December 2013 – Page 28

There’s a Naturally Occurring Nuclear Fission Reactor in West Africa

In May 1972 in a uranium enrichment plant in France, scientists examining ore from a mine in Gabon, West Africa, discovered that a natural nuclear reactor had spontaneously manifested in that region in the Earth’s primordial past, churning out approximately 100 Kw worth of energy continuously for a few hundred thousand years about 1.7 billion years ago. In order to understand how the natural nuclear reactor came about, it helps to understand a little of the history and science of nuclear reactions. Read more…

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There’s a Naturally Occurring Nuclear Fission Reactor in West Africa

YuFu Is A Range Of Bluetooth 4.0 Styli For Pro Digital Artists & Amateur Scribblers

Hex3 , the company behind a successfully Kickstarted pressure-sensitive stylus called JaJa , and a follow-up stylus for tablets, called Nota , which had a (relatively) fine 3.7mm tip to make scribbling on a slate more precise, is expanding its line-up with three new stylus products – under a new brand name, YuFu. Once again, the startup has taken to Kickstarter to get the required minimum orders to fire up production of the YuFu, YuFu Pro and YuFu Focus. It’s seeking to raise $25,000, and is more than half way there with 30 days left on its campaign. If successful it’s aiming to ship to backers next April. It’s a couple of years since pressure sensitive styluses arrived so the YuFu is definitely facing more competition than Hex3′s earlier JaJa . Which presumably is why it’s spreading its bets with multiple models, as well as focusing on a premium, hardwearing build, with the YuFu rocking a slim, metal-case design that resembles a mechanical pencil. The YuFu Pro – aimed at “serious artists” – has 4,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, with the function built into the pen, rather than the tip so you vary how much you squeeze it, rather than how hard you press it against the glass (to limit fatigue). It also has tilt sensors for shading and calligraphy, optional gestures such as tap and shake to erase, plus an ultrafine tip (1.9mm). This model is $65 for Kickstarter backers, but will retail for $99 in future. The mid-range YuFu Focus has 64 levels of pressure sensitivity and the same ultrafine 1.9mm tip. Hex3 says this model is for “creative business and art school use”. It’s $49 for Kickstarter early birds, rising to $79 retail post-Kickstarter. While the basic YuFu – aimed at “anyone who uses a tablet for notes or drawing” but doesn’t need pressure sensitivity to vary the flow of digital ink or an ultrafine tip – offers the same hardwearing metal construction and interchangeable tips (with brush, teflon or rubber tips) that all the models have but is designed for less precise scribbling. This model is up for grabs at an early bird Kickstarter price of $25, rising to $39 retail post-Kickstarter. The YuFu styli are powered by 1x AAAA battery apiece. They use Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to the tablet, so are compatible with the iPad 3 and above, and the iPad mini. They will also work with other tablets that have support for BLE, according to Hex3 – so some Android tabs might also work. What apps can you use YuFu with? Hex3 hasn’t listed compatible apps by name, rather it says it will support “all of the Apps you could need”. And includes the below graphic depicting currently supported apps. It’s worth noting that functions such as the YuFu Pro’s Gyro sensor (to support shading) will only work with “integrated apps”. So if your art app of choice doesn’t appear below you may want to ask if they’re planning to support it before pledging any cash.

PayPal launches digital gift card store, boasts iTunes as its first partner

PayPal must not have been content to let you add pre-paid gift cards to your digital wallet, because now it’s selling them directly. The online-payment juggernaut is kicking off this new program — dubbed PayPal Digital Gifts — with none other than iTunes, whose digital gift certificates come in $15, $25, $50 and $100 denominations. With this, the firm hopes to streamline online gift-card giving while adding its trademark layer of security for good measure. The company admits the digital storefront is a bit sparse at the moment, but says it will be announcing more partners soon. Unfortunately, the offer is only available in the US — space tourists will have to shop elsewhere. Comments Via: The Next Web Source: PayPal (1) , (2)

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PayPal launches digital gift card store, boasts iTunes as its first partner

Beware This Simple But Incredibly Effective Point-of-Sale Skimmer

Card skimmers are getting way more common , to the point that they’ve even started appearing on point-of-sale card machines . And, boy, if this thing is anything to go by, they’re getting better and better. Read more…

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Beware This Simple But Incredibly Effective Point-of-Sale Skimmer

How a Pill Filled With Bacteria Could Actually Make You Better

Usually, you knock back pills packed with drugs; cocktails of chemicals which have been painstakingly proven to help make you better. Soon, though, you might be swallowing tablets filled with something you might not expect: bacteria. Read more…

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How a Pill Filled With Bacteria Could Actually Make You Better

Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

For the second half of the 1990s, my standard advice to people buying computers was to max out the RAM as the cheapest, best way to improve their computers’ efficiency. The price/performance curve hit its stride around 1995, and after decades when a couple gigs of RAM would cost more than the server you were buying it for, you could max out all the RAM slots in any computer for a couple hundred bucks. Operating systems, though, were still being designed for RAM-starved computers, and when you dropped a gig or two of RAM in a machine, it screamed . It’s still good practice to max out your RAM, but it doesn’t get you much of a dividend. The turbo-charger of the 2010s is solid-state disk-drives, and they’re screaming up the same price/performance curve that RAM traversed twenty years ago. Two years ago, I traded my laptop drive for a 400GB SDD, spending as much on the drive as I had on the machine, and it was worth every penny. My laptop battery-life nearly doubled, and I stopped getting watch-cursors altogether; no matter what task I performed, it was done instantly. In October, I bought a one terabyte SDD for a ridiculous $435 — about a third of what I paid for a 600GB drive a little over a year ago! — and having run it for two months now, I’m prepared to pronounce it good. I wasn’t familiar with the manufacturer, Crucial, but they got very good reviews on Amazon, and at that price I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. My machine — a Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu 13.10 — chugs along with nary a beach-ball, and I can go six to eight hours on a six-cell battery with full brightness, and continuous Wifi and Bluetooth usage. I’m rough on my computer, and it’s taken plenty of knocks and bumps without any noticeable impact on the drive. To accompany the new drive, I bought a pair of $78 Toshiba USB3 1TB drives (one for backing up at the office, the other for my travel bag). They’re nothing near as fast as the SDD, but combined with the USB3 bus, they’re plenty quick for daily incremental backups, which take less than five minutes. If your storage needs aren’t as massy as mine, there’s a whole line of Crucial SDDs, 480GB for $269 , 240GB for $140 and so on. They all come with three year warranties, though I haven’t had cause to get service for my drive yet (knock wood). The drive is 7mm high, and comes with an easy-to-fit adapter for 9mm enclosures. I was less impressed with the adapter I bought to copy the files over; it was fiddly and prone to losing its connection. Ultimately, I slapped the new drive into a case in order to make the transfer. Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1

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Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

E Ink’s new Fina display technology promises lighter, thinner e-readers

That Kindle Paperwhite is pretty thin and light already, but future e-readers could be even skinnier thanks to a new screen technology from E Ink known as Fina. The tech uses a super thin glass substrate that’ll supposedly result in displays that measure less than 50 percent in both thickness and weight when compared to “an equivalent glass-based TFT.” According to a released statement, this makes Fina ideal for large tablets that also need to be lightweight, which is exactly why it was implemented in the PocketBook CAD Reader, a new 13.3-inch device that’s also the first to use Fina. The slate has a dual-core 1GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage space and it runs Android 4.0.4. Of course, we wouldn’t expect to pick this up at Best Buy any time soon, as it’s primarily meant for displaying drawings from Autocad. Indeed, PocketBook even said it’s made to be used on construction sites, not by everyday consumers. Still, we wonder if Fina’s arrival means we’ll see larger format e-readers in the future, especially for all those DX lovers out there. In the meantime, check out the source link below for more details on E Ink’s latest innovation. Comments Source: E Ink

Space Dandy, from the creator of Cowboy Bebop, coming to Adult Swim!

We’re beyond excited about Space Dandy , a brand new anime from the folks who brought you Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist. And now, this new teaser trailer reveals it’s coming to Adult Swim’s Toonami… in January! Read more…

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Space Dandy, from the creator of Cowboy Bebop, coming to Adult Swim!

Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish Capital Gothenburg By 2017

Qedward writes “Volvo is starting a pilot project that aims to have 100 self-driving cars on Swedish public roads around the city of Gothenburg by 2017. The project is called ‘Drive Me’ and is a joint initiative between the Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg, Volvo said Monday. Together they will make an effort to eliminate deadly car crashes in Sweden, said Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo Car Group. In the next few years, Volvo will develop its Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) in its XC90 model. The goal is to have the first self-driving cars available to 100 consumers by 2017, Coelingh said. They will be able let their cars navigate about 50 typical commuter arteries that include motorway conditions and frequent traffic jams in and around Gothenburg, the country’s second largest city.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish Capital Gothenburg By 2017

Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound

Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet. Hanspach and Goetz Computer scientists have developed malware that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection. The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an “air gap” between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that repeat the audio signals. The researchers, from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics , recently disclosed their findings in a paper published in the Journal of Communications . It came a few weeks after a security researcher said his computers were infected with a mysterious piece of malware that used high-frequency transmissions to jump air gaps . The new research neither confirms nor disproves Dragos Ruiu’s claims of the so-called badBIOS infections, but it does show that high-frequency networking is easily within the grasp of today’s malware. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound

Ken May

Month: December 2013