Month: January 2018

Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books

In Ankara, Turkey, one person’s trash is literally another’s treasure. Garbage collectors started saving books once destined for the landfill and opened a public library. CNN reports : For months, the garbage men gathered forsaken books. As word of the collection spread, residents also began donating books directly. Initially, the books were only for employees and their families to borrow. But as the collection grew and interest spread throughout the community, the library was eventually opened to the public in September of last year… Today, the library has over 6,000 books ranging from literature to nonfiction. There is also a popular kid’s section with comic books and an entire section for scientific research. Books in English and French are also available for bilingual visitors. The library is housed in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters… The collection grew so large the library now loans the salvaged books to schools, educational programs, and even prisons. ( For Reading Addicts ), image via CNN

See the original post:
Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books

Deepfakes has democratized the creation of extremely realistic video faceswapping, especially in porn

Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography. (more…)

See the article here:
Deepfakes has democratized the creation of extremely realistic video faceswapping, especially in porn

How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA

dmoberhaus writes: A 26-year-old Belgian PhD student named Sander Wuytz recently solved a 3-year-old puzzle that had locked the private key to 1 Bitcoin in a strand of synthetic DNA. Motherboard spoke with the student about how they managed to crack the puzzle, just days before it was set to expire. From the report: “As detailed by Nick Goldman, a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in his pioneering Nature paper on DNA storage, to encode information into DNA you take a text or binary file and rewrite it in base-3 (so rather than just ones and zeroes, there are zeroes, ones, and twos). This is then used to encode the data in the building blocks of life, the four nucleobases cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine. As Wuyts explained to me, coding the data as nucleobases depended upon which nucleobase came before. So, for instance, if the previous base was adenine and the next pieces of data is a 0, it is coded as cytosine. If the next piece of data is a 1, it’s coded as guanine, and so on. After the data is encoded as synthetic DNA fragments, these fragments are used to identify and read the actual files stored in the DNA. In the case of the Bitcoin challenge, there were a total of nine files contained in the DNA fragments. The files were encrypted with a keystream, which is a random series of characters that is included with the actual plain text message to obfuscate its meaning. The keystream code had been provided by Goldman in a document explaining the competition. After running the code, Wuyts was able to combine the DNA fragments in the correct order to form one long piece of DNA. After working out some technical kinks, Wuyts was able to convert the DNA sequence into plain text, revealing the private key and unlocking the bitcoin (as well as some artefacts, including a drawing of James Joyce and the logo for the European Bioinformatics Institute). He had cracked the puzzle just five days before it was set to expire.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA

A salamander with a genome 10 times the size of ours regrows lost limbs

Enlarge / It’s so cute! Let’s chop off its leg in the name of science. It’ll grow back. (credit: IMP Vienna ) Some human tissues, like the liver and muscles, retain the ability to regrow after damage. But most of our bodies do not—if you lose a limb, the limb’s gone. But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, regeneration is much more widespread. Many reptiles can regrow tails, and some salamanders can replace entire limbs. More distantly related worms called planaria can be cut into multiple pieces and see each piece regrow an entirely new body. There are a couple of organisms that have been extensively studied due to their ability to regenerate: the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea and a type of salamander called an axolotl ( Ambystoma mexicanum ). But those studies have been limited by the fact that we don’t have a complete catalog of genes for these organisms. Attempts to correct that were bogged down by the fact that the genomes appeared to be littered with duplicate copies of virus-like DNA—in the case of the axolotl, enough to balloon its genome up to 10 times the size of our own. Now, researchers have figured out a way to overcome that hurdle, and they have gotten high-quality copies of both the planarian’s and the axolotl’s genomes. Unfortunately, the copies don’t shed much light on the animals’ regeneration abilities. And all that extra DNA carried by the axolotl doesn’t seem to be doing anything useful in particular. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
A salamander with a genome 10 times the size of ours regrows lost limbs

Apple’s iBooks to become “Books” in forthcoming reading app redesign

Enlarge (credit: Apple) Apple is reportedly tweaking its e-book offering to better take on Amazon, the current leader of the digital book market. According to a Bloomberg report , Apple will release a revamped version of the iBooks app for iOS, which will be dubbed “Books,” that will have an interface more like the iOS 11 App Store, a Reading Now tab, and a separate section for audiobooks. There’s no official date for the debut of the new app, but it’s reportedly slated to be released in the coming months. Limited details are known about the app, which is in testing right now. Bloomberg’s report describes it having a “simpler interface” that emphasizes books the user is currently reading. There’s also a new digital book store within the app that’s said to be similarly designed to Apple’s current App Store, which received a drastic redesign in iOS 11. That could mean that Apple plans to make discovering new books through the Books app easier, possibly with categorical tabs and book cover art throughout the digital store. Apple recently moved its audiobook offerings from the Music app to the iBooks app, but having a dedicated tab for audiobooks will make them more easily accessible for customers. Apple has also reportedly hired a lead executive from Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook platform, to help reinvigorate its e-book efforts. The iBooks app remains one of the few Apple programs that hasn’t received a significant update in years. That is likely due in part to a 2013 ruling by the U.S. Department of Justice covering fixed pricing for e-books in Apple’s iBooks store. Apple was fined $450 million. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View the original here:
Apple’s iBooks to become “Books” in forthcoming reading app redesign

Darren Aronofsky-backed VR series ‘Spheres’ lands a 7-figure deal

If you want evidence that VR is maturing as an entertainment medium, you just got it. CityLights just bought the rights to Spheres , the three-part VR black hole series written by Eliza McNitt and produced by Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures, for a “seven-figure” amount at the Sundance Film Festival. That might not sound like much by Hollywood standards, but it’s the first-ever seven-figure VR purchase at the event. It was slated to reach the Oculus Rift in 2018 (Oculus and Intel backed the project) and should get wider distribution as a result. The project’s pedigree helps, and not just because Aronofsky’s outfit is involved. While McNitt is best-known for producing conventional shorts and documentaries, she’ll have Jessica Chastain as narrator and Stranger Things artists Survive providing the series’ all-important soundtrack. You aren’t about to see VR titles fetching the prices normally associated with blockbuster movies and TV shows. Not when VR headsets are rare both at home and public venues, at least. However, the Spheres deal could set the tone for Sundance and other VR-friendly festivals in the future. You might soon see more star-studded VR titles as companies feel they can make a serious profit, even if the viewership doesn’t hold a candle to what they’ll get from movie theaters. Source: Oculus (Twitter)

Read the original:
Darren Aronofsky-backed VR series ‘Spheres’ lands a 7-figure deal

These baby monkeys are first cloned primates created using the Dolly method

Enlarge / Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua (credit: Qiang Sun, Mu-ming Poo, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences) More than 20 years after Dolly comes Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. The twin long-tailed macaque monkeys are the first primates cloned using the same method that created the world’s most famous sheep in 1996—a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT. The twins’ genetic blueprints were swiped from fetal cells of another monkey. Researchers then popped the DNA into egg cells that they had also cleared of their DNA-containing nuclei. With a dash of compounds that spur embryo development, the reprogrammed cells developed into healthy baby monkeys in surrogate mother monkeys. The two were born about seven weeks ago in China and are developing normally so far, researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Cell . Though the overall SCNT method is the same as what was used for Dolly, researchers struggled for years to tweak it to work in primates. The procedure is delicate and required a lot of optimization—not to mention DNA-swaps. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original:
These baby monkeys are first cloned primates created using the Dolly method

Unlocked PS4 consoles can now run copies of PS2 games

Video of Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the PS2 running on an unlocked PlayStation 4. After years of work, hackers have finally managed to unlock the PS4 hardware with an exploit that lets the system run homebrew and pirated PS4 software. In a somewhat more surprising discovery, those hackers have also unlocked the ability to run many PS2 games directly on the console, using the same system-level emulation that powers legitimate PlayStation Classics downloads. While hackers managed to install Linux on the PS4 years ago , the biggest breakthrough in the PS4 hacking scene came late last month, when two different teams of hackers released a WebKit exploit for version 4.05 of the PS4 firmware . That firmware was patched (and automatically updated on many systems) in late 2016, and there’s currently no known way to downgrade an updated system to the older firmware, which limits the range of consoles that can run the exploit. For compatible consoles, though, the kernel-level exploit allows for pretty much full control of the system, including the running of unsigned code. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More here:
Unlocked PS4 consoles can now run copies of PS2 games

Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bitcoin News: In information released to shareholders this week, Coinbase revealed that it recorded turnover of $1 billion last year, which works out at an astonishing $2.74 million a day or $2, 000 a minute. As America’s largest bitcoin broker, Coinbase claims the lion’s share of the money that’s pouring into the crypto space at a dizzying rate. 2017 was a bumper year for all crypto exchanges, which reported record numbers across the board: new signups, new staff hired, new trading pairs, and new revenue. Those revenue streams have turned into a torrent that has caused Coinbase’ coffers to swell. Recode reports that the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion last year, most of it derived from the trading fees it levies. These vary from between 0.25% and 1%. and quickly add up: in the past 24 hours, 36, 000 BTC were traded on Coinbase, accounting for more than 15% of the total market. Coinbase isn’t the world’s largest exchange (and is technically a broker rather than a conventional exchange — that duty falls to its GDAX subsidiary) but it’s the best known and carries great weight in the cryptocurrency industry. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day