April 2013 – Page 14

Dish Network bids $25.5 billion for Sprint, goes head-to-head with Softbank

In the battle for Sprint’s heart, Dish Network always seemed to be stuck in the “friend zone”. That’s not the case anymore, however, now that Dish has quietly lobbed an informal $25.5 billion offer to purchase the carrier. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that after Dish was knocked-back in its attempts to buy Clearwire , the satellite TV company scrounged together the cash to beat Softbank’s multi billion dollar deal . If the bid is made formal, then Sprint’s board will have to decide if Softbank’s massive size and buckets of cash can be trumped by Dish’s spectrum reserves , pay-TV business and ability to skip commercials in a breeze. Update: Dish clarified on a conference call that its bid for Clearwire is still on the table for the company to consider even if it was turned down, and that the Sprint offer is not contingent on the carrier closing out its Clearwire purchase . Should the deal go through, the plan is target underserved and rural customers, rather than competing with inner-city fiber-based services. Softbank may find itself beaten by the higher offer, but if Dish succeeds, the Japanese company would still hold around 5% of Sprint’s shares. Filed under: Cellphones , Home Entertainment , Wireless , HD , Mobile , Sprint Comments Via: The Wall Street Journal Source: Dish

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Dish Network bids $25.5 billion for Sprint, goes head-to-head with Softbank

This Lab-Grown Kidney Can Keep Rats—And Maybe Even You—Alive

For the first time ever, a whole lab-grown kidney has been successfully transplanted into a rat , where it allowed the creature to process urine like a really kidney would—and it could someday save your life. More »

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This Lab-Grown Kidney Can Keep Rats—And Maybe Even You—Alive

Construction of World’s Largest Optical Telescope Approved

The University of Hawaii at Hilo has been granted a permit by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources to begin construction of the $1.3 billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). From the article: “The TMT has been in development for over a decade, but the large amount of land needed for its construction raised concerns over the environmental and cultural impact of such a project. Now, however, the land board has rendered a final decision, saying that the university had satisfied the eight criteria necessary under Hawaiian state law to allow the venture to go forward. The giant TMT will be an optical and infrared telescope with enough coverage area and sharpness to observe light from 13 billion years ago, track extrasolar planets, and observe planets and stars in their early formative years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How Chinese Scammers Are Swapping Fake iPhone Parts for the Real Deal

A very ingenious new kind of high-tech scam has been going down in China, where clever thieves are returning fake iPhone components to Apple and claiming they’re broken official parts, receiving genuine Apple-made pieces in return. And making a nice profit in the process. More »

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How Chinese Scammers Are Swapping Fake iPhone Parts for the Real Deal

TurboTax Went Down At a Kind of Crucial Moment and Didn’t Handle It Well on Twitter

So taxes are due…any minute now. And TurboTax is a popular service for doing taxes. Yes? Sure. Well, that’s a lot of pressure! Cue meltdown. More »

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TurboTax Went Down At a Kind of Crucial Moment and Didn’t Handle It Well on Twitter

New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust

NASA has spent a lot of time and money resurrecting the F-1 rocket engine that powered the Saturn V back in the 1960s and 1970s, and Ars recently spent a week at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to get the inside scoop on how the effort came to be . But there’s a very practical reason why NASA is putting old rocket parts up on a test stand and firing them off: its latest launch vehicle might be powered by engines that look, sound, and work a whole lot like the legendary F-1. This new launch vehicle, known as the Space Launch System , or SLS, is currently taking shape on NASA drawing boards. However, as is its mandate, NASA won’t be building the rocket itself—it will allow private industry to bid for the rights to build various components. One potential design wrinkle in SLS is that instead of using Space Shuttle-style solid rocket boosters, SLS could instead use liquid-fueled rocket motors, which would make it the United States’ first human-rated rocket in more than 30 years not to use solid-fuel boosters. The contest to suss this out is the Advanced Booster Competition , and one of the companies that has been down-selected as a final competitor is Huntsville-based Dynetics . Dynetics has partnered with Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne (designers of the Saturn V’s F-1 engine, among others) to propose a liquid-fueled booster featuring an engine based heavily on the design of the famous F-1. The booster is tentatively named Pyrios , after one of the fiery horses that pulled the god Apollo’s chariot; the engine is being called the F-1B. Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust

The Curious Case of the Nonexistent Turtle

With all the stories about “de-extinction” of animal species lately, there’s one method that doesn’t get much notice -when scientists decide that an extinct species never existed in the first place. That applies to the case of Pelusios seychellensis , which, according to specimens collected by German naturalist August Brauer over 100 years ago, lived in the Seychelles off the east coast of Africa. Curiously, these turtles closely resembled turtles on the west coast of Africa, Pelusios castaneus . But they couldn’t be the same, because they lived so far apart. So the separate species name was coined in 1983. But even more curious, no one could find any specimens of Pelusios seychellensis in the Seychelles, and scientists concluded that the species had gone extinct during the 20th century. Not only that, they assumed that humans had caused the extinction. But wait… Brauer took the trip during which he was supposed to have collected the turtles between May 1895 to January 1896. But he didn’t immediately give his finds to a museum. Specimens from his private collection didn’t get transferred to the Zoological Museum Hamburg until five years after the Seychelles trip, and those turtles soon went on to Vienna’s Natural History Museum. Somewhere in all that shuffling, the west African turtles might have been lumped in with the Seychelles reptiles or otherwise confused. Whatever happened, though, a prominent clue indicates that the turtles were not collected from the wild. One, and possibly two, of the turtles have a perforation through their shells identical to the sort that turtle purveyors have traditionally used to tie turtles together until they are sold for food. Wherever Brauer got the turtles from, he seems to have purchased them. Oops. On the bright side, this means that humans did not cause the extinction of a turtle species, because Pelusios castaneus is still around -on Africa’s west coast. Read the saga of the disappearing turtles at Laelaps. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science (Image credit: Stuckas et al., 2013)

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The Curious Case of the Nonexistent Turtle

Five Best Small Form Factor PC Cases

If you’re building an HTPC, a small workstation, or you just don’t want your rig to take up tons of space under or on top of your desk, you need a smaller PC case. Something that fits the important stuff, but doesn’t waste a lot of space on expansion bays or components you may not need. This week we’re going to take a look at five of the best for the job. More »

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Five Best Small Form Factor PC Cases

AAP reports e-books now account for over 22 percent of US publishers’ revenue

It’s well off the triple year-over-year growth that e-books saw a few years ago , but the latest report from the Association of American Publishers shows that e-books did inch up even further in 2012 to account for a sizeable chunk of overall book sales. According to its figures, e-books now represent 22.55 percent of US publishers’ total revenue — up from just under 17 percent in 2011 — an increase that helped push net revenue from all book sales up 6.2 percent to $7.1 billion for the year. As the AAP notes, this report also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of its annual tracking of e-book sales; back at the beginning in 2002, their share of publishers’ net revenue clocked in at a mere 0.05 percent. The group does caution that the year-to-year comparison back that far is somewhat anecdotal, however, given changing methodologies and definitions of e-books. Comments Via: The Next Web Source: AAP

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

CloudFlare Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application. The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses. “These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

Ken May

Month: April 2013