kenmay

Paris bans pre-1997 cars from its streets during the week

Don’t expect to see cars like this on Parisian streets after this summer (unless it’s a weekend). (credit: Don O’Brien @ Flickr ) Parisians with cars built before 1997 are going to need to head to the nearest car dealership if they want to keep driving in the city after July 1. The French capital has experienced quite horrific air pollution in the last few years, and there was a massive spike in March 2015 that saw the city’s air quality drop lower than that of Beijing, China. After trying out temporary restrictions to vehicle traffic, Les Echos reports that the city has decided to implement new rules that will ban older and more polluting vehicles from its streets on weekdays. Those restrictions will also tighten over time; in 2020, only cars built since 2011 will be allowed. The vehicle classification scheme means you get one of these window stickers based on which Euro emissions standard your vehicle complies with. This announcement follows a decision by the French government to finalize a nation-wide scheme of ranking vehicle emissions (the system is based on the European emissions standards ). Any vehicle made on or before December 31, 1996 was built to conform with Euro 1, the weakest of these standards, and it’s these cars that are no longer allowed in the capital. Pre-2000 motorbikes and other two-wheeled vehicles are also on the hit list. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Paris bans pre-1997 cars from its streets during the week

Man sings two melodies at the same time

From the YouTube description : Wolfgang Saus sings two melodies at the same time: bass & soprano of Pachelbel’s Canon simultaneously. It’s a short demonstration of polyphonic overtone singing skills (sometimes referred to as throat singing) used in special new classical compositions. The interesting thing about doing this with overtone singing is: the melody was always hidden in the overtones of the bass voice. Many ancient composers intuitively created “harmonic” melodies out of overtones of a basso continuo. Here’s a neat visual presentation of polyphonic overtone singing: https://youtu.be/UHTF1-IhuC0

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Man sings two melodies at the same time

Panasonic To Stop Making LCD Panels For TVs

AmiMoJo quotes a report from NHK WORLD: Japanese electronics maker Panasonic says it will stop making LCD panels for televisions, giving way to fierce price competition. The pullout from TV LCD manufacturing follows the company’s withdrawal from plasma TV production 3 years ago. They say they will continue to manufacture LCD panels at the plant for products other than televisions, such as medical equipment and cars. They say the company will keep making Panasonic-brand televisions, using panels supplied by other manufacturers. After Panasonic pulls out, Sharp and its Taiwanese parent firm Hon Hai will be the only producer in Japan. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Panasonic To Stop Making LCD Panels For TVs

"Skin gun" sprays patient’s own stem cells on wounds to speed healing

The SkinGun , announced today, was developed by RenovaCare to spray autologous (self-donated) stem cells on patients with chronic wounds and burns. For patients suffering severe burns and other wounds, the prospect of a quick-healing, gentle spray containing their own stem cells will be a promising alternative to conventional skin graft surgery, which can be painful, prone to complications, and slow-to-heal. Based on preliminary case studies, CellMist System patients can be treated within 90 minutes of arriving in an emergency room; a patient’s stem cells are isolated, processed, and sprayed on to wound sites for rapid healing. Preliminary investigational use in Europe and the United States indicate the potential efficacy and safety of RenovaCare’s technologies. Clinical observations point to the potential for regeneration of new skin in as little as four days, rather than the many weeks of painful and risky recovery required by traditional skin graft techniques.

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"Skin gun" sprays patient’s own stem cells on wounds to speed healing

Samsung Starts Mass Producing New 512GB NVMe SSD That’s Smaller Than a Stamp

An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Samsung announced late Monday night that it has begun mass producing a new SSD that is tinier than a postage stamp. PCWorld reports: “The PM971-NVMe fits up to 512GB of NAND flash, a controller, and RAM into a single BGA chip measuring 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighing just one gram, the company said. Samsung says the PM971-NVMe will hit 1.5GBps read speeds and 800MBps write speeds. The PM971-NVMe is built using 20nm NAND chips and includes 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM as a cache. The NAND is triple-level cell but uses a portion as a write butter. The drive will come in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB capacities.” While on the topic of hardware, Intel unveiled its Broadwell-E family, which consists of an “Extreme Edition” Core i7 chipset that has 10 cores and 20 threads. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Starts Mass Producing New 512GB NVMe SSD That’s Smaller Than a Stamp

US Court Says No Warrant Needed For Cellphone Location Data

Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: Police do not need a warrant to obtain a person’s cellphone location data held by wireless carriers, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a setback to privacy advocates. The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, voted 12-3 that the government can get the information under a decades-old legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company. The ruling overturns a divided 2015 opinion from the court’s three-judge panel and reduces the likelihood that the Supreme Court would consider the issue. The decision arose from several armed robberies in Baltimore and Baltimore County, Maryland, in early 2011, leading to the convictions of Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan. The convictions were based in part on 221 days of cellphone data investigators obtained from wireless provider Sprint, which included about 29, 000 location records for the defendants, according to the appeals court opinion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Court Says No Warrant Needed For Cellphone Location Data

Kraftwerk loses hip-hop music-sampling copyright case

(credit: Tobias Helfrich ) After a decades-long battle, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (the supreme German Constitutional Court) has overturned a ban on a song that used a two-second sample of a Kraftwerk recording. In 1997, music producer Moses Pelham used a clip from 1977 release Metall auf Metall (Metal on Metal) in the song Nur mir (Only Mine) performed by Sabrina Setlur. Lead singer of Kraftwerk, Ralf Huetter, sued Pelham, and in 2012 the electropop pioneer won his case for copyright infringement in Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), gaining damages and a block on Nur mir . However, in today’s judgment, the eight judges of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the lower court did not sufficiently consider whether the impact of the sample on Krafwerk might be “negligible.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Kraftwerk loses hip-hop music-sampling copyright case

Intel’s 7th generation of Core CPUs are coming later this year

Besides its $1, 723 10-core Core i7 Extreme Edition processor , Intel just teased some other chip news during its keynote presentation at Computex. There aren’t many details available, but the company confirmed the the 7th generation of its Core CPU technology will go on sale later this year. They will be joined by its Apollo Lake chips, which are a cheaper version of the current 6th gen Skylake family. Apollo Lake should bring 4K video capability and USB-C to cheaper, 2-in-1 laptop/tablet style devices with smaller batteries. As far as the 7th generation of Core CPUs, buyers can expect support for Thunderbolt 3 , and IR cameras used for features like Windows Hello’s facial recognition.

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Intel’s 7th generation of Core CPUs are coming later this year

Bumblebees sense electricity with their fine hairs

In 2013, Gregory Sutton from the University of Bristol published an important paper demonstrating that bumblebees can sense electricity (his experiment trained bees to associate current in fake flowers with nutrients, and showed that bees preferentially sought out electrified flowers), but now how they sensed it. (more…)

Fiverr Suffers Six-Hour DDoS Attack After Removing DDoS-For-Hire Listings

Two days after Fiverr, a marketplace for digital services, removed user listings from its website that advertised DDoS-for-hire services, the company’s website suffered a six-hour long DDOS attack. Softpedia reports: The incident took place on the morning of May 27 (European timezones), and the service admitted its problems on its Twitter account. At the time of writing, Fiverr has been back up and functioning normally for more than two hours. Fiverr’s problems stem from an Incapsula probe that found DDoS-for-hire ads on its marketplace, available for $5. Incapsula reported the suspicious listings to Fiverr, who investigated the issue and removed the ads. Fiverr first removed all listings advertising blatantly illegal DDoS services, but later also removed the ads offering to “test” a website for DDoS “protection” measures. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fiverr Suffers Six-Hour DDoS Attack After Removing DDoS-For-Hire Listings

Ken May

Author: kenmay