Month: November 2016

Wood waste alcohol converted to jet fuel, used in Alaska Airlines test flight

Enlarge Yesterday a commercial Alaska Airlines plane pumped with a blend of traditional jet fuel and wood biofuel flew from Seattle to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. The flight was the first to use a 20 percent blend of biofuel made of leftover wood from timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not the first to use a biofuel mixture in general though—in June, Alaska Airlines flew two test flights on jet fuel mixed with biofuel made from non-edible parts of corn, and in March of this year, United Airlines pledged to use a 30 percent biofuel mixture on its flights from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The United Airlines fuel is produced by a company called AltAir Fuels that depends on a variety of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae.” Alaska Airlines’ wood-based fuel was developed by a Colorado-based company called Gevo , which partnered with the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) to develop the wood waste into isobutanol, which it then converted to jet fuel. Gevo also created the corn waste biofuel mixture that Alaska Airlines flew with in June. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wood waste alcohol converted to jet fuel, used in Alaska Airlines test flight

China completes first human trial with CRISPR-edited genes

As predicted , it happened: On October 28th, Chinese oncologists at Sichuan University were the first in the world to insert CRISPR-modified cells into a patient suffering from an aggressive form of lung cancer, according to Nature . The journal reports that this first round of treatment in a safety trial went well enough to warrant a second injection of the Cas9-edited cells, and that nine more people will undergo the treatments in the future. From there, the patients will be monitored for at least six months, if not longer, to “determine whether the injections are causing serious adverse effects.” The idea behind the continued monitoring is to ensure that the edited cells act as they should. That is, that their (now deactivated) PD-1 proteins no longer halt a cell’s immune response and let cancer spread. “The hope is, without PD-1, the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer, ” Nature wrote. This might not be the silver bullet against cancer, though. Naiyer Rizvi from Columbia University’s Medical Center posits that the gene editing process could encounter a roadblock because it’s a complex procedure and isn’t very scalable — especially compared to other methods like using antibodies. “Unless it shows a large gain in efficacy, it will be hard to justify moving forward, ” he said. Source: Nature

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China completes first human trial with CRISPR-edited genes

Mozilla Releases Firefox 50

Mozilla has begun seeding the binary and source packages of the final release of Firefox 50 web browser on all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux and macOS. From a report on Softpedia: We have to admit that we expected to see some major features and improvements, but that hasn’t happened. The biggest new feature of the Firefox 50.0 release appears to be emoji for everyone. That’s right, the web browser now ships with built-in emoji for GNU/Linux distributions, as well as other operating systems that don’t include native emoji fonts by default, such as Windows 8.0 and previous versions. Also new, Firefox 50.0 now shows lock icon strikethrough for web pages that offer insecure password fields. Another interesting change that landed in the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser is the ability to cycle through tabs in recently used order using the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut. Moreover, it’s now possible to search for whole words only using the “Find in page” feature. Last but not the least, printing was improved as well by using the Reader Mode, which now uses the accel-(opt/alt)-r keyboard shortcut, the Guarana (gn) locale is now supported, the rendering of dotted and dashed borders with rounded corners (border-radius) has been fixed as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Releases Firefox 50

8TB disks still looking solid, seem to be some of Seagate’s best

(credit: Alpha six ) Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 67,642 disks that the company uses to store nearly 300PB of data. This is actually fewer disks than the company had  last quarter , even though the total capacity has gone up. That’s because Backblaze has been upgrading, replacing 2TB disks from HGST and Western Digital with new Seagate 8TB ones. While this upgrade offers size and energy savings, it’s only worthwhile if the failure rate is contained; any more than 2-3 times the failure rate and Backblaze says the migration won’t be worth it. Annualized drive failure rates. (credit: Backblaze ) Fortunately, the findings from last quarter appear to be holding true. The widely expected bathtub curve—high failure rates at the start and end of the drives’ lives, with a period of low failure rates in the middle—isn’t in evidence. The 8TB Seagate drives so far are showing an annualized failure rate of 1.6 percent; that’s identical to the (consistently reliable) 2TB disks from HGST and substantially better than the 8.2 percent seen from the WDC disks. With only a quarter of the number of drives required, this is a clear savings. Presuming things don’t take a turn for the worse, the move will mean greatly reduced failures even as the total storage capacity goes up. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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8TB disks still looking solid, seem to be some of Seagate’s best

Oxford University will offer free online courses in 2017

The highest ranked university in the world will soon join prestigious institutions like Berkeley, Harvard and MIT in offering free massive open online courses (MOOCs). Starting in February 2017, Oxford University will partner with nonprofit online learning platform edX to teach a freely available economics class titled, ” From Poverty to Prosperity: Understanding Economic Development .” While the idea of free online learning has started to catch on in the United States — the New York Times declared 2012 ” the year of the MOOC ” — Oxford has held out on such programs until now. Appropriately enough, this particular course is a perfect fit for promoting accessibility in places of higher education: it will be taught by Oxford Economics and Public Policy professor Sir Paul Collier, and will “examine the vital role that governments play in boosting economic development, ” according to a statement from the university . “The School’s mission is to improve government around the world through research and education, and this requires better educated public officials, teachers, entrepreneurs, journalists and citizens, ” Professor Ngaire Woods, the Dean of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government said. “We see this first massive open online course as an effective way to expand access to knowledge beyond the classrooms of Oxford, and to help people understand how their community and country can flourish wherever they are in the world.” Enrollment is open now through edX’s platform and students can expect to spend about two to three hours per week on the six-week course. The materials will also be available to view after the course closes. Via: BBC Source: Oxford University

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Oxford University will offer free online courses in 2017

Scientists Just Discovered Three Adorably Tiny New Salamanders

A team of biologists has just named three new salamanders in the genus Thorius ; the tiniest tailed tetrapods known to science. Smaller than a matchstick, these creatures are as strange as they are adorable, their miniaturized anatomy pushing the boundaries of what natural selection can produce. Tragically, all three species appear to be edging toward extinction. Read more…

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Scientists Just Discovered Three Adorably Tiny New Salamanders

HP’s tiny Xeon-powered PC puts the Mac Mini to shame

HP has unveiled the Z2 Mini , a mini PC that packs workstation-class parts, including an Intel Xeon CPU, NVIDIA Quadro mobile M620 graphics and M.2 SSD tech. By using powerful notebook-sized parts, it squeezed that power into a 2.3-inch-high case that’s “90 percent smaller than a traditional business-class tower, ” HP wrote. In its top configuration, the device is twice as powerful as any mini PC on the market, letting it run up to six displays in a stock configuration. The Z2 Mini is 63 percent quieter than HP’s business-class mini PCs, thanks to a custom cooling system. The PC maker hyperbolically describes the engineering, saying “the octagon form of the Z2 Mini is the most uniquely designed workstation in HP’s 35 years of workstation history.” HP is targeting CAD, design, graphics and 3D users, though it could make a decent gaming rig in some configurations. Spec-wise, it comes with up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM and an HP Z Turbo Drive , with M.2 SSD read speeds over 1GB/s and a capacity up to 1.5TB. You can get one with an Intel Core i7, i5, or i3 CPU, or pay more (presumably a lot more) for Intel’s Xeon E3-1200v5 family, normally used in workstations and servers. Another option is NVIDIA’s mobile M620 Quadro GPU with 2GB of VRAM, also geared toward workstations and officially approved for pro apps like Autocad and 3DS max. However, it doesn’t meet NVIDIA’s “VR Ready” criteria, so it’s not certified with the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, and would probably allow middling gaming performance, at best. The Z2 Mini is missing a few other features, too. While USB-C is available, it doesn’t have a Thunderbolt 3 port, limiting drive options for video editors. And while it has three DisplayPort slots, it lacks an HDMI port (though USB-C can be adapted for that purpose). As for the price, the compact PC starts at $699, which probably gets you an Intel Core i3 configuration without discreet graphics. Intel hasn’t said how much a stouter setup will cost, but it probably runs over double that with workstation components. If you’re in the market for a small, powerful PC and are tired of waiting for the next Mac Mini, however, it may be your best option. HP said it should arrive to market in December — hopefully we’ll get a better look at it before then. Source: HP

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HP’s tiny Xeon-powered PC puts the Mac Mini to shame

Facebook Employees Are In Revolt Over Fake News

Some Facebook employees have formed a secret, unofficial task force to help the company combat fake news, according to a Buzzfeed report that broke last night. The group has reportedly challenged Mark Zuckerberg’s comments claiming that fake news on the platform didn’t affect the election. Read more…

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Facebook Employees Are In Revolt Over Fake News

Electric cars must now emit engine-tones at low speeds

My friend Gilbert was the first Prius owner I knew; a hacker, Gilbert was accustomed to eating at a drive-through at 3AM, but the first time he took his silent car through the lane, the order-taker curtly said that they didn’t serve people on foot; when he insisted that he was in a car, she demanded to know why she couldn’t hear the engine idling? (more…)

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Electric cars must now emit engine-tones at low speeds

US Army’s ‘Phaser’ could fry entire drone swarms in a volley

While the US military has enjoyed several decades of aerial dominance with few enemy fighter planes to shoot down, the emergence of ISIS drones presents a new threat to American ground troops. To combat swarms of these cheap, small dangers, the US Army is testing a new anti-air device that is designed to blow multiple UAVs out of the sky in a single shot. They call it the Phaser. No, it’s not a Star Trek-style turret. The Raytheon-built “Phaser” is a microwave-emitting dish that sits atop a shipping container containing its diesel generator power source. It relies on external radar systems to track targets, then fires a burst of radiation powerful enough to fry control systems, enough to knock drones out of the air. While it’s functionally similar to radio-based anti-UAV systems like the rifle-style DroneDefender concept, the Phaser shoots a broad swathe of energy wide enough to catch several targets per shot. The Phaser’s electronics-destroying capabilities means it isn’t just good at skeet-shooting drones — it can knock out anything with circuits. That means iPads, computers, targeting systems or even cars speeding toward checkpoints, Popular Mechanics points out. Think of it like an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), the shockwave emitted from nuclear explosions that disables electronics. As the demonstration video below mentions, the Phaser can modulate the intensity of the blast, choosing to disrupt activity or damage a machine’s computational innards. The Phaser began testing in 2013 and has only recently become declassified. But further details, like maximum range, are understandably still hidden. As with most weapon concepts still in the test phase, it’s unclear if or when this system will see field deployment. Via: Popular Mechanics Source: Aviation Week

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US Army’s ‘Phaser’ could fry entire drone swarms in a volley