The conveyor belt has long been the center of wacky adventures. From Charlie Chaplin to Lucy, things whizzing by on a flat belt has made for comedy gold. Now you can watch your 3D printed objects whiz past on the Blackbelt, a conveyor system for FDM printing that lets you build huge objects. The Blackbelt Kickstarter will launch in 3 days and you can expect the system to cost about 9, 500 for… Read More
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The Blackbelt lets you 3D print really long items
Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark demonstrated a new nanotechnology-based printing technique that produces long-lasting color images on plastic at resolutions up to 127,000 dots per inch, many times more detailed than traditional laser printers. The system uses a laser to alter the structure of nanoscale structures on the plastic material. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a human hair is around 60,000 nanometers in diameter.) The nanoprinting technique could also lead to new kinds of 3D displays or invisible watermarks. From New Scientist : The surface of the plastic is shaped so that it has lots of tiny pillars, one roughly every 200 nanometers. A thin film of the element germanium is then spread over the plastic. Heat from a laser melts the germanium on each pillar, morphing its shape and thickness. As a result, it reflects a specific color. The coating protects the shapes of the newly carved nanostructures. Resonant laser printing of structural colors on high-index dielectric metasurfaces (ScienceAdvances)
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New ultra-high resolution printer makes colors from nanostructures
An anonymous reader writes: A recently released draft of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s digital identity guidelines has met with approval by vendors. The draft guidelines revise password security recommendations and altering many of the standards and best practices security professionals use when forming policies for their companies. The new framework recommends, among other things: “Remove periodic password change requirements.” There have been multiple studies that have shown requiring frequent password changes to actually be counterproductive to good password security, said Mike Wilson, founder of PasswordPing. NIST said this guideline was suggested because passwords should be changed when a user wants to change it or if there is indication of breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval
Thanks to advances in medicine, bone marrow transplants are no longer the last resorts they one were. Every year, thousands of marrow transplants are performed, a common treatment for ailments from bone marrow disease to leukemia. But because they first require a patient undergo radiation to kill off any existing bone… Read more…
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This Synthetic Bone Implant Could Replace Painful Marrow Transplants
Conventional wisdom: If you eat a lot of salt, you will get thirsty to dilute the sodium level in your blood. The excess salt will be excreted in your urine. But a new study of Russian cosmonauts is challenging this long-held belief. When the cosmonauts ate more salt, the became less thirsty. And their appetite increased – they had to eat 25 percent more to maintain their weight. From the New York Times : The crew members were increasing production of glucocorticoid hormones, which influence both metabolism and immune function. To get further insight, [Dr. Jens Titze, now a kidney specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research in Erlangen, Germany] began a study of mice in the laboratory. Sure enough, the more salt he added to the animals’ diet, the less water they drank. And he saw why. The animals were getting water — but not by drinking it. The increased levels of glucocorticoid hormones broke down fat and muscle in their own bodies. This freed up water for the body to use. But that process requires energy, Dr. Titze also found, which is why the mice ate 25 percent more food on a high-salt diet. The hormones also may be a cause of the strange long-term fluctuations in urine volume. Scientists knew that a starving body will burn its own fat and muscle for sustenance. But the realization that something similar happens on a salty diet has come as a revelation. https://youtu.be/aJEzl31zL-I
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Scientists stunned by new findings about salt’s effects on body
Dragon skin ice sounds like something you’d encounter beyond The Wall in the Game of Thrones fantasy realm. But good news nerds, you can find this magical-sounding stuff right here on Earth—though you’ve gotta be lucky, and willing to travel to some of the most hostile environments on the planet. Like the team of… Read more…
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Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible
New submitter troublemaker_23 quotes a report from ITWire: Only 36% of software engineers in India can write compilable code based on measurements by an automated tool that is used across the world, the Indian skills assessment company Aspiring Minds says in a report. The report is based on a sample of 36, 800 from more than 500 colleges across India. Aspiring Minds said it used the automated tool Automata which is a 60-minute test taken in a compiler integrated environment and rates candidates on programming ability, programming practices, run-time complexity and test case coverage. It uses advanced artificial intelligence technology to automatically grade programming skills. “We find that out of the two problems given per candidate, only 14% engineers are able to write compilable codes for both and only 22% write compilable code for exactly one problem, ” the study said. It further found that of the test subjects only 14.67% were employable by an IT services company. When it came to writing fully functional code using the best practices for efficiency and writing, only 2.21% of the engineers studied made the grade. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Only 36 Percent of Indian Engineers Can Write Compilable Code, Says Study
Scientists have been trying to replace retinas in otherwise healthy eyes to help people suffering from diseases like retinitis pigmentosa. Unfortunately, earlier efforts were only able to use rigid, hard materials , which are very different from the natural retina. A researcher at Oxford University, however, has created a synthetic retina made of biological materials to better match natural human tissues. The study, titled “Light-Patterned Current Generation in a Droplet Bilayer Array” was published this April in Scientific Reports . Your retina sits at the back of your eye collecting light and converting them to electrical signals for your brain. The research, led by 24-year-old Vanessa Restrepo-Schild, uses a retina made of soft water droplets called hydrogels and biological cell membrane proteins. These cells act like pixels to detect light and create a gray scale image. It can then generate electrical signals to stimulate the neurons at the back of your eye just like a natural retina does. The artificial tissues don’t contain anything other than natural, biodegradable materials, making it less likely that recipients’ bodies will reject the implant. It’s also far less invasive than devices that reproduce the system mechanically. While the new synthetic retina has only been tested in the laboratory, Restrepo-Schild hopes to continue her research to explore its potential with living tissues. That may still be a ways off, but it could surely become a more viable way than other efforts to restore sight to people with retinal issues. Via: MedicalXpress Source: Nature.com
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Soft, synthetic retinas may offer a better implant solution
If the idea of a more secure Windows browser appeals to you — and why wouldn’t it — then you might want to have a peek at the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build . That’s because it includes the Windows Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge, which was announced last September but is finally available for testing today. This Application Guard essentially encases your browser in a virtual machine, so that if your browser ever gets attacked by malware, it won’t affect the rest of your PC. To enable this, you need to use the “Turn Windows features on or off” dialog, and then mark the checkbox for “Windows Defender Application Guard.” Now when you open Microsoft Edge and click on the menu, you’ll see the option for a “New Application Guard window.” Click it, and a new special isolated browser window will appear. The whole thing is possible due to the Virtualization Based Security (VBS) made possible by Windows 10. The virtual PC created by Application Guard would keep the Edge browser separate from storage, other apps and the Windows 10 kernel. Other browsers offer “sandboxes” too, but Microsoft says that Application Guard is unique because there’s a hardware container that makes it impossible for malware and other exploits to seep through. There are a couple of caveats though. Running Edge in a virtual machine will likely slow it down, and since each browser’s session is siloed, all data and cookies are lost once you close it. It’s also only available for Enterprise users for now, presumably because their security needs are much higher than the average person. Still, perhaps it could be introduced as an optional feature later on for everyday users. Aside from Application Guard, the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build also includes an improved PDF Reader for Microsoft Edge and integrated Cortana settings.
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Microsoft tests a secured Edge browser for business
In the nearly 18 months since a CD-ROM-based “Nintendo PlayStation” prototype was first found in an estate sale , emulator makers and homebrew programmers have created a facsimile of what CD-based games would look like on an SNES . Efforts by hacker Ben Heck to get that kind of software actually working on the one-of-a-kind hardware, though, had been stymied by problems getting the CD-ROM drive to talk to the system. Those problems are now a thing of the past. In a newly posted video , Heck lays out how the system’s CD-ROM drive suddenly started sending valid data to the system literally overnight. “I was working on this yesterday and the CD-ROM wasn’t even detecting the disc,” Heck says in the video. “I came in this morning and jiggled the cables around and got ready to work on it some more, and all of a sudden it works… did a magic elf come in overnight?” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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18 months after discovery, the “Nintendo PlayStation” is finally working