Author: kenmay

Alaska Gets ‘Artificial Aurora’ As HAARP Antenna Array Listens Again

Freshly Exhumed quotes Hackaday: The famous HAARP antenna array is to be brought back into service for experiments by the University of Alaska. Built in the 1990s for the US Air Force’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array is a 40-acre site containing a phased array of 180 high-frequency antennas and their associated high-power transmitters. Its purpose is to conduct research on charged particles in the upper atmosphere, but that hasn’t stopped an array of bizarre conspiracy theories. A university space physics researcher will actually create an artificial aurora starting Sunday (and continuing through Wednesday) to study how yjr atmosphere affects satellite-to-ground communications, and “observers throughout Alaska will have an opportunity to photograph the phenomenon, ” according to the University. “Under the right conditions, people can also listen to HAARP radio transmissions from virtually anywhere in the world using an inexpensive shortwave radio.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alaska Gets ‘Artificial Aurora’ As HAARP Antenna Array Listens Again

RSA Conference Attendees Get Hacked

The RSA Conference “is perhaps the world’s largest security event, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a secure event, ” reports eSecurityPlanet. Scanning the conference floor revealed rogue access points posing as known and trusted networks, according to security testing vendor Pwnie Express. storagedude writes: What’s worse, several attendees fell for these dummy Wi-Fi services that spoof well-known brands like Starbucks. The company also found a number of access points using outdated WEP encryption. So much for security pros… At least two people stayed connected to a rogue network for more than a day, according to the article, and Pownie Express is reminding these security pros that connecting to a rogue network means “the attacker has full control of all information going into and out of the device, and can deploy various tools to modify or monitor the victim’s communication.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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RSA Conference Attendees Get Hacked

MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari’s unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes MAME.net: Way back in 1997, Nicola Salmoria merged a few stand-alone arcade machine emulators into the first Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Could he have possibly imagined the significance of what he’d built? Over the past two decades, MAME has brought together over a thousand contributors to build a system that emulates more machines than any other program. But MAME is more than that: MAME represents the idea that our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations. MAME strives to accurately represent original systems, allowing unmodified software to run as intended. Today, MAME documents over thirty thousand systems, and usably emulates over ten thousand. MAME meets the definitions of Open Source and Free Software, and works with Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD running on any CPU from x86-64 to ARM to IBM zSeries. A 20th-anniversary blog post thanked MAME’s 1, 600 contributors — more than triple the number after its 10th anniversary — and also thanks MAME’s uncredited contributors. “if you’ve filed a bug report, distributed binaries, run a community site, or just put in a good word for MAME, we appreciate it.” I’ve seen MAME resurrect everything from a rare East German arcade game to a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine. Anybody else have a favorite MAME experience to share? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

Thousands Of Disabled People Are Living In ‘Virtual Utopias’ In Second Life

“For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world, ” reports Backchanel. “For them, the fevered fantasies of a decade ago have become reality: Second Life is where they live.” mirandakatz shares this article: Wagner James Au, who has written extensively about Second Life, estimates they may account for roughly 20 percent of users. Some active members estimate the number higher — at as much as 50 percent… Abundant research shows imagining movement, without actually moving the body, can have positive effects on motor skills, balance, and learning… Studies suggest the therapeutic benefits of virtual reality extend beyond movement disorders — to chronic pain, cognitive functioning in people with ADHD and PTSD, and social skills for people on the autism spectrum. The article describes a 90-year-old former nurse, now living in a retirement community, who’s spent eight years living in a Second Life archipelago called “Virtual Ability Island” with over a thousand other members. “Watching her avatar hike trails and dance gave her the confidence to try things in the physical world that she hadn’t tried in a half decade — like stepping off a curb or standing up without any help.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Thousands Of Disabled People Are Living In ‘Virtual Utopias’ In Second Life

Groceries Will Soon Have Practical, Standardized Expiration Dates

We’ve long known that the expiration date on groceries is a mess of different terms that mean absolutely nothing . Now, the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association have put together a plan that simplifies the label you’ll see on food. Read more…

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Groceries Will Soon Have Practical, Standardized Expiration Dates

Airmule Pays You to Let TSA-Certified Shippers Use Your Luggage Space

These days, most airlines charge you to check a bag. If you have more space than you need in that bag, you might be able to earn extra cash. Airmule is a free app that connects travelers with TSA-approved shipping partners to send stuff overseas. Read more…

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Airmule Pays You to Let TSA-Certified Shippers Use Your Luggage Space

Humanity is on the cusp of de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth

After successfully extracting sequenceable DNA from a pair of Woolly Mammoth carcasses pulled from Siberia’s permafrost in 2014, a team of Harvard researchers announced on Thursday that they are tantalizing close to cloning the (currently) extinct pachyderms. The team made the announcement ahead of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week. They estimate that they’re just two years away from creating a viable hybrid embryo. That is, they take a modern day asian elephant embryo and splice in DNA from the Mammoth to get a fuzzy “mammophant, ” as the team calls it. “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo, ” Harvard Professor George Church told the Guardian . “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.” So far, the team hasn’t progressed passed the cellular stage in creating one of these beasts though they have managed to splice in as many as 45 mammoth genes, up from their initial 15. Within a few years, the team expects to ramp their efforts up to the embryonic stage but it’ll likely be quite a while until they can birth a living mammophant. Since the Asian elephant is itself endangered, this hybridizing technique could help preserve the species. At the same time, the Harvard team doesn’t want to put one of these valuable animals at risk carrying a mammophant fetus to term, so they’re looking into gestating it in an artificial womb. That’s where the delay comes in. While Church’s team has managed to grow a mouse in an artificial womb for ten days — half its normal gestation period — the technology for doing that for an elephant-scale animal likely won’t be feasible for at least a decade. And even once that technology has matured, there are still a host of hand-wringing ethical arguments that will have to be sorted before Church’s team gets the green light to proceed further. Source: Guardian

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Humanity is on the cusp of de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth

Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports describes research “designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather than from primary cells taken directly from a pig, ” says co-author Dr. Nicholas Genovese, a stem-cell biologist. “This entailed understanding the biology of relatively uncharacterized and recently-derived porcine induced pluripotent stem cell lines. What conditions support cell growth, survival and differentiation? These are all questions I had to figure out in the lab before the cells could be turned into muscle.” Digital Trends reports: It may not sound like the most appetizing of foodstuffs, but pig skeletal muscle is in fact the main component of pork. The fact that it could be grown from a stem-cell line, rather than from a whole pig, is a major advance. This is also true of the paper’s second big development: the fact that this cultivation of pig skeletal muscle didn’t use animal serum, a component which has been used in other livestock muscle cultivation processes. [Genovese] acknowledges that there are other non-food-related possibilities the work hints at. “There is a contingent interest in using the pig as a model to study disease and test regenerative therapies for human conditions, ” he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab

Germans warned to DESTROY Cayla, network-connected doll that spies on children

It’s called Cayla , it’s about a foot tall, and it can be used to listen to and talk to the child playing with it. But who is doing the listening? Anyone in Bluetooth range, reports Germany’s Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur). An official watchdog in Germany has told parents to destroy a talking doll called Cayla because its smart technology can reveal personal data. … The Vivid Toy group, which distributes My Friend Cayla, has previously said that examples of hacking were isolated and carried out by specialists. However, it said the company would take the information on board as it was able to upgrade the app used with the doll. But experts have warned that the problem has not been fixed. The Cayla doll can respond to a user’s question by accessing the internet. For example, if a child asks the doll “what is a little horse called?” the doll can reply “it’s called a foal”. Watch the BBC’s video of Cayla, in its squeaky, sinister voice, say “I’ve been hacked to say all sorts of scary things.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Y2KUN6XPM Cayla was on Boing Boing last year when the FCC received complaints about it. Cayla is on Amazon for $45 . It’s so easy to hack that everyday YouTubers are at it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvMb_TusPPs

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Germans warned to DESTROY Cayla, network-connected doll that spies on children