Author: kenmay

First 3D map of Earth’s interior shows where volcanoes come from

It’s no secret that Earth’s volcanoes are the result of magma rising through the planet’s mantle, but have you wondered just where those ‘roots’ run? UC Berkeley can provide an answer. It just created the first-ever detailed 3D map of the Earth’s interior by studying the path of seismic waves. The model shows mantle plumes (where the hot rock flows) starting at the bottom of the core-to-mantle boundary and climbing to the top, where they connect to volcanic hotspots in the Earth’s crust. As it turns out, the plumes don’t take a straight path — they often spread out as they merge with the colder upper mantle. It’s also clear that most of the world’s volcanoes (such as those in the Pacific’s island chains) ultimately come from two large “blobs” of hot rock at the core boundary. The model isn’t perfect. It didn’t link plumes to some volcanoes, such as the one at Yellowstone National Park . However, it’s good enough to represent the first hard evidence of magma plumes, and there are promises of higher-resolution maps in the future thanks to gravity-sensing satellites. While it’s doubtful that scientists will ever know as much about Earth’s insides as they do about the top layer, this below- longer as mysterious as it once was. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Science Comments Source: UC Berkeley , Nature Tags: ctscan, LawrenceBerkeleyNationalLaboratory, science, UcBerkeley, video, volcano

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First 3D map of Earth’s interior shows where volcanoes come from

Watch a Master Bladesmith Make a Kitchen Knife Out of Meteorites

Talk about an in-demand craftsman: After knifemaker Bob Kramer was first featured in Saveur Magazine  in the ’90s, he was so deluged with orders that it took him ten years  to catch up. Of all the certified Master Bladesmiths in the United States—there were 67 when he started out, and now just over 120 of them—Kramer is the only one who specializes in kitchen knives. “I have devoted my life, ” writes Kramer, “to the single-minded pursuit of crafting the perfect kitchen knife, and I am so grateful to those who appreciate my work.” When Anthony Bourdain went to visit the lone craftsman in his Washington-state shop, Kramer had something special in store for him. Not only would he make a knife before Bourdain’s eyes, he’d make it using a chunk of meteorite. Watch the master as he makes a knife from outer space:

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Watch a Master Bladesmith Make a Kitchen Knife Out of Meteorites

Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs

The way federal prosecutors tell it , not only did four men conspire to steal a large quantity of MacBook Airs, but they did a poor job of covering it up. The men were arrested on Wednesday and appeared before a federal judge in White Plains, New York. They are accused of “participating in a scheme to steal, transport, and sell a shipment of approximately 1,200 computers, valued at over $1 million, that were bound for two public high schools in New Jersey.” According to the criminal complaint , one of the men, Anton Saljanin, was hired to transport 1,195 laptops from a vendor in Massachusetts on January 15, 2014, after having successfully delivered 1,300 other laptops. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs

Google’s driverless cars skirt deer and pedestrians in Texas

By the looks of things, Google’s self-driving cars have been learning a lot in Austin, Texas . In its first report since it began testing autonomous vehicles in the city, the company details the challenges its cars have had to face while driving on its roads. For instance, they’ve been spotting and avoiding a lot of deer, some of which might have ended up as road kill if they happened to come across ordinary vehicles instead. The system also had to learn to identify new infrastructure, such as horizontal traffic signals. Google has learned, however, that one of the major problems it has to tackle is pedestrians stepping off the curb onto the road while hidden by other vehicles. On August 20th, a Lexus unit was rear ended after spotting a person starting to cross the road. See, its human driver took over to make sure he doesn’t end up harming anyone, but it turns out — based on the footage of the incident — that the accident wouldn’t have happened if he just allowed the car to brake on its own. Clearly, Google’s doing what it can to achieve its original goal of developing autonomous vehicles that can drive better than humans. In addition to discussing what it has learned in Austin, Mountain View has also revealed through the report that it’s deploying more of its egg-like prototype models in the city this September. Filed under: Transportation , Google Comments Via: USA Today Source: Google Tags: google, googlecar, self-drivingcar

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Google’s driverless cars skirt deer and pedestrians in Texas

Google expands health conditions feature to over 900 illnesses

Google’s health conditions feature is about making it easier to find information about an illness. So, when there’s a local outbreak, or you get early symptoms, you can be better prepared. Mountain View has doubled the number of diseases in its database, bringing the number up to over 900 — including neglected tropical diseases and infections that typically affect people in developing nations. If you do a query for any of those illnesses on either mobile or desktop, you’ll see a quick results panel, which contains info on its symptoms, treatments and prevalence. You can even download the panel as a PDF file that you can print — apparently, that’s the most requested feature among the doctors Google worked with to ensure each condition’s accuracy. Unfortunately, the feature remains accessible only via Google US (that’s Google.com, or the one without a country-specific domain), but the company promises to make it available in more languages in the future. Filed under: Misc , Google Comments Source: Google Tags: google, googlehealth

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Google expands health conditions feature to over 900 illnesses

Here’s the world’s first Ultra HD Blu-Ray player

Samsung has announced the first ( consumer ready ) Ultra HD Bluray player , alongside word that movie studio Fox is already getting its releases ready for the new format. That means 4K movies, yes, but also compatibility for HDR video. Here’s a closer look at the curved player — perfect for that new curved UHDTV, right? Check out all the news from Berlin at our IFA 2015 hub . Filed under: Home Entertainment , Samsung Comments Tags: 4k, hands-on, hdr, hdrvideo, ifa, ifa2015, samsung, uhd, uhdbluray, UltraHighDefinition, video

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Here’s the world’s first Ultra HD Blu-Ray player

MIT scientists make it easy to tweak designs for 3D printing

Two different groups of MIT researchers found a way to print out objects with glass instead of plastic and to make a printer spew out 10 different materials at once earlier this year. This particular team along with researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, however, have chosen to focus on creating a system that makes it possible for even novices to customize the objects they want to print. Designers typically have to adjust a CAD file to tweak the object’s looks by typing in numerical values, and then wait for minutes to hours for a simulation software to make sure the final product is viable. The system this group developed dramatically speeds up the process. It displays the design along with sliders representing different parameters — say, the height of a shoe’s heel or the base size and width of a mug — on a web browser. The user can then easily play with the sliders to achieve the look they want. Now, here’s the best thing about it: it won’t let you design unstable structures or anything that can’t be printed or used. Nobody has to spend hours waiting for software to make sure the modified digital object is feasible, and all the user needs to do is to send it straight to the 3D printer. Filed under: Science Comments Source: MIT Tags: 3dprinter, 3dprinting, MIT

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MIT scientists make it easy to tweak designs for 3D printing

Serious bug causes “quite a few” HTTPS sites to reveal their private keys

According to a security researcher for Linux distributer Red Hat, network hardware sold by several manufacturers failed to properly implement a widely used cryptographic standard, a data-leaking shortcoming that can allow adversaries to impersonate HTTPS-protected websites using the faulty equipment. A nine-month scan that queried billions of HTTPS sessions from millions of IP addresses was able to obtain leaked data for 272 keys, reports Red Hat security researcher Florian Weimer in a research paper  published this week. Because the scan surveyed only a very small percentage of the overall number of transport layer security protocol  handshakes, many more keys and manufacturers are likely to be affected by the leakage. Vulnerable hardware includes load balancers from Citrix as well as devices from Hillstone Networks, Alteon/Nortel, Viprinet, QNO, ZyXEL, BEJY, and Fortinet. The results of Weimer’s nine-month scan. Florian Weimer Enter Chinese Remainder Theorem The leakage is the result of insecure implementations of the RSA public key cryptosystem , which is one of several that HTTPS-protected websites can use to exchange keys with visitors. A 1996 research paper by researcher Arjen Lenstra warned that an optimization known as the Chinese Remainder Theorem sometimes causes faults to occur during the computation of an RSA signature. The errors cause HTTPS websites that use the perfect forward secrecy protocol to leak data that can be used to recover the site’s private key using what’s known as a side-channel attack . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Serious bug causes “quite a few” HTTPS sites to reveal their private keys

Three-ounce silicone bottles to hold your goops when you travel

This set of three 3-ounce travel bottles lets you transfer your favorite shampoo, lotion, and unguent into TSA-compliant squeezable tubes. The also have a suction cup so you can stick them to the shower wall in your hotel room and forget to pack them when you check-out.

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Three-ounce silicone bottles to hold your goops when you travel

Bugzilla Breached, Private Vulnerability Data Stolen

darthcamaro writes: Mozilla today publicly announced that secured areas of bugzilla, where non-public zero days are stored, were accessed by an attacker. The attacker got access to as many as 185 security bugs before they were made public. They say, “We believe they used that information to attack Firefox users.” The whole hack raises the issue of Mozilla’s own security, since it was a user password that was stolen and the bugzilla accounts weren’t using two-factor authentication. According to Mozilla’s FAQ about the breach (PDF), “The earliest confirmed instance of unauthorized access dates to September 2014. There are some indications that the attacker may have had access since September 2013.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bugzilla Breached, Private Vulnerability Data Stolen