a new semiconductor chip design they say can enable the continuation of Moore's Law. The breakthrough architecture sees transistors built onto the chip in a way that allows for vertical current flows, resulting in a more densely packed device and paving the way for smartphones that run for weeks on a charge, among some other interesting possibilities.


----------



## ekim68

Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive



> Necklaces and accessories claiming to "protect" people from 5G mobile networks have been found to be radioactive.
> 
> The Dutch authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection (ANVS) issued a warning about ten products it found gave off harmful ionising radiation.


----------



## ekim68

Germany's new government will firmly defend encryption, key Social Democrat says



> The next German government intends to speak more strongly in favour of end-to-end encryption and against the introduction of backdoors, the digital policy expert for the Social Democrats (SPD) who co-negotiated the coalition agreement's chapter on digitalisation, told EURACTIV in an interview.


----------



## ekim68

Stanford researchers point the way to avoiding blackouts with clean, renewable energy 



> For some, visions of a future powered by clean, renewable energy are clouded by fears of blackouts driven by intermittent electricity supplies. Those fears are misplaced, according to a new Stanford University study(link is external) that analyzes grid stability under multiple scenarios in which wind, water and solar energy resources power 100% of U.S. energy needs for all purposes. The paper, just published in _Renewable Energy_, finds that an energy system running on wind, water and solar coupled with storage avoids blackouts, lowers energy requirements and consumer costs, while creating millions of jobs, improving people's health, and reducing land requirements.


----------



## ekim68

Column: Leaked SoCal hospital records reveal huge, automated markups for healthcare



> Ridiculous, seemingly arbitrary price markups are a defining characteristic of the $4-trillion U.S. healthcare system - and a key reason Americans pay more for treatment than anyone else in the world.
> 
> But to see price hikes of as much as 675% being imposed in real time, automatically, by a hospital's computer system still takes your breath away.


----------



## ekim68

FedEx takes delivery of first electric vans from GM's BrightDrop



> BrightDrop delivered the first five of an order of 500 light electric commercial vehicles to FedEx last week, who will integrate them into its operations in California. The vans will be housed in and operated out of a facility in Inglewood, and will keep on the move by tapping into the company's network of 500 charging stations across the state.


----------



## ekim68

A domestic newspaper warns of the Russian space program's "rapid collapse"



> A long and strikingly critical article that reviews the state of the Russian space program was published in the state-aligned newspaper MK this week.
> 
> None of the findings in the 2,800-word article were particularly surprising. Western observers who track the Russian space industry realize the program is deeply troubled, and to a great extent running on the fumes of its past and very real glory. What _is_ notable, however, is that a major Russian media outlet has published such a revelatory article for a domestic audience.


----------



## ekim68

Oil driller sees the industry's future in electric rigs, carbon offsets



> BROOMFIELD, Colorado, Dec 20 (Reuters) - In a Denver suburb, an oil drilling rig plumbs the earth near a wealthy enclave framed by snow-capped mountains. The site is quieter, cleaner and less visible than similar oil and gas operations. It might just be the future of drilling in the United States.
> 
> Oil firm Civitas Resources designed the operation to run largely on the city's electric grid, eliminating daily runs by more than a dozen diesel fuel trucks.


----------



## ekim68

25 Facts About the Winter Solstice, the Shortest Day of the Year



> Amid the whirl of the holiday season, many are vaguely aware of the approach of the winter solstice, but how much do you really know about it? Whether you're a fan of winter or just wish it would go away, here are 25 things to note-or even celebrate-about the shortest day of the year.


----------



## ekim68

JPMorgan hit with $200 million in fines for letting employees use WhatsApp to evade regulators' reach



> JPMorgan Chase is paying $200 million in fines to two U.S. banking regulators to settle charges that its Wall Street division allowed employees to use WhatsApp and other platforms to circumvent federal record-keeping laws.


----------



## ekim68

World's largest offshore wind farm generates its first power



> The switch has been flicked on a wind farm off the shore of the UK of unprecedented scale, with Danish energy firm Orsted announcing that Hornsea 2 has produced its first power. It is expected to become fully operational next year as the world's biggest offshore wind farm, and provide enough power for more than 1.3 million homes in the UK.


----------



## ekim68

New policing system will send drones to the source of gunshots 



> If you hear gunshots in an urban setting, it's important to get the police to their source as quickly as possible. A new system is being developed to help, by combining autonomous drones with an existing shot-locating technology.
> 
> Already in use in over 120 cities in the US, South Africa and the Caribbean, the American ShotSpotter system utilizes a network of microphones within a neighborhood to detect "loud, impulsive sounds."


----------



## ekim68

Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe known for helping Pilgrims will keep land after 'Trump tried to take it away'



> MASHPEE, Mass. - The U.S. Department of the Interior has reversed a Trump administration order that rescinded the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's right to 321 acres of reservation land that helped establish the tribe as a sovereign government.
> 
> The land had been held by the U.S. government for the sovereign use of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe since 2015, when the federal government declared hundreds of acres in Massachusetts the tribe's reservation.
> 
> If the Trump administration order had stood, about 170 acres of reservation land in Taunton, Mass., would have been earmarked for the building of a casino.


----------



## ekim68

The internet runs on free open-source software. Who pays to fix it?



> The truth is different: Log4J, which has long been a critical piece of core internet infrastructure, was founded as a volunteer project and is still run largely for free, even though many million- and billion-dollar companies rely on it and profit from it every single day. Yazici and his team are trying to fix it for next to nothing.


----------



## ekim68

Charging tweak revives lost lithium to boost battery capacity & lifespan 



> Scientists have taken aim at inactive clumps of lithium that build up over a battery's lifetime and shown how they can be brought back to life to boost the performance of the device. They say this can be achieved simply through tweaks to the charging process, and the approach mightn't just benefit the batteries of today, but unlock next-gen battery designs with far greater densities.


----------



## ekim68

Watching A Lecture Twice At Double Speed Can Benefit Learning Better Than Watching It Once At Normal Speed



> Watching lecture videos is now a major part of many students' university experience. Some say they prefer them to live lectures, as they can choose when to study. And, according to a survey of students at the University of California Los Angeles, at least, many students also take advantage of the fact that video playback can be sped up, so cutting the amount of time they spend on lectures. But what impact does sped-up viewing have on learning? The answer, according to a new paper in _Applied Cognitive Psychology_, is, within some limits, none. In fact, if used strategically, it can actually improve learning.


----------



## ekim68

The 'Cowboy Cocktail':How Wyoming became one of the world'stop tax havens



> It's called the "Cowboy Cocktail," and in recent years the coveted financial arrangement has attracted a new set of outsiders to the least populated state in America.
> 
> The cocktail and variations of it - consisting of a Wyoming trust and layers of private companies with concealed ownership - allow the world's wealthy to move and spend money in extraordinary secrecy, protected by some of the strongest privacy laws in the country and, in some cases, without even the cursory oversight performed by regulators in other states.


----------



## ekim68

Gina. Rosanne. Guy.
What do you do the day after you storm the Capitol?



> They can't arrest us all,*'' *a future defendant had posted days before, and this was the vibe in the moment, the ecstatic invulnerability that leads someone to smear feces on the floor of the building in which the most powerful country on earth writes its rules.


----------



## ekim68

The most creative battery breakthroughs of 2021



> With lithium-ion batteries serving as the engine room for so much of the modern world, from phones and laptops, to electric cars and planes, every scientific breakthrough that improves their performance is an important one. Some of these come from incremental advances that experiment with alternative materials, for example, while some come from re-imagining the whole device and the way they work from the ground up. 2021 produced a stellar crop of discoveries that resulted from researchers thinking outside the box in this way. Let's take a look at the most creative and interesting examples.


----------



## ekim68

The world's first octopus farm - should it go ahead?



> News that the world's first commercial octopus farm is closer to becoming reality has been met with dismay by scientists and conservationists. They argue such intelligent "sentient" creatures - considered able to feel pain and emotions - should never be commercially reared for food.


----------



## ekim68

Hyundai shuts down its engine development team amid focus on electric cars



> Hyundai announced that it is shutting down its internal combustion engine development team as the automaker focuses on electric cars.
> 
> For 40 years the Korean automaker has been developing internal combustion engines to use in its vehicle lineup, but no more.


----------



## ekim68

Retailers surrender to unprecedented costs on online returns



> Returning unwanted gifts this holiday season is becoming so expensive for retailers that they just might let customers keep the products - and issue refunds anyway.


----------



## ekim68

2021 in pictures: Striking photojournalism from around the world



> A selection of some of the most powerful pictures taken by news agency photographers around the world this year.


----------



## ekim68

13 battery gigafactories coming to the US by 2025 - ushering new era of US battery production



> There are 13 new battery cell gigafactories coming online in the US by 2025, according to the Department of Energy.
> 
> These factories are ushering in a new era of battery production in the US.
> 
> Aside from Tesla and Panasonic's Gigafactory Nevada, which supplies battery cells for the production of Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, there has been limited battery cell production in the US.


----------



## ekim68

Ransomware gang coughs up decryptor after realizing they hit the police



> The AvosLocker ransomware operation provided a free decryptor after learning they encrypted a US government agency.
> 
> Last month, a US police department was breached by AvosLocker, who encrypted devices and stole data during the attack.
> 
> However, according to a screenshot shared by security researcher pancak3, after learning that the victim was a government agency, they provided a decryptor for free.


----------



## ekim68

Sweden's Northvolt reveals it has built the first lithium-ion battery cell in Europe



> Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that on December 28th, it successfully produced the first lithium-ion battery cell to be designed, developed, and built completely in Europe by a homegrown company.


----------



## ekim68

The best photography of 2021


----------



## ekim68

TuSimple takes humans out of the equation for fully autonomous road trip 



> Earlier in the year, autonomous transport company TuSimple sent one of its trucks on a 900-mile journey from Arizona to Texas, though human drivers took the wheel for the first and last parts. Now a semi-truck has completed an 80-mile trip on public roads on its own.


----------



## ekim68

21 really good things that happened in 2021



> Behind the scary headlines, the human race is making a tremendous amount of progress.


----------



## ekim68

Winnie the Pooh is now officially public domain



> Happy Public Domain Day! After a drought of some 20 years in which no works of art became publicly available to the American people, this year's newly available content includes _Winnie the Pooh_, Ernest Hemingway's _The Sun Also Rises_, TE Lawrence's _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ (the source for _Lawrence of Arabia_), Agatha Christie's _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_, and an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923.


----------



## ekim68

Washington state to require internet service disclosure when selling house in new year



> It's hard to imagine home life without the internet, particularly amid the coronavirus pandemic. Now a law going into effect in Washington state is acknowledging that.
> 
> Starting in the new year, home sellers in Washington will be required to share their internet provider on signed disclosure forms that include information about plumbing, insulation and structural defects.


----------



## ekim68

Apple becomes first U.S. company to reach $3 trillion market cap



> Apple briefly hit a market cap of $3 trillion during intraday trading on Monday, before dropping back under the mark shortly afterwards. Apple broke the barrier when its share price hit $182.86.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T, Verizon reject Buttigieg's plea to delay 5G launch amid warnings of aviation chaos



> AT&T and Verizon on Sunday rejected the U.S. Department of Transportation's request that they delay this week's scheduled launch of a new round of 5G wireless service - and instead pledged to take enhanced measures to avoid warned disruptions of air travel.


----------



## ekim68

Five of world's most powerful nations pledge to avoid nuclear war



> Five of the world's most powerful nations have agreed that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought" in a rare joint pledge to reduce the risk of such a conflict ever starting.
> 
> The pledge was signed by the US, Russia, China, the UK and France, the five nuclear weapons states recognised by the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) who are also the five permanent members of the UN security council. They are known as the P5 or the N5.


----------



## ekim68

The US government has no time for people trying to renounce their citizenship



> People so unhappy with the United States that they want to never be associated with it again are being given one last thing to gripe about as they wait to head out the door, the US Government can't even be bothered.
> 
> You can say you aren't a US citizen, but in order to get the United States of America to acknowledge this you must to have an exit interview! Ever since the pandemic came along, the government has no time for the already unhappy.


----------



## ekim68

Modular building facade heats and cools rooms with solar power



> Heating and cooling buildings is a major consumer of energy, especially older ones that weren't built with modern energy efficiencies in mind. Now, engineers at Fraunhofer Institute have developed a modular facade powered by solar panels that can heat or cool rooms.


----------



## ekim68

New French Law Requires Car Commercials to Tell People to Walk or Bike Instead



> Whether it's cigarettes or alcohol, many governments have legislated that companies must warn consumers of the negative effects of their products. This is often achieved on packaging or required in advertising. France is now intending to bring such measures to the automotive industry, forcing carmakers to supplement ads with messages about greener transport alternatives, as reported by _CTV News._


----------



## ekim68

John Deere takes wraps off autonomous farm tractor



> John Deere has unveiled an autonomous farm tractor capable of working in the field on its own 24 hours a day. Revealed at CES 2022, the 8R tractor is scheduled to go into large-scale production this year.


----------



## ekim68

Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining to save electricity



> PRISTINA, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Kosovo's government on Tuesday introduced a ban on cryptocurrency mining in an attempt to curb electricity consumption as the country faces the worst energy crisis in a decade due to production outages.


----------



## ekim68

Meta sued for alleged role in extremist-linked murder of federal guard



> The surviving sister of Dave Patrick Underwood, a federal security guard who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2020, has filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent organization of Facebook. The suit seeks to hold the company accountable for connecting the two men charged in the murder plot and giving them a space online to plan the attack.


----------



## ekim68

Today is Hawking's birthday and some cool stuff.. 


12 Incredible Stephen Hawking Quotes


----------



## ekim68

Fungus-made protein may be an eco-friendly alternative to egg whites



> Egg white powder is a very widely used food ingredient, which means that a lot of hens have to be raised on a lot of farms, consuming a lot of feed and producing a lot of waste. There may soon be a greener alternative, however, thanks to a fungus which produces a key egg white protein.
> 
> In a study conducted by the University of Helsinki and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, scientists genetically altered filamentous _Trichoderma reesei_ fungus so that it would produce and secrete ovalbumin, which constitutes over half of the protein content in egg white powder.


----------



## ekim68

Cryptocurrency Investors Try to Turn Private Islands Into Blockchain Utopias



> For as long as cryptocurrencies have existed, libertarians have dreamed of using them to create communities, seasteads, and cities free from the prying eyes of the state and its tax collectors. We've seen crypto-inspired attempts to claim disputed lands as tax havens, use UFOs and fireworks to christen a new tax-free Bitcoin town, build cities with DAOs, and establish communities inside of U.S. colonies to avoid taxes. But there's now a wave of attempts to buy entire islands and build the next crypto "paradise."


----------



## ekim68

FAA Reveals the 50 US Airports With '5G Buffer' Zones



> The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has published the list of 50 airports around which it wants Verizon and AT&T to create "5G buffer" zones as they roll out their C-Band networks.
> 
> The Department of Transportation previously asked Verizon and AT&T to delay the deployment of their C-Band networks from Dec. 5, 2021 to Jan. 5 due to concerns about interference affecting the altimeters used by commercial aircraft. Then on Jan. 2 the FAA asked the carriers to push back the debut of their C-Band networks again so it could investigate those safety risks.


----------



## ekim68

The Lancet Public Health: Global dementia cases set to triple by 2050 unless countries address risk factors



> The number of adults (aged 40 years and older) living with dementia worldwide is expected to nearly triple, from an estimated 57 million in 2019 to 153 million in 2050, due primarily to population growth and population ageing. The Global Burden of Disease study is the first to provide forecasting estimates for 204 countries worldwide, and is published in _The Lancet Public Health_.


----------



## ekim68

T-Mobile begins blocking iPhone users from enabling iCloud Private Relay in the US



> Earlier today, a report indicated that some European carriers were blocking the Private Relay feature introduced by Apple with iOS 15. This feature is designed to give users an additional layer of privacy by ensuring that no one can view the websites that they visit.
> 
> Now, in addition to some carriers in Europe, it appears that T-Mobile/Sprint in the United States is also blocking iCloud Private Relay access when connected to cellular data.


----------



## ekim68

Panasonic to Offer Four-Day Workweek in Japan



> Productivity actually goes up when workers have more flexibility with their hours.


----------



## ekim68

ekim68 said:


> T-Mobile begins blocking iPhone users from enabling iCloud Private Relay in the US


More on this:


T-Mobile says it has 'not broadly blocked' iCloud Private Relay, blames iOS 15.2 bug for errors


----------



## ekim68

Here's what you won't be driving in 2030



> Love the idea or hate it - and apparently plenty of us do hate it - driverless cars are on the way. While it will still be some time before we reach full recline-and-relax level 6 autonomy, Tesla and others are out there gathering the mountains of real-world data generated by semi-autonomous cars that's needed to make this happen. In the meantime, designers are anticipating the day they'll be unshackled from the constraints of driver and steering wheel by creating concepts that redefine the car, inside and out. Here's a taste of what's in store.


----------



## ekim68

BiteFighter string lights chase mosquitoes from decks and yards 



> Just as hordes of homeowners have rediscovered the simple joy of spending time outdoors on their decks and in their gardens, backyard mosquito repellers have moved away from the smoky, smelly designs of the past, toward cleaner, more integrated solutions like the Thermacell E55. Now, Tiki Brand shifts gears from the torches nearly synonymous with its name and strings up a full strand of outdoor lights complete with silent, odorless mosquito repellent diffusers.


----------



## ekim68

US to hold largest-ever offshore wind farm auction next month



> The US government announced Wednesday it will auction more than 480,000 acres off the coasts of New York and New Jersey to build wind farms as part of its campaign to supply renewable energy to more than 10 million homes by 2030.


----------



## ekim68

Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars



> The yawning disparity between the performance of the electric car company and established automakers last year reflects the technological change roiling the industry.


----------



## ekim68

Raspberry Pi Can Detect Malware By Scanning for Electromagnetic Waves



> A team of researchers at France's Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems created an anti-malware system centered around a Raspberry Pi that scans devices for electromagnetic waves. As reported by Tom's Hardware, the security device uses an oscilloscope (Picoscope 6407) and H-Field probe connected to a Raspberry Pi 2B to pick up abnormalities in specific electromagnetic waves emitted by computers that are under attack, a technique the researchers say is used to "obtain precise knowledge about malware type and identity."


----------



## ekim68

Carmakers Launch Desperate Attempt to Delay Massachusetts Right-to-Repair Law



> Major car manufacturers aren't giving up on their efforts to stymie Massachusetts' right to repair legislation. Less than two years after residents in the state voted in favor of updated right to repair laws that would let independent auto repair shops receive telematics data from vehicles, groups representing auto manufacturers are now introducing their own new proposals that would delay the law's implementation.


----------



## ekim68

FedEx Asks FAA to Let It Install Anti-Missile Lasers on Its Cargo Planes



> With the right military equipment, a single person can target a plane from three miles away using a heat-seeking missile. While such a nightmare is a rare occurrence, FedEx has applied to the FAA seeking approval to install a laser-based, anti-missile defense system on its cargo planes as an added safety measure.


----------



## ekim68

John Deere Hit With Class Action Lawsuit for Alleged Tractor Repair Monopoly



> A class action lawsuit filed in Chicago has accused John Deere of running an illegal repair monopoly. The lawsuit alleged that John Deere has used software locks and restricted access to repair documentation and tools, making it very difficult for farmers to fix their own agricultural equipment, a problem that Motherboard has documented for years and that lawmakers, the FTC, and even the Biden administration have acknowledged.


----------



## ekim68

Volvo Trucks gives class 8 electric truck more range, faster charging 



> Just over two years ago, Volvo Trucks introduced the VNR Electric regional transport truck to the US market, and now the company has announced an enhanced version - with more per-charge range and faster charging.


----------



## ekim68

From living rooms to landfills, some holiday shopping returns take a 'very sad path'



> More than half a trillion dollars. That's the estimated value of all the stuff that U.S. shoppers bought last year only to return it - more than the economy of Israel or Austria.


----------



## ekim68

It's Official: Gun Deaths Hit an All-Time High in 2020



> The number of gun deaths in America hit an all-time high in 2020, owing mostly to an increase in homicides, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 45,222 people died of gunshot wounds - a 14 percent jump from 2019 and the largest year-over-year rise on record.


----------



## ekim68

A long but good read...


Imagining the unimaginable: The U.S., China and war over Taiwan



> One way to avoid conflict may be to understand just how destructive it would be.


----------



## ekim68

South Australia breaks record by running for a week on renewable energy



> South Australia sourced an average of just over 100 per cent of the electricity it needed from renewable power for 6½ days leading up to December 29 last year - a record for the state and perhaps for comparable energy grids around the world.
> 
> The state's previous record was just over three days, says Geoff Eldridge, an energy analyst who runs the website NEMlog.com.au, which tracks the operations of the National Energy Market covering Australia's east-coast states and South Australia.


----------



## ekim68

Eco-friendly plastics made from sugars boast "unprecedented" properties 



> The search for sustainable alternatives to common plastics has researchers investigating how their building blocks can be sourced from places other than petroleum, and for scientists behind a promising new study, this has led them straight to the sweet stuff. The team has produced a new form of plastic with "unprecedented" mechanical properties that are maintained throughout standard recycling processes, and managed to do so using sugar-derived materials as the starting point.


----------



## ekim68

The highlights of the 2021 science, sci-fi and technology auction year



> This is the second part of a two-part overview of the 2021 auction year - a year where investors channeled more of their wealth into "investments of passion" than ever before.


----------



## ekim68

Some Roku smart TVs are now showing banner ads over live TV



> Some Roku smart TV owners are seeing banner ads appear over live content, according to a thread on the r/cordcutters subreddit.


----------



## ekim68

Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists



> The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.
> 
> Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.


----------



## ekim68

US competition enforcers launch overhaul of merger approval process



> On Tuesday, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission launched a joint effort to modernize antitrust enforcement, seeking comment on how the agencies can apply current law in cases against tech companies like Meta (parent company of Facebook) and Google.


----------



## ekim68

Liquid metal catalyst quickly converts carbon dioxide into solid carbon



> Researchers at RMIT have developed a new method for quickly converting carbon dioxide into solid carbon, which can be stored indefinitely or turned into useful materials. The technology works by bubbling CO2 up through a tube of liquid metal, and it's designed to be easy to integrate into the source of emissions.


----------



## ekim68

Crypto Enthusiasts Meet Their Match: Angry Gamers



> Game publishers are offering NFTs, but skeptical gamers smell a moneymaking scheme and are fighting back.


----------



## ekim68

China's looming property crisis threatens economic stability



> China Evergrande, which has the dubious distinction of being the world's most indebted real estate developer, is gripped by a solvency crisis that began more than a year ago. And the crisis affects not just Evergrande. A growing number of Chinese property developers are facing financial strain, while property sales and home prices in China are falling sharply. The Chinese government, worried that an engine of growth is losing steam, is struggling to keep the property sector afloat. Yet China's rescue measures are mostly short-term solutions to a larger long-term problem. In fact, Evergrande is a leading indication that China's model of property-led growth is unsustainable and needs to change.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street's Pandemic Bonanza



> Most Americans have missed out on the asset-price boom created by the policy response to the pandemic. Not so the big banks.


----------



## ekim68

More than 450 scientists call on PR and ad firms to cut their ties with fossil fuel clients



> On Wednesday, more than 450 scientists called on public relations and advertising firms, including the prestigious Edelman, to stop working for oil and gas companies. The firms' ad campaigns for these companies, the scientists said, "represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency." A group of 100 activists and former Edelman employees partnered with Clean Creatives, a campaign pressuring PR and ad agencies to quit fossil fuels, to issue the same demand.


----------



## ekim68

'It's All Just Wild': Tech Start-Ups Reach a New Peak of Froth



> How crazy is the money sloshing around in start-up land right now?
> 
> It's so crazy that more than 900 tech start-ups are each worth more than $1 billion. In 2015, 80 seemed like a lot.
> 
> It's so crazy that hot start-ups no longer have to pitch investors for money. The investors are the ones pitching them.


----------



## ekim68

Why we are in 'the age of artificial islands' 



> We are building more islands than ever before. In the latest edition of our photographic series Anthropo-Scene, we explore the striking results of humanity's attempts to colonise the world's lakes and oceans with new land.


----------



## ekim68

Solar power will account for nearly half of new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2022



> In 2022, we expect 46.1 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric generating capacity to be added to the U.S. power grid, according to our _Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory_. Almost half of the planned 2022 capacity additions are solar, followed by natural gas at 21% and wind at 17%.


----------



## ekim68

The Texas Electric Grid Failure Was a Warm-up



> One year after the deadly blackout, officials have done little to prevent the next one-which could be far worse.


----------



## ekim68

Four-day weeks and the freedom to move anywhere: Companies are rewriting the future of work (again)



> The traditional idea of going to the office five days a week or working 9 to 5 may be dying. Some companies are making room for more creative and flexible approaches to getting workers to do their jobs.


----------



## ekim68

'China will be China': Why journalists are taking burner phones to the Beijing Olympics



> Journalists covering the Winter Olympics next month say they'll do their work in Beijing on brand-new cellphones and laptops. When the Games are over, they'll simply leave them behind or throw them away.
> 
> The reason: Reporters are concerned that any devices they use there could become infected with tracking software, enabling Chinese authorities to spy on their contents. Hence, the use of "burner" phones and computers.


----------



## ekim68

New MoonBounce UEFI bootkit can't be removed by replacing the hard drive



> Security researchers from Kaspersky said on Thursday that they had discovered a novel bootkit that can infect a computer's UEFI firmware.
> 
> What makes MoonBounce-the name they gave the bootkit-special is the fact that the malware doesn't burrow and hide inside a section of the hard drive named ESP (EFI System Partition), where some UEFI code typically resides, but instead it infects the SPI flaws memory that is found on the motherboard.


----------



## ekim68

Faster internet speeds linked to lower civic engagement in UK



> Faster internet access has significantly weakened civic participation in Britain, according to a study that found involvement in political parties, trade unions and volunteering fell as web speeds rose.
> 
> Volunteering in social care fell by more than 10% when people lived closer to local telecoms exchange hubs and so enjoyed faster web access. Involvement in political parties fell by 19% with every 1.8km increase in proximity to a hub. By contrast, the arrival of fast internet had no significant impact on interactions with family and friends.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous drones may be the ultimate scarecrows ... for pigeons



> Much as we may like pigeons, they can make quite a mess of buildings and other structures, potentially posing a health hazard. According to new research, autonomous drones may be ideal for harmlessly chasing the birds away.


----------



## ekim68

Is Old Music Killing New Music?



> Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music-especially that endangered species known as the_ working musician_-should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.


----------



## ekim68

How Exxon is using an unusual law to intimidate critics over its climate denial



> America's largest oil firm claims its history of publicly denying the climate crisis is protected by the first amendment


----------



## ekim68

'He's a villain': Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis



> The West Virginia senator's name is reviled on the streets of Bangladesh and other countries facing climate disaster as he blocks Biden's effort to curb planet-heating gases


----------



## ekim68

Social media scammers stole at least $770 million in 2021



> The last year has been a boon for social media scammers, according to a new report from the FTC. The agency says more than 95,000 people lost $770 million to scammers who found them via social media platforms in 2021. That's more than double the $258 million they say scammers made off with in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

The Most Epic Adventures in America's 50 States



> From roaming the pine forests of Alabama to conquering the rivers of Wyoming on a SUP, every state in the union has a unique adventure to offer. We rounded up 50 epic trips-some tried-and-true and some way under the radar.


----------



## ekim68

Special Report: Green Jobs Have a Nice Future … But Fossil Fuel Work Will Persist



> While oil and gas workforces are projected to shrink, they aren't expected to vanish for some time.


----------



## ekim68

F-35C fighter jet: Race is on to reach sunken US plane... before China



> A race against time is under way for the US Navy to reach one of its downed fighter jets - before the Chinese get there first.
> 
> The $100m (£74m) F-35C plane came down in the South China Sea after what the Navy describes as a "mishap" during take-off from the USS Carl Vinson.
> 
> The jet is the Navy's newest, and crammed with classified equipment. As it is in international waters, it is technically fair game.


----------



## ekim68

Domestic extremists have plotted to disrupt U.S. power grid, DHS bulletin warns



> Domestic violent extremists have been planning to try to disrupt the U.S. power grid and will probably keep doing so, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin shared with law enforcement agencies and utility operators Monday and obtained by CBS News.


----------



## ekim68

Former Nuclear Leaders: Say 'No' to New Reactors



> The former heads of nuclear power regulation in the U.S., Germany, and France, along with the former secretary to the UK's government radiation protection committee, have issued a joint statement that in part says, "Nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change."


----------



## ekim68

States Want to Eliminate All Childhood Vaccinations 



> The most and least trusted people in the world.


----------



## ekim68

World's Fastest Gaming Monitor Hits 500 Hz Refresh Rate



> According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world's first 500 Hz gaming monitor. The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms.


----------



## ekim68

Lunar New Year 2022



> Lunar New Year is one of the most important celebrations of the year among East and Southeast Asian cultures, including Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean communities, among others. The New Year celebration is usually celebrated for multiple days-not just one day as in the Gregorian calendar's New Year. In 2022, Lunar New Year begins on February 1.


----------



## ekim68

A group of Irish fishermen held back the Russian military



> Last week, the Russian Navy announced plans to execute a series of military exercises in the waters off the western coast of Ireland. As CNN reported on Monday, January 24, 2022:





> Things were tense there for a while. But diplomacy ultimately prevailed … thanks to a small group of stubborn Irish fishermen who weren't having any of it. Members of the Irish South and West Fish Producers Organization intervened, explaining to everyone they could how the military demonstration would cause long-term damage to the marine ecosystem that sustains them. This ultimately got them a meeting with the Russian ambassador to Ireland


----------



## ekim68

Electric wound dressing could help injuries heal faster



> The dressing is made up of four layers. The bottom layer is made from an electrically charged plastic that produces an electric field through static contact with the skin. Next is a layer of flexible silicone rubber gel that moulds to the skin's curvature, and then a layer of shape memory alloy that pushes the two sides of the wound together. A second layer of flexible gel completes the dressing, which is just 0.2 millimetres thick in total.


----------



## ekim68

Senate introduces bill to allow farmers to fix their own equipment



> The legislation is part of the broader "right to repair" movement opposing repair restrictions.


----------



## ekim68

Koenigsegg aims to reinvent electric drive with new Raxial Flux motors



> Not one to let the inadequacies of existing technology stand in its way, Koenigsegg has been an innovating pioneer in modern powertrain technology, rethinking fundamentals with solutions like gearbox-free direct-drive hybrids and camshaft-free engines. Its latest breakthrough has come in the form of a compact electric motor that squeezes together the torque-heavy benefits of axial flux topology with the power-dense boost of a radial flux layout. The all-new Quark motor will help the boundary-smashing Gemera four-seat GT achieve sprint times formerly reserved for the world's quickest electric coupes while supporting a wide range of applications from aerospace to marine.


----------



## ekim68

Gmail's next big redesign starts rolling out next week



> Google will finally start rolling out the Gmail redesign it first showed off last year. The company is calling the interface in the update the "integrated view" because the goal is to integrate Google's latest messaging service, Google Chat (a Slack competitor and the successor to Hangouts) and Google Meet (a Zoom competitor) into Gmail. The main section will remain mostly the same, but there are plenty of changes coming to Gmail's navigation sidebar.


----------



## ekim68

Musk: Robots to be bigger business than Tesla cars



> Elon Musk likes to have a focus - and this year, it looks like it might be robots.
> 
> He told investors on a Tesla earnings call his nascent robot plans had "the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business, over time".


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX reveals premium Starlink satellite internet with 500-Mbps speeds



> As it continues to build out its constellation of satellites designed to blanket the Earth in high-speed broadband, SpaceX has introduced a new premium version of its Starlink internet. Using a bigger antenna, high-end users will soon be able to tap into much faster download speeds, though they can expect to pay a pretty penny for the service.


----------



## ekim68

New lightweight material is stronger than steel



> Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.
> 
> The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.


----------



## ekim68

Fashion is just TikTok now



> The video app absolutely dominates style trends and discussion around fashion. What does that mean for the way we dress?


----------



## ekim68

Ford F-150 Lightning can seamlessly power a home for three days



> Electric vehicles are increasingly including the capability to serve as backup power sources that can be tapped into during blackouts and emergencies. But how exactly will that work at home, and how much will any given EV be able to power around the house? Ford has provided a closer look at how the upcoming F-150 Lightning's 131-kWh extended-range battery will keep the lights on in the average American home.


----------



## ekim68

It's Back: Senators Want EARN IT Bill to Scan All Online Messages



> People don't want outsiders reading their private messages -not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It's a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn't seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.


----------



## ekim68

Traders are selling themselves their own NFTs to drive up prices



> The NFT marketplace is rife with people buying their own NFTs in order to drive up prices, according to a report released this week by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. Known as "wash trading", the act of buying and selling a security in order to fool the market was once commonplace on Wall Street, and has been illegal for nearly a century.


----------



## ekim68

A Change by Apple Is Tormenting Internet Companies, Especially Meta



> Meta's stock prices plunged after the company reported that Apple's privacy features would cost it billions this year. It's not the only tech giant to take a hit.


----------



## ekim68

All the Beijing snow is human-made -- a resource-intensive, 'dangerous' trend as planet warms



> It would be hard to hold a conversation over the deafening sound of the snow machines preparing the Olympic venues northwest of Beijing. They are loud and they are everywhere, blowing snow across what will be this month's most-watched slopes.
> It is almost beautiful -- except that the venues are surrounded by an endless brown, dry landscape completely devoid of snow.


----------



## ekim68

Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them



> A pre-pandemic policy on airport usage is pressuring airlines to keep "ghost flights" in the air. The climate impact is massive.


----------



## ekim68

The Weirdest Town Names In All 50 States



> Traveling across the United States will afford you views of pristine nature, bustling cities and quaint towns that might fail to register on your GPS. But if you're using this particular map as your compass, you might find yourself relatively off the grid, pumping gas in the middle of Satan's Kingdom, Massachusetts, or buying Gatorade in Catfish Paradise, Arizona.


----------



## ekim68

US groups need to stop interfering in Canada: US ex-envoy



> The statement comes after GoFundMe decided to return about $9m raised for protests in Canada against vaccine mandates.


----------



## ekim68

Weeks after a ransomware attack, some workers still worry about paychecks



> The country's largest distributor of Coca-Cola products was among many companies affected by a cyberattack on a payroll company. Its workers are dealing with the fallout.


----------



## ekim68

Electric vehicle sales doubled in 2021, with more now sold each week than entire year in 2012



> New data, from the influential intergovernmental International Energy Agency (IEA), revealed that 6.6 million electric cars were sold last year - twice the number of 2020 - making up 9 per cent of the global car market.


----------



## ekim68

The Unnerving Rise of Video Games that Spy on You



> The state's use of biometric data to police its population is, of course, invasive, and especially undermines the privacy of underage users-but Tencent is not the only video game company to track its players, nor is this recent case an altogether new phenomenon. All over the world, video games, one of the most widely adopted digital media forms, are installing networks of surveillance and control.


----------



## ekim68

Google Cloud adds new cryptomining threat detection capability



> Google has launched today a new security feature for Google Cloud tenants that is meant to detect and block cryptomining operations that may be taking place behind the owners' backs.
> 
> Named *Virtual Machine Threat Detection* (VMTD), Google said this new feature is an agentless system that continually scans the memory of virtual machines deployed in Google Cloud environments for tell-tale signs of increased CPU or GPU usage-specific to cryptomining operations.


----------



## ekim68

TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app - and it's unclear where it goes, study says



> That's according to a recent study, published last month by mobile marketing company URL Genius, which found that YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps.


----------



## ekim68

Time-shifted computing could slash data center energy costs by up to 30%



> Recently, two computer scientists had an idea: if computers use energy to perform calculations, could stored data be a form of stored energy? Why not use computing as a way to store energy?
> 
> What if information could be a battery, man?
> 
> As it turns out, the idea isn't as far-fetched as it may sound. The "information battery" concept, fleshed out in a recent paper, would perform certain computations in advance when power is cheap-like when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing-and cache the results for later. The process could help data centers replace up to 30 percent of their energy use with surplus renewable power.


----------



## ekim68

Inside Finland's Plan to End All Waste by 2050



> As natural resources diminish and the climate crisis grows more acute, the notion of a circular economy has been gaining traction around the globe. Most modern economies are linear-they rest on a "take, make, waste" model in which natural resources are extracted, their valuable elements are transformed into products, and anything left over (along with the products themselves when they are no longer useful) is discarded as waste. In contrast, a circular economy replaces the extraction of resources with the transformation of existing products and essentially does away with the notion of waste altogether.


----------



## ekim68

Four fast chargers every 50 miles-US unveils EV infrastructure plan



> About five years from now, a common complaint about electric vehicles-range anxiety-will be a thing of the past across much of the US.
> 
> Starting this year, the federal government will begin doling out $5 billion to states over five years to build a nationwide network of fast chargers. The plan initially focuses on the Interstate Highway System, directing states to build one charging station every 50 miles. Those stations must be capable of charging at least four EVs simultaneously at 150 kW.


----------



## ekim68

Biohybrid fish powered by beating human heart cells swims for 100 days 



> Researchers at Harvard and Emory University have created a biohybrid fish out of human heart muscle cells that can swim autonomously for months at a time as the cells beat. The project is a quirky sidestep on the way to eventually growing new functioning hearts for transplant.


 * 
*


----------



## ekim68

Big Tech Sold Out on Its Promise of an Open Internet



> 2021 was a bad PR year for Big Tech. Lawmakers, advocates, and scholars filled pages of books and held hours of hearing exalting what they viewed as an industry being strangled by a handful of players using anti-competitive practices to solidify their position as kings. Ironically, those exact same tactics were vehemently opposed by the Big Tech companies themselves less than a decade ago. Like an aging punk throwing out their raggedy jean jacket for a blazer, Big Tech sold out.


----------



## ekim68

Shields Up



> Every organization in the United States is at risk from cyber threats that can disrupt essential services and potentially result in impacts to public safety. Over the past year, cyber incidents have impacted many companies, non-profits, and other organizations, large and small, across multiple sectors of the economy.
> 
> Notably, the Russian government has used cyber as a key component of their force projection over the last decade, including previously in Ukraine in the 2015 timeframe. The Russian government understands that disabling or destroying critical infrastructure-including power and communications-can augment pressure on a country's government, military and population and accelerate their acceding to Russian objectives.


----------



## ekim68

Apple plans AirTag updates to curb unwanted tracking



> (CNN)Apple (AAPL) said Thursday it plans to add more safeguards to AirTags to cut down on unwanted tracking following reports that the devices have been used to stalk people and steal cars.
> 
> In a blog post, Apple said it has worked with safety groups and law enforcement agencies to identify more ways to update its AirTag safety warnings, including alerting people sooner if the small Bluetooth tracker is suspected to be tracking someone.


----------



## ekim68

US Army turns to microgrids, EVs to hit net zero by 2050



> The US Army released its climate change strategy this week, and it's a lengthy document that shows how the largest and oldest branch of the military will not only prepare for climate change but will also zero out emissions from most of its operations and activities.


----------



## ekim68

Making 'Dinobabies' Extinct: IBM's Push for a Younger Work Force



> Documents released in an age-discrimination case appear to show high-level discussion about paring the ranks of older employees.


----------



## ekim68

Amprius ships first batch of "world's highest density" batteries 



> Californian company Amprius has shipped the first batch of what it claims are the most energy-dense lithium batteries available today. These silicon anode cells hold 73 percent more energy than Tesla's Model 3 cells by weight, and they take up 37 percent less volume.
> 
> Tesla's current Model 3 cells serve as a state-of-the-art comparison, and hold around 260 Wh/kg and 730 Wh/l, according to Enpower. The new Amprius cells are a significant step up, both in specific energy and energy density, holding 450 Wh/kg and 1,150 Wh/l - and the company says that the undisclosed number of cells just delivered to "an industry leader of a new generation of High-Altitude Pseudo Satellites" give it bragging rights for "the highest energy density cells available in the battery industry today."


----------



## ekim68

Global river study finds pharmaceutical contamination on every continent 



> A wide-ranging study into pharmaceutical pollution of the world's rivers has found that more than a quarter of those analyzed carry potentially toxic levels of drugs. The research greatly expands our scope of knowledge around this type of pollution, and also teases out useful insights into where it is most heavily concentrated.


----------



## ekim68

France to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors by 2050, says Macron



> Emmanuel Macron has announced a "renaissance" for the French nuclear industry with a vast programme to build as many as 14 new reactors, arguing that it would help end the country's reliance on fossil fuels and make France carbon neutral by 2050.


----------



## ekim68

DeLorean Making a Comeback with New EV Model



> DeLorean Motor Company, one of the world's most iconic automotive brands, plans a comeback with a new electric vehicle production enterprise. The global headquarters, which is contingent on final approvals of various incentive packages, will bring approximately 450 jobs to San Antonio, principally in executive, management, and engineering roles.


----------



## ekim68

Major banks pledging net zero are pouring money into the dirtiest fossil fuel



> ShanghaiFinancial institutions channeled more than $1.5 trillion into the coal industry in loans and underwriting from January 2019 to November 2021, even though many have made net-zero pledges, a report by a group of 28 non-government organizations showed.


----------



## ekim68

Anti-porch-pirate doors are being installed in homes



> With porch package theft on the rise (or at least being recorded on security cameras more frequently) some people are opting for delivery doors that allow deliverers to deposit packages inside a house or garage.


----------



## ekim68

74% of ransomware revenue goes to Russia-linked hackers



> New analysis suggests that 74% of all money made through ransomware attacks in 2021 went to Russia-linked hackers.
> 
> Researchers say more than $400 million worth of crypto-currency payments went to groups "highly likely to be affiliated with Russia".


----------



## ekim68

Scientists identify how caffeine reduces bad cholesterol 



> Your morning vice might not be that guilty a pleasure after all: coffee seems to have a range of health benefits, but exactly how it affects the body to produce these results remains unknown. A new study has identified specific proteins that caffeine works on, which help the liver remove bad cholesterol from the bloodstream and protect against cardiovascular disease.


* 
*


----------



## ekim68

Rebuffing cable lobby, FCC bans deals that block competition in apartments



> Vote closes loopholes ISPs use to make sure apartment dwellers have only one choice.


----------



## ekim68

New York Is Now Using Cameras With Microphones to Ticket Loud Cars



> If you live in New York and drive a loud car, you could receive a notice from the city's Department of Environmental Protection telling you your car is too loud. Not because a police officer caught your noisy car, but because a computer did.


----------



## ekim68

The U.S. is now energy independent



> U.S. petroleum production and consumption


----------



## ekim68

How a Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world



> WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world's most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.
> 
> It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists boost the mosquito-killing effect of natural clove oil



> The best method of limiting the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases is to kill the mosquito larvae, but doing so often involves the use of synthetic insecticides. A new study now suggests a method of improving the effectiveness of a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative - clove oil.


----------



## ekim68

FDA clears first smartphone app for insulin delivery



> The Food and Drug Administration cleared a smartphone app from Tandem Diabetes Care to program insulin delivery for its t:slim X2 insulin pump, the company announced Wednesday. It's the first phone app for both iOS and Android to able to deliver insulin, the company said in a statement. Previously, delivery had to be handled through the pump itself.


----------



## ekim68

Humans Find AI-Generated Faces More Trustworthy Than the Real Thing



> Viewers struggle to distinguish images of sophisticated machine-generated faces from actual humans


----------



## ekim68

Linux developers patch security holes faster than anyone else, says Google Project Zero



> There's a lot of FUD about how Linux is being shown recently to be less secure than proprietary systems. That's nonsense. But, now there are hard facts from Google's Project Zero, Google's security research team, showing Linux's developers do a faster job of fixing security bugs than anyone else, including Google.


----------



## Johnny b

Gasoline prices about to go up ( and it's not from inflation )

*Explosion, fire rock Louisiana oil refinery *
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...marathon-explosion-fire-garyville/6879774001/



> The refinery, on Mississippi River, has a crude oil refining capacity of 578,000 barrels per day, according to the company's website. A major expansion project was completed in 2009 that increased Garyville's crude oil refining capacity, making it one of the largest refineries in the U.S.


----------



## ekim68

Investors bought a record share
of homes in 2021. See where.



> Last year, investors bought nearly one in seven homes sold in America's top metropolitan areas, the most in at least two decades, according to the realty company Redfin.
> 
> Those purchases come at a time when would-be buyers across the country are seeing wildly escalating prices, raising the question of what impact investors are having on prices for everyone else. Investors were even more aggressive in the final three months of the year, buying 15 percent of all homes that sold in the 40 markets.


----------



## ekim68

You can now see how many Uber drivers liked (or hated) you



> Uber drivers have been rating riders for years. A new option in the app lets everyone see how many one-star ratings they've received.


----------



## ekim68

First-ever recording of dying human brain reveals dreaming-like activity



> "My whole life flashed before my eyes" is a phrase we often hear regarding near-death experiences - and there just might be some truth to it. Scientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever, revealing brain wave patterns related to processes like dreaming and memory recall.


----------



## ekim68

Sound waves convert stem cells into bone in regenerative breakthrough



> Regrowing or replacing bone lost to disease is tricky and often painful. In a new study Australian researchers have found a relatively simple way to induce stem cells to turn into bone cells quickly and efficiently, using high-frequency sound waves.


----------



## ekim68

The C.D.C. Isn't Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects



> The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.


----------



## ekim68

AMD is now worth more than rival Intel



> Score another notable win for chip giant AMD (AMD) against its heated rival Intel.
> 
> AMD's market cap currently stands at $188 billion after shares rose nearly 2% in Tuesday's session. Intel's market cap is $182 billion. That marks the second time in a week AMD's market value has climbed above Intel - the first time it happened was a week ago.


----------



## ekim68

How Exxon, BP and Shell help Russia pump oil and gas



> But any action that affects Russia's energy interests will highlight the role played by some of the West's biggest players, which have generated billions of dollars for the Russian state and are among the country's leading foreign investors.
> 
> Here's how ExxonMobil (XOM), BP (BP) and Shell (RDSA) are helping keep Russia's oil-dependent economy afloat.


----------



## ekim68

Methane emissions from the energy sector are 70% higher than official figures



> The IEA's Global Methane Tracker shows emissions from oil, gas and coal are on the rise again, underscoring need for greater transparency, stronger policies and immediate action


----------



## ekim68

University of Oxford researchers create largest ever human family tree



> Researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute have taken a major step towards mapping the entirety of genetic relationships among humans: a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of us.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Says Penalized By Russia After Refusing To Halt Fact-checkers



> Facebook's parent company Meta said Friday that Russia will hit its services with restrictions after the social media giant defied authorities' order to stop fact-checkers and content warning labels on its platforms.


----------



## ekim68

YouTube Blocks RT, Other Russian Channels From Earning Ad Dollars



> (Reuters) - YouTube on Saturday barred Russian state-owned media outlet RT and other Russian channels from receiving money for advertisements that run with their videos, similar to a move by Facebook, after the invasion of Ukraine.


----------



## ekim68

Electric vehicle battery recycling is starting in California



> Redwood Materials Inc., founded by ex-Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel, is launching an electric vehicle battery-recycling program in California. Automakers Ford and Volvo are the first to partner with the Carson City, Nevada-based company.


----------



## ekim68

Anonymous launches attacks against Russia and pledges support for Ukraine against 'Kremlin's brutal invasion'



> Hacking group Anonymous has said that it will support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and has already claimed an attack on the state-controlled TV network Russia Today.


----------



## ekim68

Brazilian academics create automated fake news detection platform



> A group of Brazilian researchers has created a web platform that is able to identify false information online in an automated manner.
> 
> Developed by academics at the Center for Mathematical Sciences Applied to Industry (CeMEAI), the system uses a combination of statistical models and machine learning techniques to establish whether a specific content in Brazilian Portuguese is likely to be false. Initial tests suggest the platform is able to detect fake news with a 96% accuracy.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk says SpaceX's Starlink satellites active over Ukraine after request from embattled country's leaders



> Elon Musk says SpaceX's Starlink satellites are now active over Ukraine after a request from the embattled country's leadership to replace internet services destroyed by the Russian attack.


----------



## ekim68

Lead ammunition appears to be chronically poisoning American eagles



> A new study has found that nearly half of all bald and golden eagles in the USA suffer from chronic and/or acute lead poisoning, which the research team believes is the result of these birds scavenging the remains of animals shot with lead bullets.
> 
> The study evaluated signs of lead exposure in a total of 1,210 bald and golden eagles from 38 states across America, taking blood samples from live eagles, and examining bone, livers and feathers from dead birds.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX shipment of Starlink satellite-internet dishes arrives in Ukraine, government official says



> A shipment of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-internet dishes arrived in Ukraine on Monday, less than 48 hours after CEO Elon Musk announced the company would send support, according to a top official in the nation's government.


----------



## ekim68

Nvidia Allegedly Hacks Hackers Who Stole Company's Data



> Nvidia yesterday launched an investigation into a hacker group that stole over 1TB of the chipmaker's data. Underground group, Vx-underground, has shared on its Twitter account that Nvidia has reportedly retaliated by sneaking back into the hacker's system and encrypting the stolen data.


----------



## ekim68

UK scientists fear brain drain as Brexit rows put research at risk



> British science is facing the threat of a highly damaging brain drain that could see scores of top young researchers leaving the UK. In addition, the futures of several major British-led international projects are also now in jeopardy following a delay in funding by the European Union.


----------



## ekim68

Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn't Forget Russia's War on Ukraine



> As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine's online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict.


----------



## ekim68

Battery-electric "Infinity Train" will charge itself using gravity



> Australian mining company Fortescue is working to clean up its own operations by 2030, while developing green solutions it can sell to others. It's forking out into green tech through a subsidiary called Fortescue Future Industries, which has recently acquired Williams Advanced Engineering. Today, the two companies announced their first project together: an electric "infinity train" designed to move loads of iron ore without ever needing to be charged.


----------



## ekim68

College kid's Twitter bot that stalks Musk's jet now tracking Russian oligarchs



> Late last night, an Airbus A340-300 took off from Munich International Airport in Germany. It's possible that the plane was empty apart from the crew, though it may have been carrying a passenger who was looking to get out of town quickly. The brown-and-white jet, named "Bourkhan," is owned by Alisher Usmanov, who has been known to visit spas in the Bavarian Alps. At the time of the takeoff, the Russian oligarch had been banned from travel in the European Union five hours earlier.
> 
> Twenty minutes later, a Twitter bot created by a college student dutifully fired off a tweet notifying anyone who was watching that Usmanov's plane was headed east.


----------



## ekim68

Mathematicians Protest Russia Hosting Major Conference



> As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July.


----------



## ekim68

Cryptographers Achieve Perfect Secrecy With Imperfect Devices



> For the first time, experiments demonstrate the possibility of sharing secrets with perfect privacy - even when the devices used to share them cannot be trusted.


----------



## ekim68

Here's What Happens When
Investors Ignore Corruption



> Bill Browder, the co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, said there's one message to take from investors who now are in a mad dash to sell their Russian securities, even if they incur a total loss: Stay out of corrupt countries or you'll lose your money.


----------



## ekim68

California issues permits to Cruise, Waymo for autonomous vehicle service



> WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) - The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on Monday issued permits to self-driving units of General Motors (GM.N) and Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) to allow for passenger service in autonomous vehicles with safety drivers present.


----------



## ekim68

Ukraine: Watching the war on Russian TV - a whole different story



> Never was there a better illustration of the alternative reality presented by Russian state media than at 17:00 GMT on Tuesday. As BBC World TV opened its bulletin with reports of a Russian attack on a TV tower in the capital Kyiv, Russian TV was announcing that Ukraine was responsible for strikes on its own cities.


----------



## ekim68

The Elephant in the Courtroom



> According to the civil-law code of the state of New York, a writ of habeas corpus may be obtained by any "person" who has been illegally detained. In Bronx County, most such claims arrive on behalf of prisoners on Rikers Island. Habeas petitions are not often heard in court, which was only one reason that the case before New York Supreme Court Justice Alison Y. Tuitt-Nonhuman Rights Project v. James Breheny, et al.-was extraordinary. The subject of the petition was Happy, an Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo. American law treats all animals as "things"-the same category as rocks or roller skates. However, if the Justice granted the habeas petition to move Happy from the zoo to a sanctuary, in the eyes of the law she would be a person. She would have rights.


----------



## ekim68

Protein tweak makes CRISPR gene editing 4,000 times less error-prone



> The CRISPR gene-editing system is a powerful tool that could revolutionize medicine and other sciences, but unfortunately it has a tendency to make edits to the wrong sections of DNA. Now, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have identified a previously unknown structure of the protein that drives these mistakes, and tweaked it to reduce the likelihood of off-target mutations by 4,000 times.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk: "High" probability of Russian attacks on Starlink in Ukraine



> SpaceX CEO Elon Musk yesterday warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions. "Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution," Musk tweeted.
> 
> When asked for specific advice, Musk said people in Ukraine should turn Starlink on only when it's needed, place the antenna "as far away from people as possible," and "place light camouflage over [the] antenna to avoid visual detection." A thin layer of spray paint would work if there are no metal particles in the paint, he wrote.


----------



## ekim68

NSA report: This is how you should be securing your network



> US spy agency NSA has given its most up-to-date guidance for protecting networks against attacks.


----------



## ekim68

Wolf of Main Street



> The fastest-growing landlord in the U.S. Midwest, Monarch Investment and Management Group, used evictions to drive up rents during the pandemic.


----------



## ekim68

ONE's 752-mile EV battery propels plans for its first US factory



> Michigan-based startup Our Next Energy (ONE) is on a mission to provide cheap batteries that propel electric vehicles much farther on each charge, and the last few months have seen it make some serious waves in the space. Having demonstrated a 752-mile (1,210-km) range for its Gemini battery last year, the company has now raised millions in new funding as it scouts locations for its first battery plant in the US, with production to kick off later this year.


----------



## ekim68

Russia mulls legalizing software piracy as it's cut off from Western tech



> With sanctions against Russia starting to bite, the Kremlin is mulling ways to keep businesses and the government running. The latest is a creative twist on state asset seizures, only instead of the government taking over an oil refinery, for example, Russia is considering legalizing software piracy.


----------



## ekim68

China plans a mammoth 450 GW of wind and solar in its deserts



> China already dominates renewable energy production. Its installed capacity of around 895 GW in 2020 was more than the European Union, the USA and Australia combined. And while the world in general is accelerating its transition to renewable power, China is growing its capacity faster than anyone else as well.
> 
> Now, according to Reuters, it's got a series of mammoth solar and wind projects in the pipeline that will expand its current capacity by nearly half a terawatt.


----------



## ekim68

Britain to start approval process for Rolls-Royce mini nuclear reactor



> LONDON, March 7 (Reuters) - The British government has asked its nuclear regulator to start the process for approving Rolls-Royce's (RR.L) planned small- scale modular nuclear reactor, which policymakers hope will help cut dependence on fossil fuels and lower carbon emissions.


----------



## ekim68

Putin's Hollywood pals - the stars who snuggled up to the Russian dictator



> From Leonardo DiCaprio to Steven Seagal, Tinseltown's biggest names were once happy to hang out with the invading president. Are they all now cringing? Not entirely


----------



## ekim68

Timing, eh? 


Japan renews island dispute with Russia



> Japan's government has renewed its claims in a territorial dispute with Russia over the Pacific archipelago of the Southern Kuril Islands.
> 
> Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi on Tuesday described the four islands as an "integral part" of Japan, the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun reported.


----------



## ekim68

Cybersecurity firm says Chinese hackers breached six US state agencies



> A Chinese government-backed hacking group has breached local government agencies in at least six US states in the last 10 months as part of a persistent information-gathering operation, investigators at cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Tuesday.
> 
> The wide range of state agencies targeted include "health, transportation, labor (including unemployment benefit systems), higher education, agriculture, and court networks and systems," the FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in a separate, private advisory to state governments obtained by CNN.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T/DirecTV Implosion Could Give Apple NFL Sunday Ticket



> It's really hard to overstate what a colossal failure AT&T's $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was. And if you're an AT&T executive with a bruised ego in the wake of the implosion, the hits just keep on coming.


----------



## ekim68

Here's What Happens
When Managers Get
Rewarded for Good
Performance - But Not
Punished as Much for Losses



> It's rational behavior: Investors eagerly reward asset managers for generating outsize returns. Although they do yank out some of their money when returns turn to losses, the punishment isn't proportional to those earlier rewards. An analyst at the European Central Bank argues that this behavior creates risks for the entire financial system that need to be addressed.


----------



## ekim68

Five lessons Taiwan is learning from the war in Ukraine



> Ukraine and Taiwan both have autocratic neighbors with an appetite for their land; people in Taiwan are hoping the similarities end there.


----------



## ekim68

Terrorism, Nuclear Weapons, China Viewed as Top U.S. Threats



> WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans generally regard terrorism, the development of nuclear weapons by unfriendly countries, and China's military power as the most critical threats to U.S. vital interests.


----------



## ekim68

China led world with 500,000 electric car exports in 2021



> Shipments jumped 160% with EU-bound EVs growing fivefold to 230,000


----------



## ekim68

CD sales grow for first time since 2004



> Dust off those plastic binders that lived in the back seat of your car and fire up the boombox, because compact discs are back.


----------



## ekim68

HOW DID THIS MANY DEATHS BECOME NORMAL?



> The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?


----------



## ekim68

U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated vehicles



> WASHINGTON, March 10 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards.





> The rules revise regulations that assume vehicles "will always have a driver's seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position."


----------



## ekim68

Walgreens replaced some fridge doors with screens. And some shoppers absolutely hate it



> Walgreens and other retailers have swapped out the clear fridge and freezer doors at thousands of stores, instead adding opaque doors with iPad-like screens showing what's inside. Some customers really, really aren't into it.
> 
> The screens, which were developed by the startup Cooler Screens, use a system of motion sensors and cameras to display what's inside the doors - as well as product information, prices, deals and, most appealing to brands, paid advertisements. The tech provides stores with an additional revenue stream and a way to modernize the shopping experience.


----------



## ekim68

The long, strange history of anti-vaccination movements



> This sounds like a tale of the Covid-19 era, with a vocal minority of vaccine opponents staging rallies and filing lawsuits across the United States. But all of the above also happened in 19th-century England, when the government mandated the smallpox vaccine for children. "As soon as that mandate is introduced, that's when we get an organized anti-vaccination movement," said Nadja Durbach, a history professor at the University of Utah. "That's when people are like, 'Oh my God, you cannot tell me to do this to my child.'"


----------



## ekim68

Happy Pi Day.... 

Pi calculated to 62.8 trillion digits, setting new world record



> Most of us can recall Pi to four or five digits, thanks to high school math, but now a team of Swiss scientists has broken the world record for calculating the mathematical constant. It took three and a half months and a data center's worth of computer equipment, but the researchers have calculated Pi to a staggering 62.8 trillion digits.


----------



## ekim68

'The Kremlin is lying': Hackers build tool to let anyone text Russian citizens about the war in Ukraine



> Hackers have created an online tool that lets users auto-text message random Russian phone numbers with information about the war in Ukraine.
> 
> Created by the hacking group known as Squad303, the tool, hosted at the domain 1920.in, loads a pre-written statement into a user's native SMS app that attempts to inform Russians about the ongoing conflict.


----------



## ekim68

This Year's Flu Vaccine Was Basically Worthless



> This winter's flu vaccine was a particularly bad match for the most common influenza strain in circulation, a new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Thankfully, the flu season was much milder than usual for the second year in a row, as ongoing covid-19 precautions likely blunted the spread of flu as well.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft is testing ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer



> Microsoft has begun testing promotions for some of its other products in the File Explorer app on devices running its latest Windows 11 Insider build.


----------



## ekim68

Ford plans seven new EVs and massive battery plant for Europe



> Ford has announced plans to significantly ramp up its electrification efforts in Europe, outlining seven new EV models for the region and massive new investment in an assembly plant in Cologne, Germany. The new generation of electric vehicles will include passenger and commercial models, with manufacturing to be supported by what could become one of Europe's biggest battery factories.


----------



## ekim68

Lead exposure in last century shrank IQ scores of half of Americans, study finds



> A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.


----------



## ekim68

Hoverfly vision circuits radically boost long-distance drone detection



> Consumer grade drones might be annoyingly buzzy when they're close by, but detecting them at a distance has been challenging - especially considering their potential as weapons or surveillance tools, as well as their ability to shut down helicopter and commercial flight operations.
> 
> New research out of Flinders University and the University of South Australia has made an impressive leap in long-distance drone detection, using signal processing algorithms inspired by the hoverfly's ability to see targets in very low light environments.


----------



## ekim68

In the Ukraine Conflict, Fake Fact-Checks Are Being Used to Spread Disinformation



> Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn't stop them from being featured on Russian state TV.


----------



## ekim68

Google's domain name registrar is out of beta after seven years



> Seven long, long years ago, Google started offering users a way to buy a domain without having to deal with a host provider. Now, Google Domains is at last out of beta as a full-fledged product.


----------



## ekim68

Ex-NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly Says He's Ending Feud With Russian Space Chief



> Decision comes after NASA sent an email to former astronauts asking them to back off criticizing Russian partners


----------



## ekim68

Congressional bills would ban tech mergers over $5 billion



> Senator Elizabeth Warren has long made clear that she's no fan of Big Tech, and her latest legislation proves it. She and House Representative Mondaire Jones have introduced legislation in their respective congressional chambers that would effectively ban large technology mergers. The Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act (PAMA) would make it illegal to pursue "prohibited mergers," including those worth more than $5 billion or which provide market shares beyond 25 percent for employers and 33 percent for sellers.


----------



## ekim68

US schools can subscribe to an electric school bus fleet at prices that beat diesel



> Electric school buses are a hot commodity. Billions of dollars of federal and state grants and incentives are flowing to U.S. school districts to help them electrify their fleets. By replacing diesel buses with clean and quiet battery-powered models, they can slash fuel and maintenance costs and cut air and noise pollution.


----------



## ekim68

Cities are switching to "smart" rat control



> Forget toxic pesticides: The next generation of urban rodent control relies on internet-connected traps that shock or impale a rat or mouse before isolating it in a chamber for disposal.


----------



## Johnny b

Sign of the times?

I was visiting Best Buy's web site.
Thought I'd check out the 'Deal of the Day'.

Hmmm?
Save $1200.
Buy $3K TV for just $1.8K
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/misc/deal-of-the-day/pcmcat248000050016.c?id=pcmcat248000050016

What a deal....I laughed.


----------



## ekim68

Russia's billionaires: Who they are, what they own - and can they influence Vladimir Putin?



> Targeting oligarchs is popular. It's not clear it can help end a war.


----------



## ekim68

These companies continue to do business in Russia



> The list of companies continuing to operate in Russia is shrinking by the minute, but several dozen corporations including multinational manufacturers and fast-food chains are still doing business in the country despite intense public pressure to withdraw over its invasion of Ukraine.


----------



## ekim68

Simple electrical circuit learns on its own-with no help from a computer



> A simple electrical circuit has learned to recognize flowers based on their petal size. That may seem trivial compared with artificial intelligence (AI) systems that recognize faces in a crowd, transcribe spoken words into text, and perform other astounding feats. However, the tiny circuit outshines conventional machine learning systems in one key way: It teaches itself without any help from a computer-akin to a living brain. The result demonstrates one way to avoid the massive amount of computation typically required to tune an AI system, an issue that could become more of a roadblock as such programs grow increasingly complex.


----------



## ekim68

Russian cosmonauts arrive at ISS in colours of Ukraine flag



> Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station last night in flight suits made in the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag, in what appeared to be a daring statement against the war.


----------



## ekim68

Cable TV Companies Lost Nearly 5 Million Subscribers in 2021



> Remember when the cable and broadcast industry insisted that "cord cutting" (ditching traditional cable TV subscriptions) wasn't actually a real trend? Or how, once they finally acknowledged it was a real thing, insisted that it was just a temporary fad that would abate once Millennials started having babies?
> 
> Years later and amazingly enough the very real trend shows absolutely no sign of slowing down.


----------



## ekim68

GE produces world's largest recyclable wind turbine blade



> Through its massive wind turbines and innovative offshore designs, GE continues sharpening its toolkit in a bid to built the future of sustainable energy, and a newly unveiled turbine blade shows how that can extend to the materials used. A consortium led by the company has manufactured the world's largest thermoplastic blade, designed to serve as full-scale example of a fully recyclable wind turbine blade.


----------



## Johnny b

And I thought a $1800 TV was outrageous lol!

* LG lowers the price of entry for an 8K OLED TV-to $13,000 *
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/lgs-lowers-the-price-on-its-new-8k-oled-tv-to-13000/



> After announcing the Z2 series of 8K OLED TVs in January, LG said on Monday that the Z2 TVs will release in April. The 76.7-inch TV will come in at $12,999, while the 87.6-inch model will cost $24,999. That's $7,000 cheaper than 2020's ZX 76.7-inch 8K OLED TV and $5,000 cheaper than the 88-inch class.


What a deal 

Sign of the times......
Looks like there'll be a need for a bigger home.


----------



## ekim68

Russians Are Racing to Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned



> On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia.





> Alexander is neither a regular Wikipedia editor nor a die-hard enthusiast, but he wants a source of information based on reliable and neutral sources, and independent of the Kremlin. He likes reading Wikipedia to learn about all sorts of topics-from the frivolous (Mozart and scatology) to the complex (geopolitics)-and he considers Wikipedia more trustworthy than the Russian media. After complaining about his crumbling life and disillusionment with his country, he was quick to share a note of sympathy for Ukraine: "I almost feel ashamed to discuss the struggles that we have in Russia these days."


----------



## ekim68

NVIDIA's Drive Map to chart 500,000 km of roads for autonomous cars 



> NVIDIA has been lending its expertise in computing to the world of autonomous vehicles for some time now, and a newly announced platform is designed improve the safety of these vehicles as they hit the streets. Called Drive Map, the technology will offer mapping of 500,000 km (310,00 miles) of roads around the world with centimeter-level accuracy, enabling self-driving vehicles to more easily find their way around.


----------



## ekim68

Young Ukrainian escapes war with USB stick holding 40% of his life savings in crypto



> As the Russian invasion of Ukraine nears its fifth week, it has been shown that cryptocurrencies have helped Ukrainian refugees in more than one way after being forced from their homes.





> One of them is a 20-year-old man identified by the pseudonym 'Fadey', who managed to escape war and cross into Poland with 40% of his life savings in Bitcoin (BTC) contained on a USB stick, _CNBC _reported on March 23.


----------



## ekim68

This Windows 1.0 easter egg managed to stay hidden for nearly 37 years



> Lucas Brooks, an avid Windows fan who digs through and analyzes its early iterations, recently shared his discovery of an easter egg that's been hiding in Windows 1.0 for nearly 37 years.
> 
> Brooks discovered the secret, a credits list of Windows developers and a "congratulations" message, buried in the data of a smiley face bitmap file that came with the OS.


----------



## ekim68

Electrify America's solar-topped stations to recharge EVs in style



> VW subsidiary Electrify America is out to offer electric vehicle owners a plethora of locations to charge up their rides, and its next-generation stations should make them more comfortable while doing it. The vision includes customer lounges, solar canopies, and updated displays and cables, as the company continues building out its cross-country network of charging infrastructure.
> 
> Electrify America is aiming to install more than 1,800 charging stations across the US and Canada by 2026, and last year we saw the completion of its first-cross country route.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists identify neurons in the brain that drive competition and social behavior within groups



> New research in mice has identified neurons in the brain that influence competitive interactions between individuals and that play a critical role in shaping the social behavior of groups. Published in _Nature_ by a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the findings will be useful not only for scientists interested in human interactions but also for those who study neurocognitive conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia that are characterized by altered social behavior.


----------



## ekim68

Retro computing museum in Ukraine destroyed by Russian bomb



> Containing 120 retro computers and consoles, and over 500 tech exhibits in total, the privately owned collection now only exists in memories online.


----------



## ekim68

Stem cells may finally offer a cure for Type 1 diabetes



> When people have Type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks and destroys the beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin. These cells regulate glucose levels in the blood which the body needs for energy. Blood sugar will continue to rise without insulin, so Type 1 diabetics must inject insulin for the rest of their lives.
> 
> But over the past 20 years, significant advancements in stem cell research and therapies have revealed promising methods of creating new insulin-making cells, which are needed to cure Type 1 diabetes.


----------



## ekim68

First chicken-free egg white product reaches US markets



> One of the first products made using a novel animal-free egg white is now available in the United States. The unique macarons are the first to be made with an egg white protein that comes from engineered yeast, designed to be indistinguishable from what is found in chicken eggs.


----------



## ekim68

Car dealers are charging buyers more because that's capitalism, baby



> Car dealers are charging way over sticker price - and consumers are paying.


----------



## ekim68

Global science project links Android phones with satellites to improve weather forecasts



> Collecting satellite data for research is a group effort thanks to this app developed for Android users. Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European Space Agency, and its first project focuses on making smartphone owners around the world part of a project that can help improve weather forecasts by using your phone's GPS receiver.


----------



## ekim68

World-first trial puts remote-controlled passenger cars on UK roads



> Once the steering wheel is taken out of cars altogether, there will still need to be a way to deal with weird "edge case" situations that an autonomous AI can't figure out. That may require human drivers to stay on standby, ready to take the wheel by remote control until the self-driving system is comfortable enough to continue.
> 
> A UK Government-funded project has just demonstrated such a system for the first time, with vehicles on public roads in Oxford and London switching control between a driver, an autonomous system and a remote teleoperator over a cyber-secure connection.


----------



## ekim68

Implantable immunotherapy "factory" fights cancer faster, more effectively



> Researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) have developed a marshmallow-like implant that can train a patient's immune system to fight off cancer. In tests in mice, the technique was more effective against cancer and could be enacted much faster than other immunotherapies.


----------



## ekim68

Apple Stores Will Now Decline to Repair iPhones Reported as Missing



> If an Apple technician sees a message in their internal MobileGenius or GSX systems indicating that the device has been reported as missing, they are instructed to decline the repair, according to Apple's memo shared on Monday. The new policy should help to reduce the amount of stolen iPhones brought to Apple for repair.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft is finally making it easier to switch default browsers in Windows 11



> Microsoft is finally making it easier to change your default browser in Windows 11. A new update (KB5011563) has started rolling out this week that allows Windows 11 users to change a default browser with a single click. After testing the changes in December, this new one-click method is rolling out to all Windows 11 users.


----------



## ekim68

Climate groups say a change in coding can reduce bitcoin energy consumption by 99%



> A simple switch in the way transactions are verified could reduce bitcoin's energy-guzzling mining habits


----------



## ekim68

Teledyne LVSS anti-drone system tracks up to 500 targets at once



> There are a number of ways of countering small drones that vary greatly in size and efficacy. Using a shotgun is one approach, but there are more practical solutions out there such as quadcopters carrying nets, net-shooting guns, aimable radio jammers that look like sci-fi ray guns, suicide drones to ram invaders, high-energy lasers, and even eagles.
> 
> The LVSS is at the high end of the spectrum, like the lasers mounted on trucks or warships. Its function isn't to deal with one or two rogue drones, but swarms that can number in the hundreds over large areas where they might be used not only as weapons, but as reconnaissance craft or smuggling platforms.


----------



## ekim68

Airbus flies A380 passenger jet on 100% biofuel for the first time



> As part of a broader push on part of the aviation industry to reduce its carbon footprint, Airbus has conducted the first ever flight of its giant A380 jumbo jet using 100 percent biofuel. This is the third Airbus aircraft to fly using the sustainable fuel made up of primarily cooking oil, as the company works to certify the technology by the end of the decade.


----------



## ekim68

Did Sweden beat the pandemic by refusing to lock down? No, its record is disastrous



> Throughout much of the pandemic, Sweden has stood out for its ostensibly successful effort to beat COVID-19 while avoiding the harsh lockdowns and social distancing rules imposed on residents of other developed nations.





> A new study by European scientific researchers buries all those claims in the ground. Published in Nature, the study paints a devastating picture of Swedish policies and their effects.


----------



## ekim68

BW: History Shows War Shocks Have a Modest Impact on Equities



> Market reactions to dangerous events like Russia's war in Ukraine tend not to damage stock valuations over the long term.


----------



## ekim68

Renewables became the second-most prevalent U.S. electricity source in 2020



> In 2020, renewable energy sources (including wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy) generated a record 834 billion kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity, or about 21% of all the electricity generated in the United States. Only natural gas (1,617 billion kWh) produced more electricity than renewables in the United States in 2020. Renewables surpassed both nuclear (790 billion kWh) and coal (774 billion kWh) for the first time on record. This outcome in 2020 was due mostly to significantly less coal use in U.S. electricity generation and steadily increased use of wind and solar.


----------



## ekim68

New vehicles must average 40 mpg by 2026, up from 28 mpg






> DETROIT (AP) - New vehicles sold in the U.S. will have to average at least 40 miles per gallon of gasoline in 2026, up from about 28 mpg, under new federal rules unveiled Friday that undo a rollback of standards enacted under President Donald Trump.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. Military Spending vs Other Top Countries



> U.S. military spending surpassed *$778 billion* in 2020.
> 
> The U.S. spends more on its military than the next *nine* highest spending countries combined.


----------



## ekim68

Google offers employees free electric scooters to get them back to the office



> Google is preparing to bring its employees back to the office this week, and as an added bonus, it'll be offering them free electric scooters to help ease the transition.
> 
> The tech giant is teaming up with e-scooter maker Unagi to launch a new program called "Ride Scoot," in which most of Google's US-based workers can get reimbursed for the full cost of a monthly subscription to Unagi's stylish Model One scooter.


----------



## ekim68

Efforts to ban books jumped an 'unprecedented' four-fold in 2021, ALA report says



> Book banning is not new - in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book _New English Caanan_ and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts.
> 
> But the American Library Association said Monday that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000.


----------



## ekim68

Hertz will order up to 65,000 Polestar EVs for its rental fleet



> Hertz isn't just leaning on Tesla to electrify its fleet. The rental car agency has struck a deal that will see it buy "up to" 65,000 Polestar EVs over the next five years. The initial mix will focus on the Polestar 2 sedan, but should expand to other models over time. Vehicles will be available to rent in Europe starting this spring, and should reach both North America and Australia late this year.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast wanted man to pay $19,000 after falsely advertising service on his street



> Comcast's ordering website falsely stated that Internet service was available.


----------



## ekim68

7,000 steps can save your life



> Want to live longer? Take a hike - a shorter one than you've been told.
> 
> 
> *Stunning stat: *Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research.
> *Why it matters:* 7,000 is the new 10,000, in terms of steps you should shoot for, _The Lancet_ medical journal reports.


----------



## ekim68

Rich companies are using a quiet tactic to block lawsuits: bankruptcy



> Johnson & Johnson, which is headquartered in New Jersey, is valued at more than $400 billion. But in October 2021, the company used a controversial legal maneuver in bankruptcy court to freeze Wilt's case along with thousands of others.


----------



## ekim68

Police Records Show Women Are Being Stalked With Apple AirTags Across the Country



> One year ago this month, Apple unveiled the AirTag, a shiny, half-dollar-sized coin with a speaker, Bluetooth antenna, and battery inside, which helps users keep track of their missing items. Attach an AirTag to your purse, keys, wallet, or even your car, and if you lose it, the device will ping every nearby Apple product with Bluetooth turned on to triangulate its location. Those devices send its location back to you on a map, showing where the AirTag has been and its current location.
> 
> Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women.


----------



## ekim68

Lockheed's HAWC hypersonic missile makes successful test flight 



> The March flight follows on from the first HAWC flight on September 20, 2021, which was made by a different vehicle built by Raytheon Missiles & Defense and Northrop Grumman. Details of the latest test flight by the Lockheed version, which is powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjet engine, are sparse, but after being dropped from a B-52 bomber the missile reached a speed in excess of Mach 5 and flew at an altitude of over 65,000 ft (20,000 m) for a distance of over 300 nm (345 miles, 555 km).


----------



## ekim68

Nissan, NASA teaming on "game changing" electric vehicle batteries so stable they could be used in pacemakers, Nissan says

_



Tokyo

Click to expand...

_


> - Nissan is working with NASA on a new type of battery for electric vehicles that promises to charge more quickly and be lighter yet safe, the Japanese automaker said Friday.


----------



## ekim68

Fed-up managers declare WFH is over, as 77% say they'd fire you or cut your pay for not coming back to the office



> Working from home. It was fun while it lasted?
> 
> About three out of five managers believe that remote work is on the wane and workers will be back in the office full-time by the end of this year.
> 
> And they're apparently prepared to use some tough tactics to get workers back at their desks.


----------



## ekim68

Trust in Media 2022: Where Americans get their news and who they trust for information



> YouGov asked 1,500 Americans where they get their news from and how much they trust a variety of prominent media organizations and news anchors.


----------



## ekim68

Google Partnering With iFixit to Sell Pixel Replacement Parts



> Google is partnering with iFixit to sell official replacement parts for its Pixel phones later this year, making it easier for independent professionals and consumers to repair the devices.


----------



## ekim68

Tiny labmade motors could one day suck pollutants from the air and harvest precious metals



> Tiny molecular machines make life possible. Spinning rotary motors generate the chemical fuel our cells need, miniature walkers carry nutrients, and minute construction crews build proteins. Now, chemists are getting in on the act by making even smaller and simpler versions of these biological machines.


----------



## ekim68

DHC-515 firefighting seaplane reloads from bodies of water in 12 seconds



> De Havilland Canada has introduced its latest seaplane for battling forest and wildfires, the DHC-515 Firefighter. The new plane features a number of upgrades, including the ability to take on a full load of fresh or saltwater in 12 seconds.


----------



## ekim68

Nissan and NASA team up on 15-minute EV charging



> Nissan has joined other big-name automakers in outlining a vision around next-generation battery technology, which includes plans for a dedicated production facility and possible 15-minute charging times for electric vehicles. The company sees cheaper solid-state batteries as a key pillar in this strategy, and has reportedly teamed up with NASA to help make them a reality.


----------



## ekim68

Liquid system stores solar energy for years and releases it on demand



> Back in 2017 we caught wind of an interesting energy system from researchers at Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology designed to store solar energy in liquid form. By hooking it up to an ultra-thin thermoelectric generator, the team has now demonstrated that it can produce electricity, a development it believes lays the groundwork for self-charging electronics that use solar power on demand.


----------



## ekim68

How much energy powers a good life? Less than you're using, says a new report



> How much energy does it take to have a good and healthy life? A new Stanford University study has found that the answer is far less than the average American is using.
> 
> Comparing energy use and quality of life across 140 countries, researchers found that the magic number is 75 gigajoules a year, or less. For context, one gigajoule of energy is equal to about 8 gallons of gasoline.
> 
> Americans use 284 gigajoules a year per capita, nearly four times that much energy, according to the new research.
Click to expand...


----------



## ekim68

Airbus hits the wind tunnel to pursue bird-inspired active wing control 

*







*


----------



## ekim68

America's gun culture - in seven charts



> Here is a selection of charts and maps on where America stands on the right to bear arms.


----------



## ekim68

The death of the gas station



> Slowly but surely, electric cars and trucks are taking over American highways. The White House aims for half of new vehicles sold in the US to be EVs by 2030, and auto giants like GM and Volvo want to go all-electric in a similar time frame. As utility companies hurry to expand the number of charging stations - a critical step for the EV transition - the future of the gas station is in doubt.


----------



## ekim68

ACE Shuts Down Massive Pirate Site After Locating Owner in Remote Peru



> As part of its global anti-piracy mission, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been trying to shut down Pelisplushd.net, a massive pirate streaming site with roughly 70 million visits per month. After tracking down its operator in the remote countryside of Peru, the anti-piracy group says the site is no more.


----------



## ekim68

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine



> Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency - a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.


----------



## ekim68

Technology turkeys: Major fails of the last 20 years



> For every iPhone and Netflix, there is a smartphone that catches fire or a gaming console riddled with problems from the moment it lands. This may be an era of great technological innovation, but success is far from a given in a landscape littered with failed crowdfunding campaigns and ill-conceived product ideas. As New Atlas celebrates it 20th birthday, let's cast an eye over some of the more notable technology fails in recent times, a list featuring ambitious startups and big-names you mightn't expect to put a foot wrong.


----------



## ekim68

US Navy shoots down drone using all-electric laser for the first time



> The US Navy has shot down its first drone representing a subsonic cruise missile using an all-electric high-energy laser. At the US Army's High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, the Lockheed Martin Layered Laser Defense (LLD) weapon disabled the engine on a drone, which then parachuted to earth.


----------



## ekim68

The Privatization Myth



> A deeply reported history of the past four decades of handing public services over to private companies provides a stunning account of how not to govern.


----------



## valis

All that said....privatization of space flight, IMO, has been a boon as opposed to a bane.


----------



## ekim68

I agree with that and I hope that the mixture of private/public continues in that direction. The article is pretty compelling, though. Such as Chicago being stuck with with a contract for the next 61 years after already losing 1 billion dollars on the deal.


----------



## ekim68

Book banning efforts are inspiring readers to form banned book clubs



> When Joslyn Diffenbaugh learned about efforts in Texas to remove certain books from school libraries and classrooms, she was surprised by the titles that were being challenged.
> 
> An avid reader, the 8th grader from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, said she had read several of the books in question. Among the titles that had come under attack in recent years were "The Hate U Give," a novel about a young Black girl who grapples with racism and police brutality, and "All American Boys," a novel about two teenagers -- one Black and one White -- who contend with similar issues.


----------



## ekim68

Our food system isn't ready for the climate crisis



> The climate breakdown is already threatening many of our favorite foods. In Asia, rice fields are being flooded with saltwater; cyclones have wiped out vanilla crops in Madagascar; in Central America higher temperatures ripen coffee too quickly; drought in sub-Saharan Africa is withering chickpea crops; and rising ocean acidity is killing oysters and scallops in American waters.


----------



## ekim68

Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms



> Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling.
> 
> The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from web scraping personal information from users' public profiles.


----------



## ekim68

"Iron Beam" laser weapon counters multiple targets in live fire tests 



> Rafael has successfully tested its Iron Beam laser weapon in various scenarios against steep-track threats, including UAVs, mortars, rockets, and anti-tank missiles. The weapon is set to complement Israel's famous Iron Dome aerial defense system


----------



## ekim68

Scientists Invent Device for Optimally Separating Oreos



> A team of mechanical engineers at MIT recently developed an "Oreometer" to test the optimal way of separating the two halves of an Oreo cookie, so that the wafers and the creme filling inside remained unbroken.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook's fibre optics in Nigerian state put Africa pivot in focus



> As company faces rising pressure in west, it is investing in digital infrastructure elsewhere


----------



## ekim68

Russian oligarch lambasts country's 'massacre'



> A Russian oligarch has lambasted the country's "massacre" in Ukraine and called for an end to the "crazy war".
> 
> Oleg Tinkov wrote in a profanity-littered Instagram post that he did not see "any beneficiary" of the conflict.


----------



## ekim68

Novel NASA alloy offers "remarkable" properties at extreme temperatures



> With a view to constructing more durable components that can withstand the very harsh environments in and around aircraft and jet engines, NASA researchers have developed a novel metal alloy with an impressive set of qualities at extreme temperatures. These include incredible strength that is double that of current state-of-the-art alloys, and far greater flexibility, which the team says could lead to key breakthroughs in sustainable flight.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. social media giants vowed to remove Russian war propaganda. It's still there.



> Grid found dozens of pro-invasion posts and accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram that appeared to violate the companies' policies and public statements.


----------



## ekim68

AirYacht would let passengers cruise both in the air and on the water



> Sailing the world's oceans in a yacht is all very well and good, but what if you want to cruise over the _land_ as well as on the water? Well, that's where the AirYacht is designed to come in, as it combines an airship with a yacht.





> Putting it simply, the AirYacht consists of two parts: a helium-filled airship, and a streamlined yacht which is coupled to its underside.


----------



## ekim68

US DoD greenlights mobile nuclear microreactor pilot in Idaho



> The US Department of Defense has announced that its Strategic Capabilities Office will go ahead with its plan to build and demonstrate a small nuclear reactor capable of being moved, and delivering between 1-5 megawatts of power for a minimum of three years.
> 
> This "Project Pele" microreactor, to be assembled and initially operated at the Idaho National Laboratory, will be the first American-built "Generation IV" nuclear reactor to generate electricity.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX signs its first deal for Starlink inflight Wi-Fi 



> SpaceX has found a new home for its satellite-powered internet, inking a deal with independent air carrier JSX to offer onboard Wi-Fi to customers later this year. That makes the airline the first to carry SpaceX's Starlink internet service, as the private space company continues shoring up the technology by launching more satellites into orbit.


----------



## ekim68

California's net neutrality law survives courtroom challenge



> As _Ars Technica_ puts it, "ISPs can't find any judges who will block California's Net Neutrality law", and it's not like they haven't been shopping hard.


----------



## ekim68

A gold rush in the deep sea raises questions about the authority charged with protecting it



> As Lodge's organization works to draft regulations that will allow robots to mine the seabed on an industrial scale, internal documents reviewed by The Times point to a closeness with mining companies that stands out as unorthodox in environmental regulation.
> 
> "The ISA is not fit to regulate any activity in international waters," said Sandor Mulsow, a marine geologist who served as the authority's top environmental official for more than five years, until 2019. "It is like to ask the wolf to take care of the sheep."


----------



## ekim68

Occidental plans up to $1 bln for facility to capture carbon from air



> Occidental Petroleum (OXY.N) on Wednesday outlined plans to advance its clean energy transition business, including spending between $800 million and $1 billion on a facility to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air.
> 
> The proposed facility, the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) project, is set to begin construction in the second half of this year in the Permian basin, the largest U.S. oilfield, with a start in 2024.


----------



## ekim68

Gun deaths were the leading killer of US children in 2020



> Guns overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death for US children and teenagers in 2020, new research shows.
> 
> Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that over 4,300 young Americans died of firearm-related injuries in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

Energy Department challenges students to wring more efficiency from EVs



> Your future electric car might benefit from some schoolwork. The Energy Department has teamed with GM and MathWorks to launch an EcoCAR Electric Vehicle Challenge that asks student groups at 15 North American universities to develop more efficient EV technology. The will have students tinker with a Cadillac Lyriq over four years as they develop automation, connectivity and propulsion tech, and they can will win annual prizes based on their progress.


----------



## ekim68

World's Leading Natural Gas Producers

(And other Ukraine/Russian stats..)


----------



## ekim68

On the road to wireless charging



> A trial of the first wireless, in-road charging system for electric vehicles in the United States is coming - and there's perhaps no place more fitting for this pilot than Detroit.
> 
> The city that led the nation's first wave of automobile technology is helping lead its second, as the Michigan Department of Transportation has awarded a $1.9 million contract to Electreon to install one mile of in-road EV charging in Motor City.


----------



## ekim68

This doesn't look very recessionary



> Economic data hasn't just been strong - they're exceeding expectations


----------



## ekim68

Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to young adults in the US



> The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is counteracting a ban on certain books by letting anyone in the US aged 13 to 21 apply for a digital library card. This gives teens and young adults, regardless of their location in the United States, access to the library's entire ebook collection.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla is already using cobalt-free LFP batteries in half of its new cars produced



> Iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which don't use nickel or cobalt, are traditionally cheaper and safer, but they offer less energy density, which means less efficient and shorter range for electric vehicles.
> 
> However, they have improved enough recently that it now makes sense to use cobalt-free batteries in lower-end and shorter-range vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

EU unveils plan for 'largest ever ban' on dangerous chemicals



> Thousands of potentially harmful chemicals could soon be prohibited in Europe under new restrictions, which campaigners have hailed as the strongest yet.
> 
> Earlier this year, scientists said chemical pollution had crossed a "planetary boundary" beyond which lies the breakdown of global ecosystems.


----------



## ekim68

Ford gets F-150 Lightning electric pickup rolling off assembly lines 



> America's best-selling vehicle series has officially gone electric. Ford kicked off production of the F-150 Lightning today, becoming the second manufacturer to get an all-electric pickup truck onto American roads, following Rivian. With a starting price just under US$40,000, up to 320 miles (515 km)of range and a best-ever 775 lb-ft (1,051 Nm) of torque, the Lightning promises big things for the hundreds of thousands of eager buyers lined up to place their order, as well as the auto market at large.


----------



## ekim68

Apple's Self Service Repair now available



> CUPERTINO, California Apple today announced Self Service Repair is now available, providing repair manuals and genuine Apple parts and tools through the Apple Self Service Repair Store. Self Service Repair is available in the US and will expand to additional countries - beginning in Europe - later this year.


----------



## ekim68

Ordinary copper telephone wire could carry gigabit broadband speeds



> Fibre-optic cable is being laid across the UK at great expense to speed up people's internet connections, but researchers claim that the copper telephone wire already in use across the country can achieve data rates three times higher than currently seen at a fraction of the price, at least over short distances. Their technique to boost speeds may help to ease the transition to nationwide fibre optic, and may also be of use in countries that use similar twisted-pair copper wire.


----------



## ekim68

Cloudflare detects one of the largest DDoS attacks on record targeting crypto platform



> Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said today that it mitigated one of the largest volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that has been recorded to date.
> 
> Cloudflare said it detected and mitigated a 15.3 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack earlier this month - making it one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record.


----------



## ekim68

Corvette is the next big name in cars to roll out an electric



> "We will have an electrified Corvette next year, so it's coming very quick," General Motors President Mark Reuss told CNBC on Monday.
> 
> An "electrified" Corvette will be available first, with a fully electric Corvette to follow, he said. Reuss didn't go into further details, such as a precise timeline or whether "electrified" means it will be a plug-in hybrid. The traditional Corvette with internal combustion engine will remain available for sale, Reuss acknowledged.


----------



## ekim68

US and over 55 other countries commit to democratic internet governance



> More than 55 countries and the United States announced their commitment Thursday to defending a free and open internet, agreeing to uphold digital human rights in response to rising authoritarianism in cyberspace.
> 
> The agreement, known as the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, aims to forestall an emerging "splinternet" characterized by the growing repression of internet users in closed regimes such as Russia and China - and the divergence of those countries from the internet's founding principles of universal access and unfettered information flow.


----------



## ekim68

VR Researchers Have Basically Figured Out How to Simulate the Feel of Kisses



> Without adding any hardware that actually makes contact with the wearer's face, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Future Interfaces Group have modified an off-the-shelf virtual reality headset so that it recreates the sensation of touch in and around a user's mouth, finally fulfilling virtual reality's inevitable one true purpose.


----------



## ekim68

You Can Finally Get Your Personal Information Off Google



> This week, Google announced they will now allow people to request to remove their personal contact information from its search results. The tech company is permitting the withdrawal of phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses in an attempt to protect their users from unwanted direct contact and physical harm.


----------



## ekim68

Study finds seven hours of sleep to be optimal from middle-age onwards



> We know sleep to be an essential ingredient for a healthy brain, but scientists continue to explore what a good night's rest looks like at different stages of life, and how it can impact on our vulnerability to cognitive decline. A wide-ranging new study involving almost half a million subjects has provided compelling new insights, suggesting seven hours of sleep per night to be best for brain health during middle and old age.


----------



## ekim68

Europe Developing 'Battery Passport' for EVs



> A group of German automakers, chemical concerns, and battery producers have announced the joint development of a "battery passport" designed to help government regulators trace the history of the cells. The consortium is funded by the German government and is supposed to work in tandem with new battery regulations that are being prepared by the European Union.


----------



## ekim68

As Polaroid's SX-70 turns 50, instant photography is booming



> Fifty years ago today, photography changed forever. The 3,000-something people assembled at a Polaroid warehouse in Needham, Massachusetts were the first to hear the news from Polaroid founder/president/resident genius Edwin H. Land himself, who declared it to be a turning point for the medium.
> 
> Land was presiding over Polaroid's annual meeting on April 25, 1972, and the change he was talking about came in the form of the company's newest instant camera. It was indeed a transformative advance on its existing products.


----------



## ekim68

Column: In Florida, DeSantis punishes Disney - by giving it a big tax cut 



> Up in their corporate suite, executives of the Walt Disney Co. must be laughing themselves silly.
> 
> They could only have watched in amazement as Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, pursuing his vendetta against the company for its opposition to his so-called "Don't Say Gay" law, signed a measure that awards the company a tax break estimated at $164 million a year and stuck voters in the Orlando area with the cost.


----------



## ekim68

"Extremely fast-charging" battery hits 60 percent in under 6 minutes



> By rethinking a key battery component, scientists in China have come up with what's described as "extremely fast charging" technology that sees a lithium-ion battery hit 60 percent capacity in under six minutes. The breakthrough is billed as a significant one for the world of electric vehicles where recharge times lag far behind refueling times for conventional cars, and could make them a far appealing proposition on that front.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Edge has overtaken Apple's Safari to become the world's second most popular desktop browser 



> According to the data, Microsoft Edge is now used on 10.07 percent of desktop computers worldwide, 0.46 percent ahead of Safari, which stands at 9.61 percent. Google Chrome remains in first place with a dominant 66.64 percent share, and Mozilla's Firefox stands in fourth with 7.86 percent.


----------



## ekim68

Energy supplier counts cost of devices on standby



> UK households could save an average of £147 per year by switching off so-called vampire devices, British Gas research suggests.
> 
> These are electronics that drain power even when they are on standby.


----------



## ekim68

All 2023 Volvos Will Have Hybrid or Fully Electric Powertrains



> Volvo will only sell electrified cars in the US beginning with the 2023 model year, the automaker confirmed Tuesday. "Electrified" means that in addition to EVs, Volvo will continue to offer gas-powered cars, but they'll all either have mild-hybrid or plug-in hybrid technology.


----------



## ekim68

GitHub will require all code contributors to use two-factor authentication



> GitHub, the code hosting platform used by tens of millions of software developers around the world, announced today that all users who upload code to the site will need to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023 in order to continue using the platform.
> 
> The new policy was announced Wednesday in a blog post by GitHub's chief security officer (CSO) Mike Hanley, which highlighted the Microsoft-owned platform's role in protecting the integrity of the software development process in the face of threats created by bad actors taking over developers' accounts.


----------



## ekim68

Mexico: Rail link worth billions won't go through Texas after Abbott used trade as 'political tool'



> The Mexican government said it intends to shift long-range plans to build a trade railway connection worth billions of dollars from Texas to New Mexico in the wake of Gov. Greg Abbott's stepped-up border inspections last month, which were widely criticized as being financially damaging and may now leave a lasting impact on relations between Texas and its No. 1 trading partner.


----------



## ekim68

'Buy now, pay later' is sending the TikTok generation spiraling into debt, popularized by San Francisco tech firms



> Do a quick scan of TikTok and you'll find trendy young people casually blowing hundreds or thousands of dollars on clothes and jewelry, often set to the clattering, bass-boosted din of Florida rapper Saucy Santana's fittingly titled "Material Girl." Plenty of those influencers get the goods they flaunt for free. But if you don't have the followers, or the up-front cash to blow, TikTokers have a tip: Just use "buy now, pay later" services, the hottest new way to take on debt.


----------



## ekim68

Employee monitoring software became the new normal during COVID-19. It seems workers are stuck with it



> In early 2020, as offices emptied and employees set up laptops on kitchen tables to work from home, the way managers kept tabs on white-collar workers underwent an abrupt change as well.
> 
> Bosses used to counting the number of empty desks, or gauging the volume of keyboard clatter, now had to rely on video calls and tiny green "active" icons in workplace chat programs.


----------



## ekim68

FBI: Cyber-scams cost victims $6.9b-plus worldwide in 2021



> Cyber-scams cost victims around the globe at least $6.9 billion last year, according to the FBI's latest Internet Crime Report.
> 
> Since 2017, the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received an average of 552,000 complaints per year. This includes reports of extortion, identity theft, phishing, fraud, and a slew of other nefarious schemes that cost victims no less than $18.7 billion in losses over the five-year period.


----------



## ekim68

Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo Vote to Keep Financing Fossil Fuels



> The three banks have rejected shareholder resolutions to make their lending practices consistent with climate targets.


----------



## ekim68

How millions of Russians are tearing holes in the Digital Iron Curtain



> RIGA, Latvia - When Russian authorities blocked hundreds of Internet sites in March, Konstantin decided to act. The 52-year-old company manager in Moscow tore a hole in the Digital Iron Curtain, which had been erected to control the narrative of the war in Ukraine, with a tool that lets him surf blocked sites and eyeball taboo news.
> 
> Konstantin turned to a virtual private network, an encrypted digital tunnel commonly known as a VPN. Since the war began in late February, VPNs have been downloaded in Russia by the hundreds of thousands a day, a massive surge in demand that represents a direct challenge to President Vladimir Putin and his attempt to seal Russians off from the wider world. By protecting the locations and identities of users, VPNs are now granting millions of Russians access to blocked material.


----------



## ekim68

Natron to kick off mass-production of long-life sodium-ion batteries 



> Natron's sodium-ion batteries have an enormous cycle life, practical power density, excellent safety and super-fast charging, without using any lithium. Through a partnership with Clarios, they'll go into mass manufacture in Michigan next year.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Recommends People Uninstall Optional Windows 11 Update



> In what can only be described in technical terms as a "whoopsie," Microsoft is advising Windows 11 users to uninstall a recent update. Reports indicated the update, which is optional, is causing various apps to crash. The problem involves an interaction between the update and the .Net Framework that's part of Windows. At this time it's unclear which apps are affected by the issue, leaving uninstallation as the only viable solution.


----------



## ekim68

The iPod is dead



> Last October marked 20 years of the iPod. It's a remarkable run in the cutthroat, always-iterating world of consumer electronics. And while it's undoubtedly true that life hasn't been particularly fruitful for the music player in a product lineup that includes various iPhones and iPads, the beloved music player has somehow managed to hang on.
> 
> That is, until today.


----------



## RT

Re: post #6,878

Windows Latest notes, this update is only available for users with Windows 11 21H2.

_>phew!<_


----------



## PeterOz

ekim68 said:


> FBI: Cyber-scams cost victims $6.9b-plus worldwide in 2021


How do we get in on the action


----------



## ekim68

Apple, Google, and Microsoft will soon implement passwordless sign-in on all major platforms



> In a joint effort, tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced Thursday morning that they have committed to building support for passwordless sign-in across all of the mobile, desktop, and browser platforms that they control in the coming year. Effectively, this means that passwordless authentication will come to all major device platforms in the not too distant future: Android and iOS mobile operating systems; Chrome, Edge, and Safari browsers; and the Windows and macOS desktop environments.


----------



## ekim68

ICE 'now operates as a domestic surveillance agency,' think tank says



> Although it's supposed to be restricted by surveillance rules at local, state and federal levels, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has built up a mass surveillance system that includes details on almost all US residents, according to a report from a major think tank. Researchers from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology said ICE "now operates as a domestic surveillance agency" and that it was able to bypass regulations in part by purchasing databases from private companies.


----------



## ekim68

An illustrated history of the iPod and its massive impact



> The iPod grew out of Steve Jobs' digital hub strategy. Life was going digital. People were plugging all kinds of devices into their computers: digital cameras, camcorders, MP3 players.


----------



## ekim68

Andy Warhol's Portrait of Marilyn Monroe Sells for $195 Million, Setting an Auction Record for an American Artist



> You can buy a lot with $200 million. A Burgess Jubilee superyacht. (Two of them at $100 million each, actually.) A couple dozen miles of interstate highway. The services of Aaron Rodgers for four years in the NFL.
> 
> Or you could purchase a 1964 silkscreen painting of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol for a record $195 million, which is exactly what one buyer did this week.


----------



## ekim68

There's a Cheap Solution to the Electric Vehicle Charging Conundrum



> It is commonly assumed that electric vehicles need specialized charging equipment. In a recent survey, 78 percent of people believed that they did not have charging access at their home. In fact, most people already do. There are three "types" of charging, and one of them can take place in nearly every house, without any modifications or new equipment.


----------



## ekim68

Algae energy harvester powers electronics for a year on its own



> As the number of electronic devices grows, we're going to have to get creative with our energy sources. Cambridge researchers have now demonstrated how an algae energy harvester can use sunlight to power a microprocessor for over a year without any human help.
> 
> Algae features heavily in green technologies of the future, in many different ways. It shows promise in producing hydrogen, purifying wastewater, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming the basis of biofuels, and generating electricity through photosynthesis.


----------



## ekim68

San Francisco Police Are Using Driverless Cars as Mobile Surveillance Cameras



> "Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads," an internal training document states.


----------



## ekim68

A quiet revolution: Southwest cities learn to thrive amid drought



> San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas have embraced innovative strategies for conserving and sourcing water, providing these metropolitan areas with sufficient water supplies to support their growing populations.


----------



## ekim68

Wall Street's Biggest Secret Could Be Exposed



> Wall Street's most closely guarded and lucrative secrets may finally become public, if New York Democratic lawmakers pass a new bill requiring financial firms to show what they are doing with hundreds of billions of dollars of Americans' retirement savings.


----------



## ekim68

Where the Super Rich Reside 




> According to the Forbes Billionaires List of 2022





> , most of the world's richest people are at home in the United States. The country counted 735 billionaires per the list's last release Tuesday. This is several more than the second-ranked country, China, with 607 and many more than in third-placed India with 165.


----------



## ekim68

The Smash-and-Grab Economy



> Over the past four decades, private equity has become a powerful, and malignant, force in our daily lives. In our May+June 2022 issue, Mother Jones investigates the vulture capitalists chewing up and spitting out American businesses, the politicians enabling them, and the everyday people fighting back.


----------



## ekim68

Uber launches robot food delivery in California



> May 16 (Reuters) - Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N) on Monday said it launched pilot food delivery services with autonomous vehicles in two California cities, and said it was adding electric vehicle charging stations into its global driver app.


----------



## ekim68

Autonomous container ship completes 790-km trip from crowded Tokyo Bay 



> These efforts are very much focused on getting autonomous ships into commercial use - the Nippon Foundation has targeted 2025 as a launch date, and it estimates that Japan alone stands to reap a positive economic benefit close to US$8 billion if the nation can get half its ships under robotic control by 2040.


* 
*


----------



## ekim68

China chipmaker SMIC says phone, PC demand has dropped 'like a rock'



> TAIPEI -- Top Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. says demand for mobile phones, personal computers and home appliances has dropped "like a rock" and shows no signs of recovering.
> 
> Speaking to investors on Friday, CEO Zhao Haijun said the Russia-Ukraine war and China's COVID lockdowns have massively dented demand for consumer electronics and home appliances, which in turn has led to a "serious" adjustment in chip orders for those segments.


----------



## ekim68

Nearly 700,000 US hospitalizations and 110,000 deaths prevented from the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, national study finds



> It is estimated that in 2021 the vaccine, the most widely used against COVID-19 in the US, prevented 8.7 million symptomatic cases of the virus, as well as 690,000 hospitalizations and more than 110,000 deaths.
> 
> The vaccine is also credited with saving more than $30 billion in healthcare costs and over $40 billion in lost productivity.


----------



## ekim68

The passwords most used by CEOs are startlingly dumb



> The more recent research sample consists of 290 million cybersecurity data breaches around the globe, and denotes the job level of those affected. Turns out, when it comes to CEOs and other high-ranking businesses execs, their password choices are much the same as the general public, although many often feature names. Tiffany was spotted in 100,534 breaches; then there was Charlie with 33,699; Michael was found 10,647 times; and Jordan, 10,472 times.


----------



## ekim68

Older people using TikTok to defy ageist stereotypes, research finds



> Older TikTok users are using the online platform, regarded as the virtual playground of teenagers, to defy ageist stereotypes of elderly people as technophobic and frail.
> 
> Research has found increasing numbers of accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followers. Using the platform to showcase their energy and vibrancy, these TikTok elders are rewriting expectations around how older people should behave both on and off social media.


----------



## ekim68

U.S. DOJ will no longer prosecute ethical hackers under CFAA



> The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced a revision of its policy on how federal prosecutors should charge violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), carving out "good-faith" security research from being prosecuted.
> 
> With this policy update, the DOJ is separating cases of good-faith security research from ill-intended hacking, which were previously distinguished by a blurred line that frequently placed ethical security research in a problematic, gray legal area.


----------



## ekim68

Electrify America will be 100 percent solar-powered by 2023



> One of the best things about electric cars, other than their power trains, immediate torque, and relaxing quiet, is the fact that as the electrical grid becomes cleaner, so too does every EV that uses that grid to charge. That process took a step forward this week with the news that by next year, the Electrify America (EA) charging network will be entirely offset by solar energy.


----------



## ekim68

Mitsubishi Electric Develops Technology for the Freeform Printing of Satellite Antennas in Outer Space



> Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) announced today that the company has developed an on-orbit additive-manufacturing technology that uses photosensitive resin and solar ultraviolet light for the 3D printing of satellite antennas in the vacuum of outer space.


----------



## ekim68

How China uses global media to spread its views - and misinformation



> A small news website in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A popular South African digital media platform. A Spanish language newswire service. Over the past year, all three far-flung news organizations have run similar stories claiming that a U.S.-run lab had created covid-19 or, more recently, articles that said the U.S. was operating a secret bioweapons program in Ukraine.
> 
> That these theories have also been simultaneously promoted by Chinese government officials is no coincidence - all three of those media outlets have ties to the Chinese government.


----------



## ekim68

Navy Ships Swarmed By Drones, Not UFOs, Defense Officials Confirm



> After intense public speculation, stacks of official documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, ambiguous statements from top officials, and an avalanche of media attention, it has now been made clear that the mysterious swarming of U.S. Navy ships off the Southern California coast in 2019 was caused by drones, not otherworldly UFOs or other mysterious craft. Raising even more questions, a similar drone swarm event has occurred off another coast, as well. These revelations came from top Department of Defense officials during a recent and much-anticipated house hearing on UFOs, which you can read all about  here.


----------



## ekim68

Rising temperatures due to climate change shaving hours off our sleep



> More severe and frequent droughts, storms and other extreme weather events are ways scientists expect climate change to endanger human health, but global temperatures can also impact our wellbeing in more insidious ways. Scientists are beginning to explore this idea with regard to human sleep, based on the premise that rising ambient temperatures are impacting the quality of our rest. And a new study indicates they may already be costing us dozens of hours of shuteye per year.


----------



## ekim68

Facebook Slammed for Spreading Vladimir Putin's Propaganda in NATO's East



> A flood of posts pushing misinformation in Slovakia is putting the spotlight on Facebook for facilitating the spread of pro-Russian theories on the war in neighboring Ukraine, ranging from claims that Kyiv is secretly developing biological weapons to questioning whether President Vladimir Putin's invasion even happened at all.


----------



## ekim68

China launches an autonomous mothership full of autonomous drones



> China christened a remarkable new 290-foot ship last week - the world's first semi-autonomous drone carrier. It'll carry, launch, recover and co-ordinate the actions of more than 50 other autonomous aerial, surface and underwater vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

EPA opens applications for its $5 billion clean school bus program



> Although much of President Joe Biden's plans to fight climate change have died thanks to obstruction from the Senate, he did manage to squeeze in a few sops to our ever-warming planet. Among those is a $5 billion program to replace dirty diesel school buses with more environmentally friendly options.


----------



## ekim68

Out with the old, in with the new: Last public pay phone removed from New York City



> It's out with the old and in with the new in New York City, as the city removed its last pay phone on Monday.
> 
> The removal of the pay phone, which was located on 745 7th Avenue, signals the official end of what used to be one of the city's most iconic street symbols. Public pay phones could be found throughout the city decades ago, but the rise of cell phones has made them obsolete.


----------



## ekim68

DuckDuckGo Isn't as Private as You Thought



> DuckDuckGo made a deal with the devil. Due to a confidential search agreement, the DuckDuckGo browser does not block all Microsoft trackers. What's worse, DuckDuckGo only acknowledged this "privacy hole" after it was discovered by a security researcher.


----------



## ekim68

DC attorney general sues Mark Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica data breach



> Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine has sued Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly failing to protect consumer data following the Cambridge Analytica data leak.
> 
> "The evidence shows Mr. Zuckerberg was personally involved in Facebook's failure to protect the privacy and data of its users leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica incident," Racine said in a statement about the lawsuit released Monday. "This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans' personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg's policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook's wrongful conduct."


----------



## ekim68

California parents could soon sue for social media addiction



> SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - California could soon hold social media companies responsible for harming children who have become addicted to their products, permitting parents to sue platforms like Instagram and TikTok for up to $25,000 per violation under a bill that passed the state Assembly on Monday.


----------



## ekim68

NY State is giving out hundreds of robots as companions for the elderly



> The state of New York will distribute robot companions to the homes of more than 800 older adults. The robots are not able to help with physical tasks, but function as more proactive versions of digital assistants like Siri or Alexa - engaging users in small talk, helping contact love ones, and keeping track of health goals like exercise and medication.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla battery research group unveils paper on new high-energy-density battery that could last 100 years



> Tesla's advanced battery research group in Canada in partnership with Dalhousie University has released a new paper on a new nickel-based battery that could last 100 years while still favorably comparing to LFP cells on charging and energy density.


----------



## ekim68

Quantum teleportation achieved between non-adjacent network nodes



> Scientists in the Netherlands have made a major step towards quantum computer networks by teleporting quantum information between two nodes that didn't have a direct link to each other. The breakthrough heralds a faster and more secure communication system.


----------



## ekim68

IndyCar is moving to 100% renewable ethanol in 2023



> The IndyCar racing series is switching to an entirely renewable fuel next year. On Friday, ahead of Sunday's Indianapolis 500 race, IndyCar announced that starting next year, the race cars will be powered by a new, second-generation renewable ethanol race fuel developed by Shell.


----------



## ekim68

GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor and provides financial assistance to patients in need



> Goodwill ransomware group propagates very unusual demands in exchange for the decryption key. The Robin Hood-like group is forcing its Victims to donate to the poor and provides financial assistance to the patients in need.


----------



## ekim68

Chorus shows off 25 gigabit per second retail fibre broadband



> Broadband infrastructure wholesaler Chorus has demonstrated symmetric fibre to the premises service that is rated at 25 gigabits per second, running over its existing passive optical fibre (PON) network.
> 
> The demonstration in Auckland achieved 21.4 Gbps throughput, tested simultaneously on the same strand of fibre that ran an 8 Gbps symmetric HyperFibre connection, and a 900/550 Mbps UFB link.


----------



## ekim68

Windows XP Delta Edition revives the world's second-most beautiful OS ever



> Windows XP Delta Edition is not one of those web-based aesthetic dream OSes evoking a more perfect inflection point at the cusp of the new millennium. Nor is it a clever theme for Linux evoking a similar techiraeth. It is a real cut of Windows XP itself, perfected for the third decade of the twenty-first century.


----------



## ekim68

The Internet Crime Business is Booming



> The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its2021 Internet Crime Report which found that 2021 was another record year for both victims of internet crime and dollar losses in the United States. 847,376 complaints were logged by IC3 in the last calendar year with total losses amounting to $6.9 billion. The most frequent internet crimes recorded in 2021 were some form of Phishing/Vishing/Smishing/Pharming. Business Email Compromise and Email Compromise schemes (BEC/EAC) and were the costliest internet crimes last year with adjusted losses of nearly $2.4 billion.


----------



## ekim68

Mona Lisa attacked with cake by disguised eco-activist



> The Mona Lisa was attacked but unharmed when a visitor to the Louvre in Paris tried to smash the glass protecting the world's most famous painting before smearing cake across its surface in an apparent environment-related publicity stunt.


----------



## ekim68

Frontier breaks the exascale threshold to take top supercomputer spot



> The US Department of Energy's Frontier supercomputer has been crowned world's fastest at the International Supercomputing Conference 2022 in Hamburg, Germany, and is the first system to enter the exascale era of computing.
> 
> The US Department of Energy partnered with Cray Inc in 2019 to build a new supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which already housed the Titan and Summit supercomputers - the latter being the most powerful until it was surpassed by Japan's Fugaku in 2020.


----------



## ekim68

World's fastest carbon capture system claims 99% efficiency in ambient air



> As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, it won't be enough to simply curb our emissions - we'll need to actively remove some of what we've already released. In a new advance, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new compound that can reportedly remove carbon dioxide from ambient air with 99 percent efficiency and at least twice as fast as existing systems.


----------



## ekim68

Greece passes first climate law, vows to cut dependence on fossil fuels



> Greece passed on Thursday its first climate law, which sets out specific targets to fight climate change and wean itself off coal in power generation by 2028.


----------



## ekim68

'Right to repair' equipment removed from NC Senate farm bill. Why it matters.



> A N.C. Senate committee on Tuesday walked back a provision that would have made it easier for farmers to access diagnostic and repair tools for complicated electronic parts on their equipment.


----------



## ekim68

Unprecedented water restrictions hit Southern California today: What they mean to you



> Get ready for short showers and brown lawns: More than 6 million Southern Californians will be placed under new drought rules today in an unprecedented effort to conserve water.


----------



## ekim68

Germany Slashes Summer Train Fares More Than 90 Percent to Curb Driving, Save Fuel



> Germany's parliament has set summer train fares at 9 euros per month in a bid to slash pollution and curb imports of Russian oil by spurring drivers to take public transit.


----------



## ekim68

Evering: Smart ring that acts as wallet and key gets backing from big Japanese firms



> Smart Ring That Acts as Wallet and Key Gets Backing From Big Japanese Firms
> 
> Itochu Corp., Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and other companies are planning to invest in Evering, a chip-embedded smart ring that can act as a wallet and a key, people with knowledge of the matter said.


----------



## ekim68

Blistering data transmission record clocks over 1 petabit per second 



> Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission - a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure.
> 
> For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will "only" get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.


----------



## ekim68

HP turns back on $1b in annual sales by quitting Russia and Belarus



> PC and printer giant HP Inc. is boldly but belatedly turning its back on Russia and Belarus due to the continued conflict in Ukraine.
> 
> HP was among the first wave of tech companies to suspend shipments to the countries soon after Russia invaded its neighbor on February 24, but now the company's president and CEO Enrique Lores is making the move more permanent.


----------



## ekim68

Connecticut will pay a security analyst 150k to monitor election memes for misinformation



> Ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, Connecticut is hiring a "security analyst" tasked with monitoring and addressing online misinformation. _The_ _New York Times_ first reported this new position, saying the job description will include spending time on "fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble and mainstream social media sites." The goal is to identify election-related rumors and attempt to mitigate the damage they might cause by flagging them to platforms that have misinformation policies and promoting educational content that can counter those false narratives.


----------



## ekim68

Desantis to block $35M in funding to a Florida sports team over their commitment to gun safety



> This isn't even stooping past the normal levels of Flordia's not saying gay Governor Ron Desantis depravity. Desantis will block the funding for a new spring training facility over the Tampa Bay Ray's statement that more can be done to provide a safer environment for America's children and the general citizenry.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota's prototype 'cartridge' is a way to make hydrogen portable



> One of the myriad issues with hydrogen as a clean energy source is infrastructure, as it's very expensive to move around and store an extremely explosive gas. Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet believe they may have a solution with a new portable hydrogen cartridge prototype. The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment.


----------



## ekim68

Diamond-based quantum computer paired with supercomputers for first time



> Quantum computing may have just taken a major step forward, as a supercomputer facility in Australia becomes the first to have a quantum computer integrated into it. The quantum processor, developed by German-Australian start-up Quantum Brilliance, runs at room temperature, and will now work in tandem with classical supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.


----------



## ekim68

Someone apparently leaked classified Chinese tank schematics to win an online argument



> Fans of the free-to-play military video game "War Thunder" are so passionate about the game that they've taken to sharing actual classified schematics for real-life military vehicles in an effort to win arguments with complete strangers online.


----------



## ekim68

New type of 3D printing uses sound waves to build up objects



> 3D printing typically involves depositing layers of molten plastic, laser-melting powdered metal, or using UV light to harden gelatinous resin. A new technique takes yet another approach, however, by utilizing sound waves.


----------



## ekim68

Lawmakers reignite battle for federal privacy law



> Committee leaders in both the House and Senate are poised to introduce an online privacy bill, with key lawmakers releasing a bipartisan draft Friday.
> 
> *Why it matters: *The U.S. has lagged behind the E.U. and China in establishing national privacy rules for online platforms, but this bipartisan effort shows signs of life even as the looming midterms mark the unofficial end of legislating.


----------



## ekim68

Shipping Chaos Is the Latest Sign that Capitalism Is Eating Itself



> Capitalism rests on a network of privately-owned infrastructure, with shipping at its heart - but now the industry is in chaos as the profiteering of rentier corporations sends the world system into meltdown.


----------



## ekim68

The idea of working in the office, all day, every day? No thanks, say workers



> More than two years into a pandemic that has no clear end, the debate over remote work has only intensified. Working from home isn't possible in many jobs. But for those who have the option, it's now evident that it is feasible, even beneficial.


----------



## ekim68

Massive LNG tanker sails itself across the Pacific in shipping world first



> HD Hyundai has announced that the Prism Courage, a 122,000 tonne ultra-large natural gas tanker operated by its subsidiary Avikus, has become the first large ship to make an ocean passage of over 10,000 km (6,210 miles) under autonomous control.


----------



## ekim68

Italian city of Palermo shuts down all systems to fend off cyberattack



> It's impossible to communicate or request any service that relies on digital systems, and all citizens have to use obsolete fax machines to reach public offices.


----------



## ekim68

Biden orders emergency steps to boost U.S. solar production



> President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals.


----------



## ekim68

California permits Cruise to launch fully driverless taxi services



> A fully autonomous, commercial robo-taxi service with no backup drivers is about to launch in San Francisco, after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued its first-ever Driverless Deployment Permit to GM subsidiary Cruise.
> 
> This permit marks the first time that robocabs have been allowed to take paying customers without keeping a backup driver on board to handle sticky situations the AI isn't ready to deal with yet.


----------



## ekim68

The 2022 Uber Lost & Found Index



> Each year, the Uber Lost & Found Index provides a snapshot of our riders' most commonly forgotten and most unique lost items, as well as the cities that have been most forgetful, the times of day and days of the week riders forget items most, and of course, helpful tips on how to get lost items back using the Uber app.


----------



## ekim68

Toyota applies its EV tech to O-Uchi Kyuden home battery system 



> It was back in 2015 that Tesla unveiled its Powerwall battery energy storage system for the home. Well, Toyota has now announced its similar O-Uchi Kyuden System, which can draw power from EVs.
> 
> Incorporating technology developed for the automaker's electric vehicles, the system has a rated capacity of 8.7 kWh and a rated output of 5.5 kWh.


----------



## ekim68

Waymo is teaming up with Uber on autonomous trucking because time really heals all wounds



> Waymo and Uber, former legal foes and bitter rivals in the autonomous vehicle space, are teaming up to speed up the adoption of driverless trucks. Waymo is integrating Uber Freight, the ride-hail company's truck brokerage, into the technology that powers its autonomous big rigs.
> 
> This "long-term strategic partnership" will enable fleet owners to more quickly deploy trucks equipped with Waymo's autonomous "driver" for on-demand delivery routes offered by Uber Freight, the companies said.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft Trying to Kill HDD Boot Drives By 2023: Report



> A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023.


----------



## ekim68

Solid-state batteries for EVs move a step closer to production



> Solid-state batteries differ from the lithium-ion batteries currently used in EVs in that they replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid layer between the anode and cathode. It's an attractive technology for multiple reasons: Solid-state cells should have a higher energy density, they should be able to charge more quickly, and they should be safer, as they're nonflammable (which should further reduce the pack density and weight, as it will need less-robust protection).


----------



## ekim68

This plasma ignition system can increase engine efficiency by 20%



> In 2019, we took a look at an interesting new advanced ignition system from Transient Plasma Systems. It replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle's engine with an ignition module that uses very short duration (nanosecond) pulses of plasma to ignite the fuel/air mixture within the cylinder. Back then, the technology was still being bench-tested, but now it's almost ready for production after validation testing has confirmed its potential to increase fuel efficiency by up to 20 percent when fitted to an existing engine.


----------



## ekim68

Blame the Fed For Everything!



> "_It's the Fed's fault_!"
> 
> That has been the rallying cry for so many misguided analyses and criticisms going back to the 1990s, if not before.
> 
> Has the financial press ever written a less insightful and lazier line than the "Fed-driven rally?" As if a columnist actually _knows_ what is driving the market at any given moment in time (or year, for that matter).


----------



## ekim68

Superworms act like "mini recycling plants" to survive solely on plastic



> The magnitude of our plastic waste problem has scientists searching far and wide for answers, and for a team at Australia's University of Queensland (UQ) this search has led them to hungry little critters known as "superworms." These tiny creatures have now been shown to have a healthy appetite for plastic waste, which the researchers were able to trace to specific enzymes in their gut bacteria that convert it into energy, even leading the worms to gain weight as a result.


----------



## ekim68

Biden to require electric vehicle charging stations every 50 miles on federal highways



> The proposed standards, which will be published next week in the Federal Register, dictate that a charging station be located every 50 miles along the interstate and no more than a mile off the highway. Stations would be required to maintain a minimum number and type of chargers capable of serving multiple customers.
> 
> Stations would be prohibited from requiring drivers to have a membership or be part of a club to use their chargers.


----------



## ekim68

GM 3D Prints 60,000 Parts to Keep Tahoe Deliveries on Time



> Current chip shortages may be the buzzkill quashing your most urgent capitalistic desires during the pandemic, but production supply issues aren't limited to the silicon variety. When faced with an inability to produce a component needed for delivery of the 2022 Chevrolet Tahoe, General Motors engineers turned to a novel solution: 3D printing.


----------



## ekim68

New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function



> The Human Genome Project was an ambitious initiative to sequence every piece of human DNA. The project drew together collaborators from research institutions around the world, including MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and was finally completed in 2003. Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells. The data from this project, published online June 9 in _Cell,_ ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.


----------



## ekim68

In-road inductive charging tests demonstrate unlimited EV range



> The world's fifth-largest automaker has built and tested a charge-as-you-drive system - a loop of road in Italy with wireless EV charging coils embedded under the surface, so that electric cars can charge as they drive and unlock unlimited range.
> 
> Stellantis, parent company of Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, Maserati and many others, is a founding member of the Arena Del Futuro project in Chiari, a 1,050-meter (0.65-mile) loop of road near the Chiari exit of the A35 Motorway, about half an hour outside Milan in northern Italy. This "Arena of the Future" was built to test a number of forward-looking transport technologies, including advanced 5G connectivity and IoT ideas, V2X communications and road surface optimizations.


----------



## ekim68

Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users worldwide



> Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac and Linux. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.


----------



## ekim68

Adobe plans to make Photoshop on the web free to everyone



> Adobe has started testing a free-to-use version of Photoshop on the web and plans to open the service up to everyone as a way to introduce more users to the app.


----------



## ekim68

Beat cancer? Your Medicare Advantage plan might still be billing for it.



> Firms mined patient records for outdated, irrelevant conditions to increase profits, Justice Department contends


----------



## ekim68

Act now to save $78 trillion



> Replacing coal with renewable energy would represent a $78 trillion boon for the global economy, according to new research from the International Monetary Fund.


----------



## ekim68

World's most efficient passenger plane gets hydrogen powertrain 



> The Celera 500L is a truly remarkable design. Otto Aviation says its odd shape delivers an astonishing 59 percent reduction in drag, and a massive leap in efficiency and range compared to traditional plane geometries. Arguably, this thing should've been electric from the get-go, so it's a no-brainer that Otto has teamed up with ZeroAvia to build a version with a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain.


 *







*


----------



## ekim68

These American cities will soon be under water



> The steady rise in global surface temperatures is largely attributed to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. With rising temperatures, the world's ice has been melting and sea levels have been rising. As a result, barring major interventions, sooner or later thousands of coastal communities around the world will become uninhabitable.


----------



## ekim68

World's largest plane soars to its highest altitude yet



> The world's largest flying aircraft has reached new heights, with Stratolaunch today completing the seventh test flight of its gigantic Roc carrier plane and logging a record altitude for the huge aircraft in the process. The exercise was also used to test the in-flight performance of recently installed pylon hardware, which will launch smaller hypersonic aircraft from altitude and send them across the skies at speeds of over Mach 5.


----------



## ekim68

Boring Company receives approval for expanding its tunnels to downtown Las Vegas



> Elon Musk's Boring Company has received unanimous approval to expand its system of tunnels beneath downtown Las Vegas. The expansion will add stops at landmarks like the Stratosphere and Fremont Street, letting customers hop aboard a Tesla and travel from one part of the city to the next.
> 
> The network of tunnels, called the Vegas Loop, is supposed to span 29 miles and have 51 stops when finished. But for now, only 1.7-mile tunnels are operational beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), turning what would be a 25-minute walk across the convention center into a two-minute ride.


----------



## ekim68

Florida undercounted COVID cases and deaths, failed to get test results, state audit says



> Florida's COVID-19 data was so inaccurate, incomplete and delayed during the first months of the pandemic that government officials and the public may not have had necessary information to determine the effectiveness of the state's COVID-19 precautions and the best plan to fight the virus, according to a state report released Monday.


----------



## ekim68

Once seen as fleeting, a new solar tech shines on and on



> Princeton Engineering researchers have developed the first perovskite solar cell with a commercially viable lifetime, marking a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology. The team projects their device can perform above industry standards for around 30 years, far more than the 20 years used as a threshold for viability for solar cells.


----------



## ekim68

Taste of the future: First artificial intelligence-created craft beer to be released at NOLA Brewing



> Locals will have a chance to try the first craft beer created by an artificial intelligence platform in June.
> 
> The AI Blonde Ale will be released at a Launch Party at Nola Brewery on June 20 to coincide with CVPR, the world's premier computer vision event.


----------



## ekim68

China's 'alien' signal almost certainly came from humans, project researcher says



> Chinese scientists' claims that their "Sky Eye" telescope could have picked up signals from intelligent aliens have been met with skepticism by an American colleague.
> 
> Dan Werthimer, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher at the University of Berkeley, California and a coauthor on the research project (opens in new tab) which first spotted the signals, told Live Science that the narrow-band radio signals he and his fellow researchers found "are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials."


----------



## ekim68

U.S. probing how American electronics wound up in Russian military gear



> Commerce Department agents who enforce export controls are conducting the inquiries together with the FBI, paying joint visits to companies to ask about Western chips and components found in Russian radar systems, drones, tanks, ground-control equipment and littoral ships, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive investigations.


----------



## ekim68

The US Can Halve Its Emissions by 2030-if It Wants To



> The economics are clear: Renewables are cheap enough for the country to rapidly decarbonize. Less evident is the political will to pull it off.


----------



## ekim68

Modular optical computer chip allows stackable swappable functions



> The team's modular chip is made up of layered components like artificial intelligence, processors and sensors, which can be stacked or swapped in to build a chip to perform specific functions as needed, or upgrade it as new technology becomes available.
> 
> "You can add as many computing layers and sensors as you want, such as for light, pressure, and even smell," says Jihoon Kang, an author of the study. "We call this a LEGO-like reconfigurable AI chip because it has unlimited expandability depending on the combination of layers."


----------



## Johnny b

Something new for the palate ....ganja chicken 

* A farm feeding chickens with marijuana instead of antibiotics is fetching higher prices from consumers seeking organic poultry, researchers say *
https://news.yahoo.com/farm-feeding-chickens-marijuana-instead-053945112.html


----------



## ekim68

Canada MPs given panic buttons as threats increase



> Canada's members of parliament will be given panic buttons to call police in an emergency, amid growing harassment, intimidation and threats of violence.
> 
> The move was announced by Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino who has himself received death threats.


----------



## ekim68

PCI Express 7.0 standard provides eight times the bandwidth of today's connections



> The group responsible for developing and updating the PCI Express standard, the PCI-SIG, aims to update that standard roughly every three years. Version 6.0 was released earlier this year, and the group has announced that PCIe version 7.0 is currently on track to be finalized sometime in 2025. Like all new PCI Express versions, its goal is to double the available bandwidth of its predecessor, which in PCIe 7.0's case means that a single PCIe 7.0 lane will be able to transmit at speeds of up to 32GB per second.


----------



## ekim68

Airbnb Your Days Are Numbered



> Let me get this straight. You expect me to sleep in a stranger's income property when I'm in a foreign city? You expect me to read a book of rules for their "beautiful mid century modern country home" that is nothing more than some clear plastic chairs from Amazon and a few quilts? You want me to potentially get hate-crimed by my host? No thanks honey, give me a hotel any day. At least I will be able to wear a robe and watch _Shark Tank _from bed.


----------



## ekim68

Sick and struggling to pay, 100 million people in the U.S. live with medical debt



> To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, the KHN-NPR investigation draws on a nationwide poll conducted by KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) for this project. The poll was designed to capture not just bills patients couldn't afford, but other borrowing used to pay for health care as well. New analyses of credit bureau, hospital billing, and credit card data by the Urban Institute and other research partners also inform the project. And KHN and NPR reporters conducted hundreds of interviews with patients, physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, and researchers.
> 
> The picture is bleak.


----------



## ekim68

'It keeps on going': driving the world's first production-ready solar car



> It is this streamlined design that the company credits for allowing it to muscle its way into a space long overlooked by most car manufacturers. As early as November, the company will start delivery of what it describes as the "world's first production-ready solar car" - the Lightyear 0, a €250,000 (£215,000) sedan draped in 5 sq metres of curved solar panels that top up the electric battery while the car is driving or parked outdoors.


----------



## ekim68

Vision EQXX squeezes a staggering 747 miles out of less than 100 kWh



> The Vision EQXX left Stuttgart, Germany, and drove to Silverstone in the UK on a single charge of its sub-100 kWh battery, mainly at motorway speeds, then completed a few track laps before running out of juice at 1,202 km (747 miles). That's about twice what a Tesla Model S can do on the same amount of energy.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla launches new virtual power plant that pays Powerwall owners to help end brownouts



> Tesla has launched a new virtual power plant in partnership with PG&E in California that will pay Powerwalls owners to help stabilize the electric grid and end brownouts in California.
> 
> A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants. Last year, Tesla launched a test VPP in California, where Powerwall owners would join in voluntarily without compensation to let the VPP pull power from their battery packs when the grid needed it.


----------



## ekim68

Watch an Electric Fan Car Shatter the Goodwood Hill Climb Record



> A McMurtry Speirling piloted by former F1 and IndyCar racing driver Max Chilton broke the Goodwood hill record Sunday, crushing the previous record set by the VW ID.R by nearly a full second. The electric fan car rocketed-_almost literally_-up the hill in a staggering 39.08 seconds, compared to the electric prototype's 39.90.


----------



## ekim68

Cabless autonomous electric truck approved for US public roads



> Freight technology company Einride first introduced its cabless autonomous electric T-pod truck back in 2017, which rolled on Swedish roads for the first time a couple of years later. Now the company has been given the green light for operation on public roads in the US.


----------



## ekim68

Work begins on Mammoth, the world's largest CO2 direct air capture plant



> The ultimate contribution that direct air capture might make in helping us address climate change remains to be seen, but there's no shortage of startups, governments and research groups driving the technology forward. Chief among them is Swiss outfit Climeworks, which has today broken ground on its second direct air capture (DAC) plant in Iceland, and one that marks significant progress in its ambitions of removing gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050.


----------



## ekim68

Report estimates 10% of all cancers in Europe are caused by pollution



> A new report from the European Environmental Agency estimates more than 10 percent of all cancer cases in Europe are likely caused by environmental and occupational exposure to pollution. The report indicates most of these cases could be prevented by improving environmental protections.


----------



## ekim68

Social media sites can slow the spread of deadly misinformation with modest interventions



> Social media platforms can slow the spread of misinformation if they want to - and Twitter could have better reduced the spread of bad information in the lead-up to the 2020 election, according to a new research paper released Thursday.


----------



## ekim68

First perovskite solar cell to cross 30-year expected lifespan



> Perovskite is poised to become a major material for solar cells, but before then it needs to overcome a major durability issue. Engineers at Princeton have unveiled a new perovskite solar cell design that tests suggest could last as long as 30 years of real-world use.


* 
*


----------



## ekim68

Who Is to Blame for Inflation, 1-15



> Who is to blame for the rampant inflation the United States (and the entire world) have been experiencing over the past 12 to 24 months? Which individuals and institutions can we hold accountable for the highest consumer price increases in 40 years?


----------



## ekim68

US Space Force establishes new unit to track 'threats in orbit'



> The United States Space Force has activated a new unit that is tasked with providing "critical intelligence on threat systems, foreign intentions and activities in the space domain."
> 
> Pentagon leaders have said that the creation of this new unit is critical for shaping the future of the Space Force's innovation and technology acquisition.


----------



## ekim68

Light-activated fish-shaped robot soaks up microplastics from the water



> There is a lot for us still to learn about the dangers microplastics pose to the environment and the health of living organisms, but one thing is clear, their presence is widespread and only becoming more-so. Scientists have come up with a novel cleanup solution that takes its cues from nature, in the form of a fish-like robot that can move through the water and soak up small plastic pieces as it goes.


----------



## ekim68

Confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court Sinks to New Low



> Americans' confidence in the Supreme Court has hit record lows, according to a new poll by Gallup. Only 25 percent of U.S. respondents said they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of trust in the institution, down from 36 percent a year ago. The new total is five percentage points lower than the last recorded lull, back in 2014. Gallup has been surveying the U.S. public on the topic since 1973.


----------



## ekim68

'Pickleball Is the Wild, Wild West': Inside the Fight Over the Fastest-Growing Sport in America



> There are: Too many leagues. Too many federations. Battling billionaires. Bad behavior. And the growth of a booming sport is on the line.


----------



## ekim68

Remember RadioShack? It's now a crypto company with wild tweets.



> Variations of, "What in the world is going on?" peppered the comment threads, but a glance of the company's Twitter profile partly held the answer: RadioShack is no longer the electronics store Americans ran to for generations, but rather an online cryptocurrency company that also happens to sell batteries.


----------



## ekim68

India bans 19 single-use plastic items to combat pollution



> India has imposed a ban on single-use plastics on items ranging from straws to cigarette packets to combat worsening pollution in the nation of nearly 1.4 billion people.


----------



## ekim68

British army Twitter and YouTube accounts compromised to promote crypto scams



> The British army is investigating an apparent hack after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised on Sunday. News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great. According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.


----------



## ekim68

Berlin preps 'huge thermos' to help heat homes this winter



> BERLIN (AP) - The rust-colored tower rising from an industrial site near the banks of Berlin's Spree river looks nothing like the sleek flasks Germans use for coffee, yet its purpose is similar: to provide some warmth throughout the day, especially when it's cold outside.
> 
> With a height of 45 meters (almost 150 feet) and holding up to 56 million liters (14.8 million gallons) of hot water, utility company Vattenfall says the tower will help heat Berlin homes this winter even if Russian gas supplies dry up.


----------



## ekim68

Gartner predicts 9.5% drop in PC shipments



> The party is over for PC makers as figures from Gartner suggest the market is on course for a breathtaking decline this year.
> 
> According to the analysts, worldwide PC shipments will decline by 9.5 percent, with consumer demand leading the way - a 13.5 percent drop is forecast, far greater than business PC demand, which is expected to drop by 7.2 percent year on year.


----------



## ekim68

New CRISPR tool corrects mutations by copying genes between chromosomes 



> Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have demonstrated an intriguing new variation on the CRISPR gene-editing system, which involves fixing a mutation on one chromosome by copying a healthy version from the other. "Nicking" the DNA seemed to work better than cutting it.


----------



## ekim68

New energy-dense lithium-sulfur battery works at extreme temperatures



> By continuing to experiment with its electrolyte recipe, the scientists have now developed a version that operates at the other end of the spectrum as well. The new electrolyte features lithium salt and dibutyl ether, a chemical compound with a boiling point of 141 °C (286 °F), enabling the electrolyte to remain liquid at high temperature.
> 
> In proof-of-concept experiments with this electrolyte, the batteries were able to retain 87.5 percent of their capacity at -40 °C (-40 °F) and 115.9 percent of their capacity at 50 °C (122 °)F. They also demonstrated high Coulombic efficiencies of above 98 percent at these temperatures, which relates to their ability to handle more charge cycles before the end of the lives.


----------



## ekim68

FedEx to close data centers, retire all mainframes by 2024, saving $400m



> Speaking during the FedEx investor day, FedEx CIO Rob Carter said the company is aiming for a 'zero data center, zero mainframe' environment based in the cloud, which will result in $400 million in savings annually.
> 
> "We've been working across this decade to streamline and simplify our technology and systems," he said. "We've shifted to cloud...we've been eliminating monolithic applications one after the other after the other...we're moving to a zero data center, zero mainframe environment that's more flexible, secure, and cost-effective."


----------



## valis

ekim68 said:


> FedEx to close data centers, retire all mainframes by 2024, saving $400m


Huh. That could be a groundbreaker in that industry....


----------



## ekim68

Climate change: 'Sand battery' could solve green energy's big problem



> The developers say this could solve the problem of year-round supply, a major issue for green energy.
> 
> Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind.
> 
> The sand stores the heat at around 500C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.


----------



## ekim68

We're Not Already In a Recession



> We believe a recession is coming but the US is clearly not in one yet. In the first five months of the year, manufacturing production is up at a 6.6% annual rate, nonfarm payrolls are up at an average monthly pace of 488,000, and the unemployment rate has dropped to 3.6% from 3.9%. Meanwhile, in April, both "real" (inflation-adjusted) consumer spending and real personal income (excluding transfers) were at record highs. If this is a recession, we could use more recessions.


----------



## ekim68

Japan introduces jail time, tougher penalties for online insults



> A prison term of up to one year and other tougher penalties for online insults came into effect Thursday as part of Japan's efforts to tackle cyberbullying.


----------



## valis

Well, poop....the Georgia Guidestones were blown up....

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62073675


----------



## Couriant

valis said:


> Well, poop....the Georgia Guidestones were blown up....
> 
> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62073675


Wasn't that what MTJ wanted to get rid off? Sabotage?


----------



## valis

Who or what is MTJ?

Michael The Jordan? 

Maybe Metallica Thanks Jesus?


----------



## Couriant

valis said:


> Who or what is MTJ?
> 
> Michael The Jordan?
> 
> Maybe Metallica Thanks Jesus?


I meant MTG. Marjorie Taylor Greene. I remember something of a rant from her about it.


----------



## valis

yeah, she falls into that same category for me as that Infowars idiot....I ignore them so totally that their names don't even register.


----------



## ekim68

Automakers Are Starting to Drop AM Radio in New Cars.



> It's easy to take for granted amenities in our cars like air conditioning and the radio, which have been standard equipment for longer than many of us have been alive. But the rise of electric vehicles is giving the auto industry the chance to rethink norms and jettison ideas that belong in the past. One of those ideas may be AM radios, which some carmakers say they won't include on future EVs, and which are already unavailable on a few. Car companies blame interference from EVs' drivetrains, but the answer isn't that simple-not by a long shot.


----------



## ekim68

Volkswagen announces $20 billion effort to build its own EV batteries



> Volkswagen said it would invest $20.38 billion to build electric vehicle batteries, a move the company says will create 20,000 jobs and generate $20.38 billion in annual sales. The automaker will create a new company called Power Co to oversee the vast effort as VW races to secure enough capacity, materials, and supplies to power its EV ambitions.


----------



## ekim68

Europe wants a high-speed rail network to replace airplanes



> Imagine a network of modern, super-fast and comfortable trains hurtling between every major city in the European Union, providing a reliable, comfortable and sustainable alternative to air travel.
> That was the vision outlined by rail industry leaders in Lyon, France, on June 29, amid ambitious European plans to double high-speed rail use by 2030 and triple current levels by 2050.


----------



## ekim68

Nature's strongest known material inspires green alternative to Kevlar



> Nature is capable of producing materials of incredible strength, with spider silk one of the most celebrated examples. In 2015, a group of scientists made a game-changing discovery in this area, demonstrating that the teeth of clingy molluscs called limpets actually have the strongest tensile strength of any biological material. Drawing inspiration from these flinty fangs, the team has produced a composite biomaterial with extreme strength, which could provide a more sustainable alternative to high-performance materials such as Kevlar.


----------



## ekim68

North Carolina Looks to Remove Public EV Chargers, Probably to the Trash



> Politicians have to run on some kind of platform, and Ben Moss-my incoming state House representative here in North Carolina's District 52-decided that his animating principle is Being Mad at Electricity. To prove his animosity toward this invisible menace, he's sponsoring House Bill 1049, which would allocate $50,000 to destroy free public car chargers. It contains some other enlightened ideas, but that's the main theme: We've simply got to do something about these free public chargers, even if it costs us $50,000! Those things cost tens of cents per hour, when they're being used.


----------



## ekim68

Carmakers start to starve combustion models out of existence



> Automakers have announced a whopping $526-billion collective investment in electric vehicles through 2026, more than double the amount they mapped out over a similar forward time frame a couple years ago.


----------



## ekim68

White House: Tesla to expand its US Supercharger network to other EVs in late 2022



> Tesla plans to begin opening its Supercharger network to other electric vehicles by the end of the year, according to a White House memo that shared the automaker's plans.
> 
> The U.S. government said in April that it needs to increase its own network of about 1,100 charging stations a hundred-fold to meet coming demand.


----------



## ekim68

London is experimenting with traffic lights that put pedestrians first



> For pedestrians*,* walking in a city can be a frenetic and stressful experience. Crossings puncture the route. Parked cars block the view; curbs may have to be navigated. The city is an obstacle course.
> 
> Transport for London (TfL), the public body behind transport services in the British capital, has cottoned onto this, recently piloting new rules at 18 crossings around the city. Instead of waiting for the "green man" as a signal to cross the road, pedestrians will encounter green as the default setting when they approach these crossings. The light changes to red only when the sensor detects an approaching vehicle.


----------



## ekim68

FCC cracks down on spam "auto warranty" robocalls



> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday told carriers to stop delivering those annoying auto warranty robocalls and said it has launched a formal investigation.
> 
> Why it matters: The scam has resulted in more than 8 billion unwanted and possibly illegal phone calls. It has been the top consumer robocall complaint for the past two years.


----------



## ekim68

The Debatable Land #24: Things Fall Apart



> Shed no tears for Boris Johnson and none for the Tory party either. They knew what they were doing and they did it anyway.


----------



## ekim68

Perovskite-silicon solar cells break 30% efficiency barrier



> Scientists have broken the efficiency record for tandem silicon-perovskite solar cells, surpassing the milestone of 30 percent for the first time. The new record takes the technology beyond the upper limits of silicon alone, using low-cost and scalable materials.


----------



## ekim68

Business Exit from China Accelerating


> There has been a sense in financial circles that the fever among American executives to shorten supply lines and bring production back home would prove short-lived. As soon as the pandemic started to fade, so too would the fad, the thinking went.
> And yet, two years in, not only is the trend still alive, it appears to be rapidly accelerating.
Click to expand...


----------



## ekim68

Investments in plant-based meat can help cut down carbon emissions: Report



> A report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has revealed that investments in plant-based meat alternatives lead to far greater cuts in climate-heating emissions than other green investments.
> 
> The improved investment in the production of meat and dairy alternatives resulted in three times more greenhouse gas reductions compared with investment in green cement technology, seven times more than green buildings and 11 times more than zero-emission cars, The Guardian reported citing the report.


----------



## ekim68

Microplastics found in the meat, milk and blood of farm animals



> Scientists in the Netherlands studying the spread of plastic waste have turned their eye to meat and dairy products, and discovered high rates of contamination in farm animals. The findings shed new light on the way microplastics move through the food chain, and add extra impetus to better understand the ubiquitous material's potential effects on living organisms.


----------



## ekim68

Floating abortion clinic proposed in Gulf to bypass bans



> A California doctor is proposing a floating abortion clinic in the Gulf of Mexico as a way to maintain access for people in southern states where abortion bans have been enacted.


----------



## ekim68

Major step forward in fabricating an artificial heart, fit for a human



> Bioengineers have developed the first biohybrid model of human ventricles with helically aligned beating cardiac cells, and have shown that muscle alignment does, in fact, dramatically increases how much blood the ventricle can pump with each contraction.


----------



## ekim68

"Aspirin" for plants could help crops survive climate change



> Much like we take aspirin to alleviate a splitting headache, plants also have their own form of medicine that helps in times of stress. Known as salicylic acid, this organic compound is naturally produced when plants encounter things like drought and heat, and a new study demonstrates how this process might be leveraged to protect crops in the face of rising global temperatures.


----------



## ekim68

Mahle's new SCT electric motor runs non-stop at over 90% of peak power



> Tier-one auto parts supplier Mahle has announced a groundbreaking "superior continuous torque" (SCT) motor for electric vehicles, capable of continuously pounding out more than 90 percent of its peak power without overheating - and it'll work without magnets.


----------



## ekim68

Gmail users "hard pass" on plan to let political emails bypass spam filters



> Earlier this month, Google sent a request to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider.


----------



## ekim68

Barracuda report: Almost everyone faced an industrial attack in the last year



> A report commissioned by cloud security company Barracuda found that 94% of respondents have experienced some form of attack on their industrial IoT (IIoT) or operational technology (OT) systems during the last 12 months.


----------



## ekim68

Panasonic to build $4bn EV battery plant for Tesla in U.S.



> Panasonic Holdings will invest $4 billion in a second U.S. electric vehicle battery factory in Kansas, its subsidiary Panasonic Energy announced on Thursday, confirming an earlier Nikkei report. The factory is expected to hire as many as 4,000 employees and supply a new high-capacity battery for Tesla.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft moves to new Windows development cycle with major release every three years, feature drops in between



> Microsoft is shifting to a new engineering schedule for Windows which will see the company return to a more traditional three-year release cycle for major versions of the Windows client, while simultaneously increasing the output of new features shipping to the current version of Windows on the market.


----------



## ekim68

New Windows Media Player app travels back in time, gains the ability to rip CDs



> If there's one thing Windows 11 has been good for, it has been the renewed attention and useful updates to the built-in apps that ship with Windows. Sometimes this means new features for long-neglected apps, like Notepad and Paint. In other cases, it means bringing _back_ features that old apps lost somewhere along the way, like with Sound Recorder or Windows Media Player.


----------



## ekim68

Google's Chrome OS Flex is now available for old PCs and Macs



> Google is releasing Chrome OS Flex today, a new version of Chrome OS that's designed for businesses and schools to install and run on old PCs and Macs. Google first started testing Chrome OS Flex earlier this year in an early access preview, and the company has now resolved 600 bugs to roll out Flex to businesses and schools today.


----------



## ekim68

FCC chair proposes raising broadband standard to 100Mbps



> The FCC's 25Mbps broadband standard seemed fast in 2015, but that was seven years ago - and the agency's current leadership believes it's time to raise that baseline. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed raising the minimum definition of broadband to 100Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads.


----------



## ekim68

Amazon's Prime Air drones will soon make deliveries in Texas



> They'll take flight in College Station, the home of Texas A&M University's main campus.


----------



## ekim68

Why disasters are getting more severe but killing fewer people



> Yet despite these growing risks, around the world, disasters in general are becoming less deadly. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the number of disasters over the last 50 years has increased fivefold, but the number of deaths has fallen by two-thirds.


----------



## ekim68

Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered hydrogen



> Australian scientists say they've made a "eureka moment" breakthrough in gas separation and storage that could radically reduce energy use in the petrochemical industry, while making hydrogen much easier and safer to store and transport in a powder.
> 
> Nanotechnology researchers, based at Deakin University's Institute for Frontier Materials, claim to have found a super-efficient way to mechanochemically trap and hold gases in powders, with potentially enormous and wide-ranging industrial implications.


----------



## ekim68

Earthgrid aims to re-wire the USA using super-cheap tunnel tech



> Bay Area startup Earthgrid says it's developing a plasma boring robot that can dig underground tunnels 100x faster and up to 98% cheaper than existing tech, and it plans to use it to start re-wiring America's energy, internet and utilities grids.


----------



## ekim68

Overrun by influencers, historic sites are banning TikTok creators in Nepal



> Prominent tourist and religious sites in Nepal are putting up "No TikTok" signs to keep creators from shooting at the premises.


----------



## ekim68

Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows



> WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' confidence in two facets of the news media -- newspapers and television news -- has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year.


----------



## ekim68

Global manufacturers see chip shortage easing



> ZURICH/STOCKHOLM, July 21 (Reuters) - Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS), factory robot builder ABB (ABBN.S) and Swedish fridge maker Electrolux (ELUXb.ST) see the semi-conductor chip shortage easing, executives said Thursday, in a boost for manufacturers after a long struggle for components.


----------



## ekim68

Teens are rewriting what is possible in the world of competitive Tetris



> WhenWhen the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) debuted in 2010, the kill screen was the game's final, unbeatable boss. Players pushed to get the highest score possible before level 29, at which point the game's pieces started falling at double speed. It seemed humanly impossible to keep up with the falling shapes, which would pile up on players' screens and spell death for their game.
> 
> But in the past four years, what once seemed an impossibility has become the norm in competitive classic _Tetris_.


----------



## ekim68

FCC chair tries to find out how carriers use phone geolocation data



> Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has ordered mobile carriers to explain what geolocation data they collect from customers and how they use it. Rosenworcel's probe could be the first step toward stronger action-but the agency's authority in this area is in peril because Congress is debating a data privacy law that could preempt the FCC from regulating carriers' privacy practices.


----------



## ekim68

Another hydrogen transport powder emerges, promising double the density 



> Stir this silicon-based powder into water, and hydrogen will bubble out, ready for immediate use. Hong Kong company EPRO Advance Technology (EAT) says its Si+ powder offers an instant end to the difficulties of shipping and storing green energy.
> 
> This is the second powdered hydrogen advance we've learned about this week, designed to solve the same problems: transporting hydrogen is difficult, dangerous and expensive, whether the costs are for cryogenic cooling in a liquid hydrogen system, or for compression to around 700 times the normal sea-level air pressure.


----------



## ekim68

Startup believes AI-guided hydrofoil flotilla is key to green hydrogen



> Wind power is a promising source of green energy and one that could feature in the production of green hydrogen. UK startup Drift Energy shows a different spin on that idea. Instead of creating windmill-derived electricity, its plan involves using AI-routed hydrofoil sailing yachts to generate the electricity required for electrolysis. Those yachts would then deliver green hydrogen to ports around the world for use as a power source.


----------



## ekim68

Europe is burning like it's 2052



> The United Kingdom's Meteorological Office declared its first ever "red warning" for exceptional heat over the weekend. Meanwhile, the UK Health Security Agency raised its heat alert level to 4, triggering a national emergency. And on Tuesday, the UK broke its national record for the highest temperature ever recorded: 39.1 degrees Celsius, or 102.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Forecasters warn the numbers could climb higher.


----------



## ekim68

Zephyr UAS smashes its own endurance record, may still be up there



> The remarkable Zephyr is a stratospheric UAV designed to fly ultra-long endurance missions acting as a solar-powered observation and comms platform. In its latest test, it sailed past its old endurance record two weeks ago, and may still be up there.


----------



## ekim68

Why One Critical Second Can Wreak Havoc on the Internet



> Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth's actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur.
> 
> Since 1972, the world's timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities like adding data to a database.


----------



## ekim68

"Lost" Apple computer prototype goes on the auction block



> A "lost" artifact from the dawn of the age of the personal computer is going up for sale. Steve Job's original, hand-soldered "Apple Computer A" prototype built in 1976 to support Apple's first big contract is on the auction block at RR Auction.





> The prototype differs significantly from later Apple-1s, aside from being damaged, in that it has three orange Sprague Atom capacitors, rather than the Big Blue capacitors used on the production Apple Computer 1. In addition, it is inscribed with the words "Apple Computer A, © 76" instead of the production model "Apple Computer 1, Palo Alto, Ca., Copyright 1976," as well as several technical differences and signs of Wozniak's distinct three-handed soldering technique, where he held the solder in his mouth while working.


----------



## ekim68

The Decline Of New Music



> The music business is the canary in the coal mine. It's where disruption happens first. What happens in the music business ultimately spreads to other industries. So what is happening here is there's a plethora of product and the means of promoting that product has become ever less efficient and diverse.


----------



## ekim68

Incognito Mode Isn't As Incognito As You Might Think



> You've seen the prompt: If you're using a shared or public computer, use incognito mode. It gives you a sense of security knowing that whatever sites you visit or passwords you type won't be saved to the device-like skulking around in an invisibility cloak. But of course, nothing you do online is invisible. Private browsing (aka incognito mode) is a great way to prevent your web browser from saving what you do. But to call it privacy-focused is a stretch, and while your browser or device doesn't log your movements in its history and cookies, that doesn't mean the sites you visit don't clock your behavior. Despite its name, you're not really incognito, and you may want to dial back your confidence in what these modes really do.


----------



## ekim68

Google is adding Flyover-like aerial views to Maps



> Google is adding "photorealistic aerial views" to almost 100 landmarks in Google Maps, the company announced on Wednesday. The views, which remind me of Apple Maps' Flyover feature, give you an overhead look at landmarks in cities including Barcelona, London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo, according to Google.


----------



## ekim68

Ancient genetic study traces "cold sore" virus back 5,000 years



> For people who get cold sores, the virus is with them for life - but how long has the virus itself been with humanity? Scientists from Cambridge have now sequenced the genome of the facial herpes virus, including samples taken from several ancient human remains, and found that it arose a few thousand years ago.


----------



## ekim68

Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us



> Researchers have unpacked a major cybersecurity find-a malicious UEFI-based rootkit used in the wild since 2016 to ensure computers remained infected even if an operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is completely replaced.


----------



## ekim68

Can Pickleball Save America?



> Pickleball, which is played with paddles and a Wiffle-like ball, has exploded in popularity in recent years. During the pandemic, more than a million Americans began playing it, bringing the total to around five million. Stars and athletes play pickleball (Michael Phelps, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Clooneys); so do grandparents, parents, and children, often together. It's simple to grasp-"easy to learn, hard to master," many told me-and is social and inexpensive. Its design, which includes a no-volley zone near the net, minimizes running, as does the vast popularity of doubles. For these reasons, it can blur the lines between sport and hobby, amateur and pro, celebrity and mortal. In June, at a court near Pittsburgh, a petite grandmother named Meg texted her daughter a photo of herself with three burly strangers. "The guy in the green shirt and I whooped the other two," she wrote. "Then everybody else there wanted to take our photo." All three were Pittsburgh Steelers.


----------



## ekim68

Unpicking the link between smell and memories



> The ability of aromas to bring back highly specific memories is becoming better understood, and could be used to boost and heal our brains.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter warns of 'record highs' in account data requests



> Twitter has published its 20th transparency report, and the details still aren't reassuring to those concerned about abuses of personal info. The social network saw "record highs" in the number of account data requests during the July-December 2021 reporting period, with 47,572 legal demands on 198,931 accounts. The media in particular faced much more pressure. Government demands for data from verified news outlets and journalists surged 103 percent compared to the last report, with 349 accounts under scrutiny.


----------



## ekim68

Climate legislation seen as 'transformative' for the automotive and energy industries 



> WASHINGTON - The $369 billion climate and tax package Democrats in the Senate proposed this week could have far-reaching effects on the kinds of cars that Americans drive, where those cars are made and how the country produces its energy. The legislation also aims to break China's hold on battery supply chains.


----------



## ekim68

Fact check: Scientists at CERN are not opening a 'portal to hell'



> The accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, had undergone repairs and upgrades, and scientists plan to use it to crash protons together and learn more about the origins of the universe.
> 
> Nevertheless, social media users are suggesting that the machine has a different purpose. A Facebook post shared July 5 shows a TikTok video of a woman who claims that CERN scientists are using the machine to open a doorway for demons.


----------



## ekim68

Blowhole wave energy generator exceeds expectations in 12-month test



> Wave Swell Energy's remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results.


----------



## ekim68

Oh my days! Midnight comes a fraction sooner as Earth spins faster



> Broadly speaking, Earth completes one full turn on its axis every 24 hours. That single spin marks out a day and drives the cycle of sunrise and sunset that has shaped patterns of life for billions of years. But the curtains fell early on 29 June, with midnight arriving 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected.
> 
> The past few years have seen a flurry of records fall, with shorter days being notched up ever more frequently. In 2020, the Earth turned out 28 of the shortest days in the past 50 years, with the shortest of those, on 19 July, shaving 1.47 milliseconds off the 86,400 seconds that make up 24 hours. The 29 June record came close to being broken again last month, when 26 July came in 1.5 milliseconds short.


----------



## ekim68

In a 3rd test, Facebook still fails to block hate speech



> Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove.
> 
> It is the third such test of Facebook's ability to detect hateful language - either via artificial intelligence or human moderators - that the groups have run, and that the company has failed.


----------



## ekim68

Samson Switchblade flying car is finally ready for takeoff 



> After 14 years of development, the Samson Switchblade - a fast, street-legal three-wheeler that converts at the touch of a button into a 200-mph (322-km/h) airplane - has been approved for airworthiness by the FAA. The team is now preparing for flight tests.


----------



## ekim68

Beavers are heat wave heroes



> During an intense heat wave, humans have a number of tools to stay cool, such as air conditioning, swimming pools, and ice cream. Wild animals, meanwhile, have beavers.
> 
> Yes, beavers. These web-footed, fat-tailed amphibious rodents help countless other critters survive a heat wave. They not only drench certain landscapes in cold water but also help cool the air. They even make forests and grasslands less likely to burn.


----------



## ekim68

The End of Snow Threatens to Upend 76 Million American Lives



> Disappearing snowpack is accelerating the historic drought across the Western US, and so far government responses haven't matched the scale of the problem.


----------



## ekim68

Powdered sodium battery design promises a 15% leap in energy density



> With real uncertainty clouding the world's supply of lithium, alternative battery chemistries will be crucial as we continue our uptake of electric vehicles and mobile devices. One exciting candidate in this space is sodium-ion, and a research team in Russia has developed a novel battery of this ilk that boasts some impressive energy density, and may also be resistant to low temperatures.


----------



## ekim68

1,200 km/h TransPod FluxJet: Canadian hyperloop reels in half a billion



> Faster than a jet plane and about half the price. Yes, it's another hyperloop-style vacuum-tube train - this time from Canada. TransPod says it's started preliminary construction on a tube that'll fire you from Calgary to Edmonton in 45 minutes.


----------



## ekim68

Spain puts limits on air conditioning and heating to save energy



> Spain has announced new energy-saving measures, including limits on air conditioning and heating temperatures in public and large commercial buildings, as it becomes the latest European country to seek to reduce its energy consumption and its dependence on Russian oil and gas.


----------



## ekim68

Having rich childhood friends is linked to a higher salary as an adult



> A study of Facebook friend networks has shown that people from low-income households are more likely to grow up to make a higher salary if they had wealthier friends as children


----------



## ekim68

SeaSearcher drone is set to take the treasure-hunting world by storm 



> As any frequent viewer of the Discovery Channel will know, the search for sunken treasure typically involves sifting through the sand, just hoping to unearth gold or silver. The SeaSearcher underwater drone, however, may soon point clients right to the booty.


----------



## ekim68

Who do we spend time with across our lifetime?



> In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone.


----------



## ekim68

Toxic PFAS chemicals render rainwater unsafe to drink across the globe 



> A striking new review article from researchers in Europe argues the global spread of certain hazardous chemicals is so pervasive that unsafe levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) can be found in rainwater from all parts of the world, including remote regions such as Antarctica and the Tibetan Plateau.


----------



## ekim68

A Sydney high school banned mobile phones. It had dramatic results



> A Sydney high school has seen a dramatic decrease in behavioural issues and a boost in physical activity and students talking to each other just two months after it tightened restrictions on mobile phone usage.


----------



## ekim68

Inventors Must Be Human, Federal Circuit Rules in Blow to AI



> Computer scientist Stephen Thaler was dealt another blow in his battle for artificial intelligence machines to be recognized as inventors on patents, after the nation's top patent court found that inventors must be humans.


----------



## ekim68

This travel company wants tourists to visit Ukraine right now



> Visiting Ukraine right now to experience what's it like living in the middle of a war, see its bombed cities, feel the danger and meet its fighters isn't likely to be on anyone's travel wish list.
> 
> But six months after Russia invaded the country, unleashing a wave of death and destruction, one organization is inviting tourists to come.


----------



## ekim68

Google Fiber plans 5-state growth spurt, biggest since 2015



> Aug 10 (Reuters) - Google Fiber plans to bring its high-speed internet service to multiple cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska and Nevada over the next several years in its first big expansion since it spun out as an independent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit in 2015.


----------



## ekim68

Meta's chatbot says the company 'exploits people'



> Meta says the chatbot uses artificial intelligence and can chat on "nearly any topic".
> 
> Asked what the chatbot thought of the company's CEO and founder, it replied "our country is divided and he didn't help that at all".


----------



## ekim68

More than 100 municipalities in France without drinking water



> Due to the extreme drought, more than 100 municipalities in France are without potable water, and are being supplied by lorries as much as possible while the Government is looking for a solution.


----------



## ekim68

More Energy on Less Land: The Drive to Shrink Solar's Footprint



> With the push for renewables leading to land-use conflicts, building highly efficient utility-scale solar farms on ever-smaller tracts of land has become a top priority. New approaches range from installing PV arrays that take up less space to growing crops between rows of panels.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists create quality concrete with 100% tire-rubber aggregate 



> In recent years, we've heard about efforts to replace _some_ of the aggregate used in concrete with crumbled used tires. Now, however, scientists have succeeded in producing good quality concrete in which _all_ of the aggregate has been replaced with tire particles.


----------



## ekim68

LG's 97-inch vibrating OLED TV claims to offer 5.1 audio without speakers



> LG Display has shown off some interesting ideas as it looks to change the way OLED panels work, from positing bizarre form factors to addressing dimmer brightness levels compared to LED alternatives. Now, the panel maker is exploring a new approach to OLED TV audio.
> 
> Today, LG Display announced its creation of a 97-inch OLED EX TV panel that debuts the company's Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO), "which allows the display to vibrate and generate the sound directly from the display without separate speakers."


----------



## ekim68

It's not just social media: Cable news has bigger effect on polarization



> When it comes to echo chambers, TV trumps online.


----------



## ekim68

Why Doesn't China Invade Taiwan?



> China officially ended its live-fire military exercises around Taiwan this week, but its Taiwan Affairs Office has issued a white paper emphasizing "peaceful reunification" with the self-ruled island-while reserving the right to use force. It looks like dramatic escalation in response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan can be ruled out, even as aggressive Chinese intrusions across the median line in the Taiwan Strait become the new normal.


----------



## ekim68

A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making



> Time and again, mining company Homestake and government agencies promised to clean up waste from decades of uranium processing. It didn't happen. Now they're trying a new tactic: buying out homeowners to avoid finishing the job.


----------



## ekim68

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?



> Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. We explore the number of factors which might explain this difference.


----------



## ekim68

An eye implant engineered from proteins in pigskin restored sight in 14 blind people



> Twenty people with diseased or damaged corneas had significant improvements in their vision after they received implants engineered out of protein from pigskin.
> 
> The patients, in Iran and India, all suffered from keratoconus, a condition in which the protective outer layer of the eye progressively thins and bulges outward. Fourteen of the patients were blind before they received the implant, but two years after the procedure, they had regained some or all of their vision. Three had perfect vision after the surgery.


----------



## ekim68

Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' leaps to top of Amazon bestseller lists



> Author Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" topped several Amazon bestsellers lists on Tuesday, days after he sustained serious injuries in a stabbing at a lecture in New York.


----------



## ekim68

How Remote Work is Shifting Population Growth Across the U.S.



> Since the pandemic began, there has been a debate about whether the rapid rise of remote work would affect where people live. Some argued that remote work effects would be mostly temporary and local. Others argued that remote work would have significant effects on where people live and the economic geography of the U.S. and elsewhere.


----------



## ekim68

It's about time.......!


US FDA ruling allows low-cost hearing aids to be sold over-the-counter



> The US FDA has issued a final rule that establishes a new category of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. The move comes as part of a push by the US government to make healthcare more affordable, allowing millions of people to buy low-cost hearing aids without prescription.


----------



## ekim68

Floating artificial leaves produce fuels from water, air and sunlight



> The leaf is one of nature's most impressive little machines, able to convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into energy. Scientists at Cambridge have now created a type of artificial leaf that can float on water, tapping into sunlight above it and water below it to produce fuels as efficiently as the real thing.


----------



## ekim68

Australia to target vehicle emissions to boost electric car supply



> SYDNEY, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Australia's government said on Friday it plans to introduce new regulations targeting vehicle carbon emissions to boost the uptake of electric cars, as it looks to catch up with other developed economies.
> 
> Just 2% of cars sold in Australia are electric compared with 15% in Britain and 17% in Europe, and the country risked becoming a dumping ground for vehicles that can't be sold elsewhere, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said.


----------



## ekim68

The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars



> Everyone trusted the two guys at Three Arrows Capital. They knew what they were doing - right?


----------



## ekim68

Banana Ships And The Hidden Fees Of Ship Cargo



> A cadre of ocean carriers are charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports. Sellers of furniture, coconut water, even kids' potties say the fees are inflating costs.


----------



## ekim68

Closing Down the Billionaire Factory



> The private equity industry has been running America for four decades. This is how the 'billionaire factory' emerged, and why the public has had enough.


----------



## ekim68

Apple already sold everyone an iPhone. Now what?



> The ubiquitous device is becoming a shop window for the firm's services


----------



## ekim68

Big Tech braces for "big lie" in 2022 midterms



> Why it matters: Tech companies were caught flat-footed by the deluge of disinformation aimed at delegitimizing the election process and outcome in 2020. Now, amid intense regulatory scrutiny, they are trying to get ahead of a repeat.


----------



## ekim68

Why Stacking Chips Like Pancakes Could Mean a Huge Leap for Laptops



> By packaging "chiplets" into a single, larger uberprocessor, Intel hopes to bring to the masses the kind of premium speeds found in the Apple M1 Ultra.


----------



## ekim68

Predatory landlords are buying up trailer parks en masse



> From Cape Cod to West Palm Beach to Houston to San Diego, real estate developers have been going all-in on mobile home properties. It might sound like a strange investment to some, but it's also one of the most reliable and low-lift ways to make a passive (read: predatory) profit off of rent-seeking.


----------



## ekim68

Bioengineering: Better photosynthesis increases yields in food crops



> Scientists have transgenically altered soybean plants to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, resulting in greater yields without loss of quality.


----------



## ekim68

EPB Launches America's First Community-Wide 25 Gig Internet Service



> Continuing the focus on delivering the world's fastest internet speeds that led Chattanooga's municipal utility to launch America's first comprehensively available Gig-speed internet service (2010) and the first 10-Gig internet service (2015), EPB has launched the nation's first community-wide 25 gigabits per second (25,000 Mbps) internet service.


----------



## ekim68

A new concept for low-cost batteries



> Made from inexpensive, abundant materials, an aluminum-sulfur battery could provide low-cost backup storage for renewable energy sources.


----------



## ekim68

Unexpected end to Zephyr 8's record-smashing 64-day endurance flight 



> The US Army's record-breaking Zephyr 8 uncrewed ultra-long endurance drone demonstration came to an abrupt end on August 18 at 9 pm PDT after an unprecedented 64 days in flight, when an unspecified and "unexpected" event brought the aircraft down over the Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) in Arizona.


----------



## ekim68

The GPU shortage is over. The GPU surplus has arrived!



> How quickly things change: A year ago, it was nearly impossible to buy a GeForce GPU for its intended retail price. Now, the company has the opposite problem. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during the company's Q2 2023 earnings call yesterday that the company is dealing with "excess inventory" of RTX 3000-series GPUs ahead of its next-gen RTX 4000 series release later this year.


----------



## ekim68

Ah the good old days... 


The Twisted Life of Clippy



> Last year, Microsoft officially revived the Office Assistant that debuted in Office 97. The character replaced a plain old paperclip in Microsoft 365 to help liven up the company's emojis and indulge a social media outpouring. Clippy can now permanently live in Word files, Outlook emails, or other common workplace apps. In one of the company's Teams backgrounds, the paperclip hovers above yellow legal pad paper on a pedestal in a cement-walled basement, seemingly exiled to the dungeon of bad tech ideas.


----------



## ekim68

When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home



> After an investment firm bought St. Joseph's Home for the Aged, in Richmond, Virginia, the company reduced staff, removed amenities, and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.


----------



## ekim68

Criminals posting counterfeit Microsoft products to get access to victims' computers



> One such package seen by Sky News is manufactured to a convincing standard and contains an engraved USB drive, alongside a product key.
> 
> But the USB does not install *Microsoft* Office when plugged in to a computer. Instead, it contains malicious software which encourages the victim to call a fake support line and hand over access to their PC to a remote attacker.


----------



## ekim68

Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas



> Germany has ordered overnight shutdowns for non-essential digital signage, to save its reserves of natural gas for more important purposes.
> 
> Like many European nations, Germany relies on natural gas imported from Russia. And thanks to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, that gas is currently in short supply.


----------



## ekim68

Electronic circuit degrades on demand into recyclable pieces



> A growing field of research is what is known as transient electronics - those made to degrade after a certain amount of time, or when they encounter a specific trigger like heat or water. These could not only help reduce e-waste, but make for sensors in the human body or the environment that can biodegrade when their work is done.


----------



## ekim68

SmartDry's useful laundry sensor to be cloud-bricked next month



> Sensor for already dry clothes relied on smartphone app, servers to work.


----------



## ekim68

Simple method destroys dangerous 'forever chemicals,' making water safe



> If you're despairing at recent reports that Earth's water sources have been thoroughly infested with hazardous human-made chemicals called PFAS that can last for thousands of years, making even rainwater unsafe to drink, there's a spot of good news. Chemists have developed a simple way to break down almost a dozen types of these nearly indestructible 'forever chemicals' at relatively low temperatures with no harmful byproducts.


----------



## ekim68

Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely 



> The drinking water system in Jackson - Mississippi's largest city and home to more than 160,000 residents - is failing, state officials announced on Monday. Thousands of Jackson residents already have no or little water pressure, and officials cannot say when adequate, reliable service will be restored.


----------



## ekim68

An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are mad



> Jason Allen's AI-generated work "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" took first place in the digital category at the Colorado State Fair.


----------



## ekim68

Hornsea 2: North Sea wind farm claims title of world's largest



> The world's largest offshore wind farm is now fully operational, 55 miles off the coast of Yorkshire.
> 
> The Hornsea 2 project can generate enough electricity to power about 1.3 million homes - that's enough for a city the size of Manchester.


----------



## ekim68

Scientists call on colleagues to protest climate crisis with civil disobedience



> Scientists should commit acts of civil disobedience to show the public how seriously they regard the threat posed by the climate crisis, a group of leading scientists has argued.
> 
> "Civil disobedience by scientists has the potential to cut through the myriad complexities and confusion surrounding the climate crisis," the researchers wrote in an article, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.


----------



## MisterEd51

ekim68 said:


> Scientists call on colleagues to protest climate crisis with civil disobedience


I call on the people in California after 2035 to act in civil disobedience and buy their new gas powered cars in another state. 


> People can continue driving gas-fueled vehicles and purchasing used ones after 2035. The plan also allows for one-fifth of sales after 2035 to be plug-in hybrids that can run on batteries and gas.


That means that people will probably be driving gas powered cars in California well after 2035.

Question...I thought the world only had 10 years. Has that date been pushed back?


----------



## ekim68

Sunnova Submits Application to Develop First-of-its-Kind Solar "Micro-Utility" in California



> Sunnova formed a wholly-owned subsidiary called Sunnova Community Microgrids California, LLC ("SCMC") to own and operate EaaS offerings in new communities including energy generation, storage, and distribution infrastructure. SCMC seeks to develop largely self-sustaining micro-utilities by equipping new home communities with solar and storage to provide consumers with a better energy service that allows them to live in a more resilient home and community with latest-generation energy infrastructure. SCMC will focus on newly constructed homes, allowing the company to work with developers to design and implement distributed solar-powered microgrids for communities that will benefit from improved sustainability and clean, resilient and reliable power.


----------



## ekim68

The nation's poorest state used welfare money to pay Brett Favre for speeches he never made



> Brett Favre earned nearly $140 million as a star NFL quarterback over two decades and millions more in product endorsements.
> 
> But that didn't stop the state of Mississippi from paying Favre $1.1 million in 2017 and 2018 to make motivational speeches - out of federal welfare funds intended for needy families. The Mississippi state auditor said Favre never gave the speeches and demanded the money back, with interest.


----------



## ekim68

EPA head: Advanced nuke tech key to mitigate climate change



> The head of the U.S. Environment Protection Agency said Friday that advanced nuclear technology will be "critical" for both the United States and Japan as they step up cooperation to meet decarbonization goals.
> 
> Michael Regan, after holding talks with his Japanese counterpart Akihiro Nishimura in Tokyo, told a joint news conference that nuclear energy in their countries plays a role and "the opportunities for advanced nuclear technology will be critical if we're going to meet our climate goals."


----------



## MisterEd51

ekim68 said:


> EPA head: Advanced nuke tech key to mitigate climate change


Someone needs to tell California about this. They used to have 5 nuclear power plants but only have one now called Diablo Canyon. Even it will be shut down within the next few years. Since California is determined to make everyone drive electric cars what do they think will produce the electricity needed to charge all those batteries? If you shut down power plants that use fossil fuels then nuclear power is the only thing that is capable of producing the power needed to do this.


----------



## ekim68

A smartwatch for your 5-year-old kid? More parents say yes as stopgap cellphone



> Across the United States, parents are increasingly buying Apple Watches and strapping them onto the wrists of children as young as 5. The goal: to use the devices as a stopgap cellphone for the kids. With the watch's cellular abilities, parents can use it to reach and track their children, while the miniature screens mitigate issues like internet addiction.


----------



## ekim68

Can We Save the Planet and Still Eat Meat?



> As governments drag their feet in responding to climate change, many concerned people are looking for actions they can take as individuals—and eating less meat is an obvious place to start. Livestock today account for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s cars and trucks combined.


----------



## ekim68

Artificial gravity reduces spaceflight's health toll in fruit fly tests



> Microgravity wreaks havoc on the bodies of astronauts, which is bad news given humanity’s space-bound ambitions. A NASA experiment housing fruit flies on the International Space Station has now shown that artificial gravity can help reduce some of those health problems.


----------



## ekim68

US Postal Service Celebrates NASA’s Webb Telescope With New Stamp



> The U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp celebrating NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most powerful, and most complex science telescope ever put in space. The stamp, which features an illustration of the observatory, will be dedicated in a ceremony Thursday, Sept. 8, at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington.


----------



## ekim68

Cannabis legalization in US projected to cost big pharma billions



> New research from a team of economists has estimated the legalization of medical and recreational cannabis over the past 25 years has cost pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars in lost sales. And, if the US were to legalize cannabis across the whole country, pharma stocks could rapidly drop by over 10 percent.


----------



## ekim68

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse



> Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences


----------



## ekim68

For New Zealand Māori, an uncertain future as fish move away




> As the climate warms, animals are heading for new areas. The Indigenous Māori’s experience handling the shift offers a warning — and lessons — for people around the world.


----------



## ekim68

Dolphins may use whistles like humans use names



> Bottlenose dolphins’ signature whistles just passed an important test in animal psychology. A new study by my colleagues and me has shown that these animals may use their whistles as namelike concepts.


----------



## ekim68

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030



> US farm machinery giant John Deere has estimated software fees will make up 10 percent of the company's revenues by the end of the decade.
> 
> Chief executive John May offered the projection in a _Wall Street Journal_ report on how Deere has plowed billions into developing self-driving tractors and crop sprayers that can tell the difference between weeds and produce.
> 
> Though farmers are already struggling with operating costs – including fertilizer and fuel – Deere wants to sell software subscriptions for operating its ever smarter vehicles.


----------



## ekim68

Uber Eats Will Begin Using Nuro Delivery Robots



> Autonomous tech developer Nuro is teaming up with Uber Eats in a long-awaited partnership that will see the company's latest robot take over the delivery of food to app users. The two companies signed a 10-year contract just a few days ago, paving the way for a wider rollout of Nuro's driverless delivery robots, which have been operating on a limited scale in several cities.


----------



## ekim68

1-MW floating vertical axis wind turbine to be deployed off Norway 




> Swedish company SeaTwirl says its floating vertical-axis wind turbines have what it takes to dramatically reduce the cost of deep offshore wind energy, and it's signed a deal with Westcon to build and deploy a commercial-scale 1-MW turbine in Norway.


----------



## ekim68

Moonshot plan looks to recreate lunar experience on Earth 



> Even if it eventually becomes available, a vacation to the Moon is going to be financially out of reach for most of us. Such is the thinking behind a novel US$5-billion architecture proposal that's aimed at offering visitors a tiny taste of lunar life right here on Earth.
> 
> Bringing to mind the MSG Sphere London, Moon – as it's officially named – would take a spherical form that mimics our lunar neighbor. It would be situated on top of a disc-shaped podium structure and rise to an overall height of 224 m (735 ft). Structurally, it would consist of concrete, steel and glass, plus aluminum and carbon fiber.


----------



## ekim68

Five years of data show that SSDs are more reliable than HDDs over the long haul



> Backup and cloud storage company Backblaze has published data comparing the long-term reliability of solid-state storage drives and traditional spinning hard drives in its data center. Based on data collected since the company began using SSDs as boot drives in late 2018, Backblaze cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein published a report yesterday showing that the company's SSDs are failing at a much lower rate than its HDDs as the drives age.


----------



## ekim68

SpaceX's Starlink Arrives in Antarctica, Now Available on All 7 Continents



> SpaceX’s Starlink is starting to offer satellite internet in perhaps the most remote region of the world: Antarctica.
> 
> The company has shipped a Starlink dish to McMurdo Station, a US research facility based on an island right off the coast of Antarctica. In a tweet(Opens in a new window) on Wednesday, the National Science Foundation said that scientists with the US Antarctic Program have been testing out the dish at the site to supply increased internet bandwidth.


----------



## ekim68

Study: More Than 335,000 Lives Could Have Been Saved During Pandemic if U.S. Had Universal Health Care



> In the United States, death rates from COVID-19 are higher than in any other high-income country—and our fragmented and inefficient health system may be largely to blame, Yale researchers say in a new study.
> 
> If the U.S. had had a single-payer universal health care system in 2020, nearly 212,000 American lives would have been saved that year, according to a new study. In addition, the country would have saved $105 billion in COVID-19 hospitalization expenses alone.


----------



## ekim68

We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business



> Turns out the obsolete floppy is way more in demand than you’d think


----------



## ekim68

World’s biggest carbon capture plant set for Wyoming



> The US state of Wyoming is set to welcome the world’s largest direct air capture plant for the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Called Project Bison, the facility is slated to swing into action next year and, all going to plan, will scale up its operations by the end of the decade to suck up five million tons of CO2 each year, and safely lock it away underground.


----------



## ekim68

How to Figure Out What Weirdo Just Called You



> There are a lot of instances when you might need to match a phone number to a real person’s name. Maybe you got a text from an unknown number. Maybe you’ve seen a call from an unlisted contact pop up repeatedly on your partner’s home screen. Whatever the case may be, here are some of the best ways to nail down the name of the person behind a number and figure out how or why they’re reaching out.


----------



## ekim68

Denmark and Germany now building the world's longest immersed tunnel



> Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, the world's longest immersed tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times between the two countries when it opens in 2029.


----------



## ekim68

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice



> A Monday missive from the Document Foundation reveals the org will begin charging €8.99 for the software – but only when sold via Apple's Mac App Store.


----------



## ekim68

Nvidia unveils Drive Thor, one chip to rule all software-defined vehicles



> Nvidia is gearing up to deliver Drive Thor, its next-generation automotive-grade chip that the company claims will be able to unify a wide range of in-car technology from automated driving features and driver monitoring systems to streaming Netflix in the back for the kiddos.


----------



## ekim68

Discarded human hair could be used to hydroponically grow vegetables



> As compared to traditional agriculture, hydroponic farming uses less space and less water, plus it requires no soil. It still does require a growth medium, though – and scientists have recently created a better such medium, derived from discarded human hair.


----------



## ekim68

Elon Musk activates Starlink for Iranian citizens after US Sec of State issued a General License



> Elon Musk announced that he was activating Starlink in response to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tweet announcing the issuing of a General License to provide the Iranian people with access to digital communications.


----------



## ekim68

Stanford researchers find wildfire smoke is unraveling decades of air quality gains, exposing millions of Americans to extreme pollution levels



> Stanford researchers have developed an AI model for predicting dangerous particle pollution to help track the American West’s rapidly worsening wildfire smoke. The detailed results show millions of Americans are routinely exposed to pollution at levels rarely seen just a decade ago.


----------



## ekim68

Vultures Prevent Tens of Millions of Metric Tons of Carbon Emissions Each Year



> Vultures get a bad reputation for their carrion-scavenging ways, but their dietary habits prevent the release of greenhouse gases


----------



## ekim68

Museums on prescription: Brussels tests cultural visits to treat anxiety



> Psychiatrists in the city can now prescribe free visits to cultural venues to complement other treatments


----------



## ekim68

Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones allows AI to take over the role



> James Earl Jones, the actor who has voiced iconic Star Wars villain Darth Vader since 1977, has reportedly permitted his past utterances to be fed into an AI that will ensure his distinct tones become replicable once he becomes one with the Force.


----------



## ekim68

California moves to be first state to ban natural gas heaters and furnaces



> A new proposal passed by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) cements the first steps in the state becoming the first to ban natural gas heaters and furnaces.
> 
> The decision, which was passed unanimously, aims to phase out sales of the space heater and water heater appliances by 2030.


----------



## ekim68

Google Fiber touts 20Gbps download speed in test, promises eventual 100Gbps



> Google Fiber is touting a test that delivered 20Gbps download speeds to a house in Kansas City, calling it a milestone on the path to offering 100Gbps symmetrical Internet. The company said it will also offer new multi-gigabit tiers in the near future.


----------



## ekim68

Electric Cars' Turning Point May Be Happening as U.S. Sales Numbers Start Climb



> EVs are still far from mainstream, but a 60 percent rise in new-EV registrations is definitely a sign they're getting closer.


----------



## ekim68

Europe braces for mobile network blackouts



> PARIS/STOCKHOLM/MILAN, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Once unthinkable, mobile phones could go dark around Europe this winter if power cuts or energy rationing knocks out parts of the mobile networks across the region.


----------



## ekim68

China spins up giant battery built with US-patented tech



> The world's largest vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) has been connected to the grid in Dalian, China, where it was built using technology patented in the United States.
> 
> With a current capacity of 100MW/400MWh and plans to double it, the Dalian VRFB will reportedly be able to meet the daily energy needs of 200,000 people, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said. The battery will be used to manage supplies during peak power demand periods, and could allow electricity companies in the Dalian region to adopt more renewables to feed the system.


----------



## ekim68

Sofia, the Historic Airplane-Borne Telescope, Lands for the Last Time



> Over the past eight years, a modified Boeing 747 jetliner has flown hundreds of flights on a unique mission: carrying a 19-ton, 2.5-meter telescope known as Sofia, or the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Flying a telescope on a jumbo jet offered a way to peer into the heavens at wavelengths that could not be glimpsed from the ground—but the ticket was expensive. So yesterday, NASA and the German space agency grounded the mission. Its final flight landed early Thursday morning at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in the desert near Los Angeles.


----------



## ekim68

Roku will now work with Nielsen to track cross-media viewership



> Today, Nielsen announced that Roku plans to enable four-screen measurement across desktop, mobile, connected TV and traditional TV. This is the first time Roku will use the digital methodology, Nielsen One, the data measurement firm’s cross-media measurement tool, which launches in December.


----------



## ekim68

Tesla unveils new Dojo supercomputer so powerful it tripped the power grid



> Tesla has unveiled its latest version of its Dojo supercomputer, and it’s apparently so powerful that it tripped the power grid in Palo Alto.


----------



## ekim68

Russians dodging mobilization behind flourishing scam market



> Ever since Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered partial mobilization after facing setbacks on the Ukrainian front, men in Russia and the state's conscript officers are playing a 'cat and mouse' game involving technology and cybercrime services.
> 
> More specifically, many Russian men eligible for enlistment have resorted to illegal channels that provide them with fabricated exemptions, while those fleeing the country to neighboring regions turn to use identity masking tools.


----------



## ekim68

Physics Nobel rewards 'spooky science' of entanglement



> The award goes to Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger.
> 
> Their work should pave the way to a new generation of powerful computers and telecommunications systems that are impossible to break into.


----------



## ekim68

White House unveils artificial intelligence ‘Bill of Rights’



> The Biden administration unveiled a set of far-reaching goals Tuesday aimed at averting harms caused by the rise of artificial intelligence systems, including guidelines for how to protect people’s personal data and limit surveillance.


----------



## ekim68

Report: Transitioning only 6% of American vehicles to electric could prevent 67,000 premature deaths



> Changing America’s fleet of trucks and buses to run on electricity while, at the same time, changing the nation’s power grid to renewable fuels could prevent 67,000 premature deaths by 2050, according to a report from the American Lung Association.


----------



## ekim68

The Climate Crisis Spells Big Business for Carbon Capture



> According to estimates, the worldwide carbon-capture market is expected to grow from about $2 billion this year to about $7 billion in 2028. “There’s growing recognition in the private sector that climate change isn’t scary from a business proposition,” said Matt Kittell, a senior investment officer with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. “You can solve this problem in a way that makes money.”


----------



## ekim68

Solar power and batteries account for 60% of planned new U.S. electric generation capacity



> Power plant developers and operators expect to add 85 gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity to the U.S. power grid from 2022 to 2023, 60% (51 GW) of which will be made up of solar power and battery storage projects, according to data reported in our _Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory_. In many cases, projects combine these technologies.


----------



## ekim68

Michigan is becoming the center of US battery manufacturing



> Michigan, long the automotive manufacturing capital of the United States, is now getting pumped with investment both publicly and privately to build out a series of battery manufacturing plants that will power the wave of electric vehicles coming to market.


----------



## ekim68

Researchers think a key to cooling cities lies in Naples' ancient aqueducts



> The Cool City Project looks to use the city's existing infrastructure — in some cases, centuries old and hidden underground — to combat life-threatening heat waves.


----------



## ekim68

VPN use skyrockets in Iran as citizens navigate internet censorship under Tehran’s crackdown



> Iranians are turning to virtual private networks to bypass widespread internet disruptions as the government tries to conceal its crackdown on mass protests.


----------



## ekim68

Households face three-hour blackouts as businesses asked to help tackle electricity shortage



> Households will be paid to put on their washing machines or charge their electric cars away from peak hours as the National Grid warns the country could face three-hour power cuts this winter.


----------



## ekim68

Satellite power grid would beam energy around the globe just like data




> New Zealand company Emrod says it's got the technology to enable efficient wireless energy transfer from orbit. It's proposing a global wireless energy matrix, which would instantly beam renewable energy via satellite between any two points on Earth.


----------



## ekim68

Blowhole wave energy could soon be world's cheapest clean power



> The UniWave sea platform is an artificial blowhole that harvests energy from ocean waves. Independent analysts now predict it'll create some of the cheapest renewable energy on the market – and some of the most reliable and predictable, as well.



*







*


----------



## ekim68

All Windows versions can now block admin brute-force attacks



> Microsoft announced today that IT admins can now configure any Windows system still receiving security updates to automatically block brute force attacks targeting local administrator accounts via a group policy.


----------



## ekim68

Many U.S. drivers treat partially automated cars as self-driving -study



> Drivers using advanced driver assistance systems like Tesla (TSLA.O) Autopilot or General Motors (GM.N) Super Cruise often treat their vehicles as fully self-driving despite warnings, a new study has found.


----------



## ekim68

Coastal algae farms proposed as solution to future food crisis



> A new paper published in the journal _Oceanography_ speculates future global food production problems could be solved by growing protein-dense microalgae in coastal aquaculture farms. The modeling boldly projects 100% of global protein demands could be provided by marine microalgae in 2050.


----------



## ekim68

GM created a new energy business to sell batteries and solar panels in bid to dethrone Tesla




> GM Energy is making a grab for a piece of the $150 billion energy generation and storage market. The automaker wants to shore up the grid in preparation for a tidal wave of new EVs.


----------



## ekim68

Lab-grown brain cells play video game Pong[url]



> Researchers have grown brain cells in a lab that have learned to play the 1970s tennis-like video game, Pong.
> 
> They say their "mini-brain" can sense and respond to its environment.


----------



## ekim68

Junk cellphones on Earth would stack higher than the International Space Station



> Alongside National Dessert Day, National Boss's Day, and World Egg Day, October 14 is also International E-waste Day. To celebrate, the unfortunately named WEEE Forum (that's waste electrical and electronic equipment) has compiled some grim reading.
> 
> The awareness group reckons that of the 16 billion mobile phones owned worldwide, 5.3 billion will become e-waste this year.


----------



## ekim68

What Happens When You Add a Hurricane Crisis to an Insurance Crisis?



> Whether trial lawyers and unethical contractors are really responsible, one thing’s for sure: Florida’s property insurance market is deeply broken, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The average premium is three times the national average, and rates are rising by 30 to 50 percent a year.


----------



## ekim68

Macintosh computer once owned by Steve Jobs goes up for auction



> A Macintosh SE computer that was used by tech legend Steve Jobs is going on the auction block in New York on October 25 as part of Bonham's History of Science and Technology auction, where the unit is estimated to go for US$200,000 to $300,000.


----------



## ekim68

White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight



> The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways of modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth to temper the effects of global warming, a process sometimes called solar geoengineering or sunlight reflection.


----------



## ekim68

Rooftop wind system delivers 150% the energy of solar per dollar



> Aeromine says its unique "motionless" rooftop wind generators deliver up to 50% more energy than a solar array of the same price, while taking up just 10% of the roof space and operating more or less silently. In independent tests, they seem legit.


 [/SIZE]


----------



## ekim68

FTC Wants to Add Right to Repair to Existing Energy Saving Rules



> The federal government wants to expand its energy conservation rules to include right-to-repair provisions.


----------



## ekim68

China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans



> The failure rate of semiconductors shipped from China to Russia has increased by 1,900 percent in recent months, according to Russian national business daily Коммерсантъ (Kommersant).
> 
> Quoting an anonymous source, Kommersant states that before Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine the defect rate in imported silicon was two percent. Since that war commenced, Russian manufacturers have apparently faced 40 percent failure rates.


----------



## ekim68

AT&T Hit With $23 Million Fine For Bribing Illinois Lawmaker



> In just the last decade or so AT&T has been fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; fined $105 million for helping “crammers” rip off their customers; fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of “unlimited” data; and accused of ripping off U.S. schools for decades.


----------



## ekim68

BMW will build a $1.7 billion EV battery factory in South Carolina



> BMW says it will make batteries for its electric vehicles at a factory in South Carolina in the latest move by a major automaker to localize EV production in the United States.
> 
> The German company plans to invest $1.7 billion in the US, including $1 billion for EV production at BMW’s Spartanburg plant and $700 million for a new battery-assembly facility in nearby Woodruff.


----------



## ekim68

USB-C can hit 120Gbps with newly published USB4 Version 2.0 spec



> We've said it before, and we'll say it again: USB-C is confusing. A USB-C port or cable can support a range of speeds, power capabilities, and other features, depending on the specification used. Today, USB-C can support various data transfer rates, from 0.48Gbps (USB 2.0) all the way to 40Gbps (USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4). Things are only about to intensify, as today the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) published the USB4 Version 2.0 spec. It adds optional support for 80Gbps bidirectional bandwidth as well as the optional ability to send or receive data at up to 120Gbps.


----------



## ekim68

Microsoft’s PC Manager is like CCleaner for your computer




> Microsoft has created a PC Manager app for Windows 10 and above computers. It works a lot like CCleaner to boost PC performance and clean up systems.


----------



## ekim68

How Ticketmaster gets away with it



> As the pandemic has waned, millions of Americans were excited to return to live concerts, sports, and comedy shows. The cost of attending an event, however, has exploded. Yes, the face value of these tickets has gone up considerably. But an even bigger problem is "fees," which can be "as high as 75% of the ticket price." Worse, consumers are increasingly forced to buy tickets on the secondary market, where prices and fees are even higher.


----------



## ekim68

Landowners call for scrapping of plans to ban solar energy from England’s farmland



> Farmers have urged whoever succeeds Liz Truss as UK prime minister to abandon plans to ban solar energy from most of England’s farmland, arguing that it would hurt food security by cutting off a vital income stream.


----------



## ekim68

Record-breaking chip can transmit entire internet's traffic per second 



> The speed record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip has been shattered once again. Engineers have transmitted data at a blistering rate of 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s), almost twice the global internet traffic per second.


----------



## ekim68

The largest electric school bus fleet in the US just launched in Maryland



> Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in the US, has deployed the single largest electric school bus fleet in the country.
> 
> Last school year, the school district saw the delivery of its first 25 electric buses and installed electric infrastructure at one of its transportation depots.
> 
> It’s now added 61 more electric buses to its fleet, for a total of 86.


----------



## ekim68

Comcast’s new higher upload speeds require $25-per-month xFi Complete add-on



> For Comcast Internet customers frustrated by the cable service's slow upload speeds, there have been some welcome announcements recently. But the availability of faster Comcast uploads has a catch—users can only get the higher upstream speeds by purchasing xFi Complete, which adds $25 to monthly broadband costs.


----------



## ekim68

Russian Oligarchs Keep Dying in Suspicious Ways. Wikipedia Is Keeping a List.



> Russian oligarchs linked to large energy companies keep dying in weird ways: dubiousdefenestrations, questionable suicides, and even more outlandish ways, like in May, when Russian state-owned media outlet TASS reported that 43-year-old oil executive Alexander Subbotin died from a drug-induced heart attack at the Moscow home of a Jamaican shaman. Why’d the oligarch visit the shaman? To get toad venom as a hangover cure, allegedly.


----------



## ekim68

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF



> Comment It's not sexy but it is good. Mozilla deserves our love for implementing a better PDF reader in the new Firefox browser, 106. It takes away the pain, just a bit, by doing in-browser renderings that can be annotated, decreasing the chance you'll have to find a third-party reader that does what you need.


----------



## ekim68

Apple developers are frustrated with gambling ads appearing across the App Store




> Gambling app ads have even started showing up beneath apps meant to help users recover from a gambling addiction


----------



## ekim68

You’re Going To Have To Pay To Use Some Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now



> It’s very likely you don’t give a great deal of thought to where the digital colors you use originally came from. Nor, probably, have you wondered who might “own” a particular color, when you picked it when creating something in Photoshop. But a lot of people are about to give this a huge amount of their attention, as their collection of PSD files gets filled with unwanted black, due to a licensing change between Adobe and Pantone.


----------



## ekim68

China to break its own record: World’s new largest wind farm could power 13 million homes



> The 14th five-year plan for Chaozhou, China's Guangdong province, was released last week, outlining the city's ambitious plans for a 43.3 gigawatt (GW) project in the Taiwan Strait.


----------



## ekim68

Methane ‘Super-Emitters’ Mapped by NASA’s New Earth Space Mission



> NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet’s dust-producing deserts – information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust’s effects on climate. But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.


----------



## ekim68

US Banks Spent $1 Billion on Ransomware Payments in 2021, Treasury Says



> Treasury says ransomware payments more than doubled since 2020


----------



## ekim68

Meta’s AI-powered audio codec promises 10x compression over MP3



> Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music.


----------



## ekim68

Light-powered catalyst makes profitable hydrogen from stinky waste gas



> Hydrogen sulfide famously stinks like rotten eggs, and contributes that eye-watering, low-hanging punch to the bouquet of the very worst farts. It's also toxic, corrosive, flammable and produced in large amounts as an expensive-to-treat by-product at petroleum refineries. Now, researchers have found an easy, profitable way to turn it into hydrogen.


----------



## ekim68

_The Babylon Bee_ Joins _The Onion_ in Decrying an Ohio Law That Makes Parody a Felony




> The two fake news organizations want the Supreme Court to review the case of a man who was arrested for making fun of the police.


----------



## ekim68

Low sense of personal control increases people’s affinity for tighter, rules-based culture 



> People who feel a lack of personal control in their lives are more likely to prefer a culture that imposes order, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. These “tighter” cultures, in turn, perpetuate their existence by reducing individuals’ sense of personal control and increasing their sense of collective control.


----------



## ekim68

Delhi's air branded 'hazardous', spurs calls to close schools



> Delhi's 20 million residents were effectively breathing smoke on Thursday as the air quality index (AQI) breached the "severe" and "hazardous" categories in nearly all monitoring stations of the Indian capital, spurring calls to close schools.


----------



## ekim68

Lake Mead is dangerously close to becoming a "dead pool"



> Lake Mead, which supplies electrical power and drinking water to millions of people in the American southwest, is drying up. It could soon become a "dead pool" and stop flowing to Hoover Dam.


----------



## ekim68

BYU profs create new micro nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely



> In Memmott’s new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature — 550°C — and it doesn’t take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn’t remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?



> The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
> 
> On the surface Mastodon looks like Twitter - account users write posts (called "toots"), which can be replied to, liked and re-posted, and they can follow each other.


----------



## ekim68

Black Hawk helicopter flies autonomous "rescue" mission without crew 



> The line between crewed and uncrewed aircraft has blurred even more after a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter carried out a demonstration cargo mission as well as a medical "emergency rescue" entirely on its own without anyone aboard or human guidance.


----------



## ekim68

Fast-charging arms latch onto London electric buses for 10-minute top-ups



> There are now more than 800 zero-emission buses roaming the streets of London in a bid to cut into the city’s carbon footprint, and the introduction of new fast-charging infrastructure should help speed things along. The move involves the purchase of 20 new electric tram buses, which will rely on cutting-edge fast-charging arms to stay topped up and on the road.


----------



## ekim68

Oregon tried to inform residents about wildfire risk. The backlash was explosive.




> Homeowners fear the state will devalue their properties by publicizing their fire risk.


----------



## ekim68

11 Things to Remember This Veterans Day



> Whether you know someone who served in the military or you served yourself, Veterans Day is a holiday worth observing. There are around 18.2 million veterans living in the U.S.—here are some things to remember when honoring them on November 11.


----------



## ekim68

"Telescoping can" wave energy device beats test predictions by 20%



> Scotland's AWS Energy has reported results some 20% better than predicted for its Archimedes Waveswing, a prototype wave energy generator that's been undergoing ocean-based testing at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney for the last six months.
> 
> The Waveswing is a cylindrical metal buoy that's tethered to a single point on the ocean floor. In operation, it stays beneath the surface and responds to water pressure changes. As a wave passes overhead, the pressure increase pushes down on the top "floater" section of the device, sliding it downward relative to the lower "silo" section, with a rolling seal ensuring no water gets in.


----------



## ekim68

IBM reveals Osprey, the world's most powerful quantum computer



> IBM has unveiled the most powerful quantum processor in the world – the Osprey, which boasts a massive 433 quantum bits (qubits). The new chip headlines a raft of advances in quantum computers that the company has announced, as it prepares for a massive leap next year.


----------



## ekim68

Surface Pro 9 teardown reveals modular parts, Microsoft’s 2023 repair plans



> There's not much new to the Surface Pro 9 on the outside, as our review points out. Inside, however, there is evidence of a lot of work by Microsoft to make the device more repairable, as shown in an iFixit teardown.


----------



## ekim68

Apple will spend $450 million with Globalstar and others to enable emergency satellite texting



> Apple said Thursday it will spend $450 million with U.S. companies to enable its new emergency satellite texting feature.
> 
> The majority of that money will go to Globalstar
> Apple said, a Louisiana-based company that operates the satellites that make the feature possible


----------



## ekim68

The Private Equity Guys Trying to Shoplift a Supermarket Chain Before They Sell It



> Earlier this week, four state attorneys general filed two separate lawsuits seeking to stop a clique of private equity firms from swiping $4 billion from the massive supermarket chain they own. It was a frankly shocking turn of events, given that, as anyone who has ever worked for one can attest, looting companies is quite literally what private equity firms do.


----------



## ekim68

There’s one big subject our leaders at Cop27 won’t touch: livestock farming



> There are just two actions needed to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown: leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop farming animals. But, thanks to the power of the two industries, both aims are officially unmentionable. Neither of them has featured in any of the declarations from the 26 climate summits concluded so far.


----------



## ekim68

Ambitious 3D-printed, 100-home neighborhood being constructed in Texas



> Though it currently makes up a tiny slice of the housing market, 3D-printed architecture is growing incredibly fast and it's possible to imagine large numbers of Americans living in robot-constructed homes in the near-future. Leading the charge is Icon, which is moving forward on a plan it revealed last year to build a new neighborhood in Texas made up of 100 3D-printed homes.


----------



## ekim68

Al Gore helped launch a global emissions tracker that keeps big polluters honest



> In the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, one of the longstanding challenges has been figuring out who is exactly producing them and how much.
> 
> Now, a new global tracker is helping to make clear exactly where major greenhouse gas emissions are originating. Created by the nonprofit Climate Trace, the interactive map uses a combination of satellites, sensors and machine learning to measure the top polluters worldwide.


----------



## ekim68

Apple launches Emergency SOS via satellite in US and Canada



> Apple on Tuesday announced that Emergency SOS via satellite is officially available to iPhone 14 users in the US and Canada.
> 
> Next month, Apple will launch Emergency SOS via satellite in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. Apple is enabling the feature on all iPhone 14 models that are running iOS 16.1, which was released near the end of October.


----------



## ekim68

Intel unveils real-time deepfake detector, claims 96% accuracy rate



> On Monday, Intel introduced FakeCatcher, which it says is the first real-time detector of deepfakes — that is, synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness.


----------



## ekim68

All-perovskite tandem solar cell boasts high efficiency, record voltage



> Efficiency-wise, perovskite has shot up drastically in a little over a decade, from under 4% in 2009 to over 25% in 2021, now rivaling silicon. It works even better in so-called tandem cells, where multiple layers of materials are stacked on top of each other to harvest different wavelengths of light from the Sun. Perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells, for instance, recently passed the 30% efficiency milestone.


----------



## ekim68

Study: Almost 50% of macOS malware only comes from one app



> Elastic Security Labs has recently released its 2022 Global Threat Report, which summarizes threat trends, forecasts, and recommendations for the cybersecurity industry today. According to the report, only 6.2% of malware ends up on macOS devices, compared to 54.4% and 39.4% on Windows and Linux, respectively. This is not surprising, given how Apple prioritizes security on their platform and the small desktop market share of macOS.
> 
> What _is_ surprising, however, is that almost 50% of all macOS malware only comes from one source: MacKeeper.


----------



## ekim68

Ford CEO: 40% Less Labor To Build Electric Vehicles



> Ford CEO Jim Farley made a blockbuster of a statement this week. According to the somewhat jovial and optimistic cousin of late comedic actor Chris Farley, producing electric vehicles requires about 40% less labor than producing the same number of fossil-powered cars.


----------



## ekim68

USB-C will be mandatory for all smart devices sold in India



> India will be adopting USB-C type as a common charging port for smart devices, with stakeholders reaching a consensus at a meeting of an inter-ministerial task force, consumer affairs secretary Rohit Kumar Singh said on Wednesday.


----------



## ekim68

Taylor Swift vs. Ticketmaster: How the mega-star and her fans are challenging the company’s 50-year grip on the music industry



> The Ticketmaster site crashed on Tuesday after about a bazillion of the gazillion Taylor Swift fans tried to buy tickets to her new Eras Tour.
> 
> Ticketmaster has been a thorn in the side of entertainers and fans alike for years, with service fees often adding 25 percent or even more to the original ticket price. For example, a recent ticket to the Jane’s Addiction/Smashing Pumpkins concert that cost $196 ended up being $231.


----------



## ekim68

Quettabytes and ronnagrams: Extreme numbers get new official names



> As technology advances and extreme numbers become more routine, new prefixes are needed. In this case, the driver was data – currently the volume of data created and consumed worldwide is measured in zettabytes (1021), and beyond that there’s only one more named unit – the yottabyte, or 1024.
> 
> So, at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) this past weekend, global representatives voted to introduce four new prefixes to the SI. The number 1027 is now officially known as ronna and 1030 is now quetta, while 10-27 is ronto and 10-30 is quecto.


----------



## ekim68

Right out of Star Wars... 


AI-driven combat drone can search buildings and execute suicide attacks



> Israeli defence tech company Elbit Systems has launched a lethal, autonomous suicide drone. The Lanius is an agile racing quad with a range of AI-powered scouting, mapping and target classification abilities, and the ability to explode when required.


----------



## ekim68

UPDATE: New billboard reminds New York Gov. Hochul to sign Right to Repair law



> iFixit — a Right to Repair ally and a popular do-it-yourself website with tens of thousands of repair guides — is now running a billboard in Albany, New York calling for Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign the landmark Right to Repair law, which was passed overwhelmingly nearly six months ago by the state legislature.


----------



## ekim68

There will be 3.2 billion gamers in 2022, but revenue is set to fall for first time in 15 years



> *In a nutshell:* If you're old enough to remember when gaming was considered more of a niche pastime, especially among those over the age of sixteen, it might bring a smile to your face to know that 3.2 billion people, almost half the world's population, will play games this year. They'll spend a combined total of $184.4 billion on their hobby, and while that is down slightly compared to last year, it's the result of the pandemic-induced gaming boom of 2020/21.


----------



## ekim68

US Is Focused on Regulating Private Equity Like Never Before



> An industry that has long escaped scrutiny in Washington has found agencies slow-walking deals and enforcing long-dormant competition laws.


----------



## ekim68

Bye-bye airplane mode: EU allows smartphones during flights



> Within the European Union, airlines will be able to install the latest 5G technology on their aircraft, allowing passengers to use their smartphones and other connected devices just as they do on the ground.


----------



## ekim68

South Korean capital launches self-driving bus experiment



> South Korea's capital launched its first self-driving bus route on Friday, part of an experiment which engineers said aims to make people feel more comfortable with driverless vehicles on the roads.


----------



## ekim68

Hyperion plans to kickstart a H2 fuel network with mobile stations 



> Hydrogen supercar maker Hyperion isn't happy about the state of hydrogen fuel infrastructure, so it's decided to start building its own, rolling out yacht-styled mobile hydrogen stations across the United States that can generate fuel on-site.


----------



## ekim68

Revolutionary photocatalyst is huge news for green hydrogen and ammonia



> A fundamental breakthrough in chemistry promises to unlock ammonia as a clean fuel, and it could help decarbonize the entire chemical industry in the process. Rice University researchers have created a small, LED-powered device that converts ammonia to hydrogen on the fly. It uses a light-driven catalyst that's as efficient as expensive thermal catalysts that need thousand-degree temperatures to operate, and it's made from cheap, abundant copper and iron. And it's only the beginning of a technology that could radically reduce costs and energy use in industrial chemistry.


----------



## ekim68

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment



> Japanese electronics and printer maker Epson announced this month that it will end the sale and distribution of laser printer hardware by 2026, citing sustainability issues.
> 
> According to the company, inkjets have a "greater potential" than laser printers to make "meaningful advances" when it comes to the environment.


----------



## ekim68

Rolls-Royce fires up its first hydrogen jet engine



> Rolls-Royce has edged the era of clean aviation a little closer to take-off with the successful testing of a modern jet engine using hydrogen as fuel. The test is described as a landmark achievement and an important step in the decarbonization of the industry, with flight testing of the technology in the pipeline.


----------



## ekim68

U.S Cable TV Companies Quietly Bled Another 785,000 Paying Customers Last Quarter



> The “cord cutting” phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free services like TikTok and YouTube.


----------



## ekim68

New toner cartridges are 20% full and report themselves empty at 15%. What's going on?



> We all knew inkjet printer cartridges were an outright scam, but sadly it seems that the makers of laser toner cartridges have some explaining to do as well. Lumafield scanned a new one and an "empty" one with an industrial CT machine and reports that the new one was sold 20% full and the "empty" one still had 15% in the tank.


----------



## ekim68

Web browsers drop mysterious company with ties to U.S. military contractor



> Major web browsers moved Wednesday to stop using a mysterious software company that certified websites were secure, three weeks after The Washington Post reported its connections to a U.S. military contractor.


----------



## ekim68

Laser satellite shatters space-to-Earth data transmission speed record



> A small satellite developed by MIT engineers has set a new record for data transmission between a satellite and Earth. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system used a laser to beam huge amounts of data at up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps).
> 
> This data transmission speed is far greater than most connections you’ll get between the sky and the ground. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet offers up to 500 Mbps to Premium customers, and even the International Space Station’s data transmission tops out around 600 Mbps. That makes TBIRD up to 200 times faster.


----------



## ekim68

Ford claims No. 2 spot in EVs behind Tesla – but gap remains wide



> DETROIT – Ford Motor
> said Friday that it has achieved CEO Jim Farley’s goal of becoming the second best-selling automaker of electric vehicles in the U.S.
> 
> The Detroit automaker, citing third-party industry data, narrowly topped Hyundai/Kia to hit the goal. Tesla
> remains the industry leader by a wide margin, but has been losing market share as more EVs enter the market.


----------



## ekim68

FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident



> In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened. August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried’s intent and culpability.


----------



## ekim68

‘NO’: Grad Students Analyze, Hack, and Remove Under-Desk Surveillance Devices Designed to Track Them



> In October, the university quietly introduced heat sensors under desk without notifying students or seeking their consent. Students removed the devices, hacked them, and were able to force the university to stop its surveillance.


----------



## ekim68

AMD says transistor tech will keep Moore’s law alive for 6 to 8 years



> Chipmaker AMD has hinted that new transistor technology will keep Moore's Law alive for the next six to eight years, but as one might guess, it will cost more.


----------



## ekim68

How 'goblin mode' became Oxford's word of the year



> It's mindlessly binge-watching television without worrying about the time. It's eating snacks in bed without a care about leftover crumbs. And it's wearing the same pair of pajamas all week while working from home. Welcome to "goblin mode."


----------



## ekim68

Apple Music is getting a karaoke mode



> Apple on Tuesday announced Apple Music Sing, a karaoke experience that will be built right into the Apple Music app. With Apple Music Sing, you’ll be able to follow along with Apple Music’s real-time lyrics and adjust the volume of the vocals so that you can better hear your singing voice. (I’ll personally be keeping the vocals up as loud as possible to hide my imperfections.)


----------



## ekim68

Apple advances user security with powerful new data protections  



> iMessage Contact Key Verification, Security Keys for Apple ID, and Advanced Data Protection for iCloud provide users with important new tools to protect their most sensitive data and communications


----------



## ekim68

AI learns to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance




> DeepMind’s AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges


----------



## ekim68

Atari revives unreleased arcade game that was too damn hard for 1982 players



> Atari is reviving _Akka Arrh_, a 1982 arcade game canceled because test audiences found it too difficult. For the wave shooter’s remake, the publisher is teaming up with developer Jeff Minter, whose psychedelic, synthwave style seems an ideal fit for what Atari describes as “a fever dream in the best way possible.” The remake will be released on PC, PS5 and PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Atari VCS in early 2023.


----------



## lochlomonder

ekim68 said:


> Atari revives unreleased arcade game that was too damn hard for 1982 players


As a kid whose first computer was a CBM 64, I really appreciated the games Jeff Minter wrote. Given his hippy lifestyle, I think he was inspired in some ways by, well, chemical enhancements.


----------



## ekim68

Why does the US keep running out of medicine?



> The United States, the world’s richest country and its most important developer of pharmaceuticals, is not supposed to run out of prescription drugs. And yet it does — all the time.


----------



## ekim68

Support for Windows 7 and 8 fully ends in January, including Microsoft Edge




> Even businesses that will pay for it won't get new Windows 7 security updates.


----------



## ekim68

No, Remote Employees Aren’t Becoming Less Engaged



> One of executives’ biggest worries about remote work is the reduction in spontaneous meetings and conversations with employees. But is this worry justified? New research on meetings shows that it might not be. It turns out that employees have more short, one-on-one meetings compared to 2020.


----------



## ekim68

PC price cuts are coming as manufacturers rethink their portfolios



> Economic uncertainty and decreased consumer demand are taking a toll on the tablet and PC markets. The silver lining for buyers is that excess inventory is forcing manufacturers to heavily discount prices.


----------



## ekim68

Big Oil has engaged in a long-running climate disinformation campaign while raking in record profits, lawmakers find



> Big Oil companies have engaged in a “long-running greenwashing campaign” while raking in “record profits at the expense of American consumers,” the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee has found after a year-long investigation into climate disinformation from the fossil fuel industry.


----------



## ekim68

Covid-19 vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives in US, study says, but the fight isn’t over



> The Covid-19 vaccines have kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives, a new study says – and that estimate is most likely a conservative one, the researchers say.


----------



## ekim68

Tokyo to require new homes be fitted with solar panels from FY 2025



> The Tokyo metropolitan government said Thursday it will introduce a system requiring newly built homes to be fitted with solar panels from fiscal 2025 in a bid to reduce carbon emissions from the household sector.


----------



## ekim68

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services



> Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds.


----------



## ekim68

Ten people who helped shape science in 2022 



> A trail-blazing astronomer, a climate revolutionary and a transplant pioneer are some of the people behind this year’s big stories.


----------



## ekim68

Deal reached for new non-Russian power source for Europe



> The leaders of Hungary, Romania, Georgia and Azerbaijan finalized an agreement Saturday on an undersea electricity connector that could become a new power source for the European Union amid a crunch on energy supplies caused by the war in Ukraine.


----------



## ekim68

Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive? 



> In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive.


----------



## ekim68

Audi is converting all factories to produce EVs as it phases out gas cars



> Audi is preparing to convert its entire network of global production factories to manufacture electric vehicles as it gears up to compete in the auto industry’s future.


----------



## ekim68

Intimate Photos by Roomba Vacuums Leaked Online



> Your robot vacuums are watching you — and the resulting imagery of your most private moments can, horrifically, get leaked online.


----------



## ekim68

Apple’s self-service repairs expand to desktops like iMac, Mac Studio



> Apple's Self Service Repair program continues to roll out in new regions and to new products. Earlier this month, the program expanded from the United States to eight European countries. Now, US customers are gaining access to manuals and parts for new devices: Mac desktops.


----------



## ekim68

Battery replacement must be ‘easily’ achieved by consumers, in proposed European law



> After mandatory USB-C ports, third-party app stores, access to the iPhone’s NFC chip, and more, Apple could be facing yet another European legal requirement – this one about battery replacement.
> 
> A proposed new law would require electronics companies like Apple to ensure that consumers are “easily” able to remove and replace batteries themselves …


----------



## ekim68

Google is making its internal video-blurring privacy tool open source



> Google has announced that two of its latest privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including one that blurs objects in a video, will be provided to anyone for free via open source. The new tools are part of Google's Protected Computing initiative designed to transform "how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety," the company said.


----------



## ekim68

Classifying aging as a disease could speed FDA drug approvals



> The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers aging to be a natural process. This makes it difficult to get FDA approval for drugs that seek to slow or reverse the biological process of aging. Instead, drugs intended to target aging must target a disease that often results from the aging process in order to demonstrate efficacy and gain approval.
> 
> But there is growing consensus and effort among scientists to convince the FDA that aging itself should be classified as a disease and an appropriate target for drug development.


----------



## ekim68

Zimbabwe has banned the export of raw lithium




> The country is enforcing the ban to put a stop to loss of billions of dollars from raw lithium exports, enough to repay its debts


----------



## ekim68

Mozilla Just Fixed an 18-Year-Old Firefox Bug



> We all have a to-do list with items that have been there for too long, as more important problems come up… or procrastination kicks in. That’s even true for Mozilla, which recently fixed a Firefox bug that was first reported 18 years ago.


----------



## ekim68

40 Years of PCMag: An Illustrated Guide



> PCMag's four decades of uninterrupted publication have included many highs and lows—along with the day-to-day work that comes with testing 2,000-plus products and services each year, dispensing endless buying advice, and covering important news as we chronicle the fast-paced world of technology.


----------



## ekim68

Funding bill targets online sites amid retail theft concerns



> Retailers are scoring one win in the governmentwide spending bill, which will force online marketplaces like Amazon and Facebook to verify high-volume sellers on their platforms amid heightened concerns about retail crime.


----------



## ekim68

The biggest medical milestones of 2022 



> Science is often a piecemeal process, progressing slowly through the incremental accumulation of knowledge. In the world of medical science this is particularly evident as small targeted research findings one year may, or may not, lead to massive life-changing new therapies decades later.


----------



## ekim68

Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to preserve nonprofit status



> Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.


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## ekim68

Netgear warns users to patch recently fixed WiFi router bug



> Netgear has fixed a high-severity vulnerability affecting multiple WiFi router models and advised customers to update their devices to the latest available firmware as soon as possible.


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## ekim68

Tesla Model Y is now the best-selling car in all of Europe



> Tesla Model Y became the best-selling car in all of Europe in November. It’s for the second time, and not just for electric vehicles, but all cars.


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## ekim68

Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low



> Demand for graphics cards significantly increased during the pandemic as some people spent more time at home playing games, whereas others tried to mine Ethereum to get some cash. But it looks like now that the world has re-opened and Ethereum mining on GPUs is dead, demand for desktop discrete GPUs has dropped dramatically. In fact, shipments of discrete graphics cards hit a ~20-year low in Q3 2022, according to data from Jon Peddie Research.


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## ekim68

The year tech giants fell to earth



> To say 2022 was not a good year for the technology industry is an understatement.
> 
> Stock prices and earnings fell — driving a $7.4 trillion loss, by one estimate. Industry titans such as Meta and Amazon laid off workers, and regulators and the public zeroed in on concerns about privacy, social media and potential monopolies. The metaverse flopped, Elon Musk ushered in Twitter’s dark age, and the collapse of FTX laid bare a multibillion-dollar fraud.


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## ekim68

Verizon tells 3G customers to upgrade before they lose service



> There’s nothing like an abrupt shutdown of a mobile phone to get someone’s attention.
> 
> Verizon is telling customers that if they’re still using a 3G CDMA or 4G (non-VoLTE) phone that does not support its newer network technologies, “your line will be suspended without billing and will lose the ability to call, text, or use data.”


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## ekim68

Over a Decade, Rolex Watches Outperformed the Stock Market



> The investment return of Rolexes was higher than real estate, the stock market, or even gold over a 10-year period, from 2011 to 2021, according to Paul Altieri, founder and CEO of Bob’s Watches, an online marketplace for the resale of watches, with a focus on Rolexes.


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## ekim68

NVIDIA's GeForce Now game streaming is coming to cars



> You'll soon have access to a host of PC games in your car without buying a Tesla. NVIDIA has announced that it's bringing GeForce Now game streaming to cars using the company's Drive platform. The rollout will offer access to titles like _Cyberpunk 2077_ on a driver display while you're charging or parked, or any time from the backseat.


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## ekim68

NYC Bans Students and Teachers from Using ChatGPT



> The machine learning chatbot is inaccessible on school networks and devices, due to "concerns about negative impacts on student learning," a spokesperson said.


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## ekim68

The year EVs outgrew Tesla



> The numbers bear this out. Tesla is manufacturing hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles each quarter, and new competitors like Rivian and Lucid are scaling up their businesses, too. The big Detroit automakers have also doubled down on the EV transition. Ford says its electric vehicle sales are up more than 100 percent compared to this time last year, and GM is planning 10 new EV models for 2023. Overall, an unprecedented number of electric vehicles were sold in the third quarter of this year, according to Cox Automotive, which tracks auto industry data. Demand for electric vehicles still appears greater than supply, and the firm expects that more than 1 million EVs will be sold in the United States in 2023.


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## ekim68

Qualcomm’s going toe-to-toe with Apple’s satellite messaging feature




> The company says two-way satellite messaging will be available on high-end Android smartphones starting in mid-2023.


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## ekim68

CNN Exclusive: A single Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen US companies[/url



> Parts made by more than a dozen US and Western companies were found inside a single Iranian drone downed in Ukraine last fall, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment obtained exclusively by CNN.


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## ekim68

Laid-Off Twitter Workers Remain in Limbo Over Severance Pay



> Twitter Inc. employees who were laid off shortly after Elon Musk took over are still awaiting details of their severance packages months after being let go, leading to further legal trouble for the new owner.
> 
> Musk laid off roughly 50% of Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees on Nov. 4, just a week after taking control of the company. Almost 1,000 of those who were terminated lived in California, according to documents filed with the state. Those workers were required under state and federal law to keep receiving regular paychecks over the past two months.


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## ekim68

Dell said to be planning purge of Chinese chips from products by 2024



> Dell looks set to stop using chips from China in its products by 2024, according to reports. The move appears to be part of a wider effort to shift its supply chains away from the country in response to the ongoing tensions between China and the US.


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## ekim68

Two charged with attacks on four power substations in Washington state



> Two men were arrested on New Year’s Eve for allegedly shutting down four Washington state power substations in late December that led to power outages for thousands across Pierce County.


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## ekim68

Seattle Public Schools sues TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and others, seeking compensation for youth mental health crisis[\url]



> A new lawsuit filed by Seattle Public Schools against TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, and their parent companies alleges that the social media giants have “successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth” for their own profit, using psychological tactics that have led to a mental health crisis in schools.


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