Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved ‘Totoro’ will be focus of Studio Ghibli theme park set to open in 2020

Japan’s iconic animation Studio Ghibli, co-founded by anime director Hayao Miyazaki, is developing a ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ theme park. (more…)

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Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved ‘Totoro’ will be focus of Studio Ghibli theme park set to open in 2020

Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

After hunting down torrent sites for more than a decade, Hollywood now has a more complex piracy threat to deal with. From a report: Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their “business models” and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0. “Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own, ” McCoy said. “If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I’ll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

British Airways IT Outage Caused By Contractor Who Accidentally Switched off Power

An anonymous reader shares a report: A contractor doing maintenance work at a British Airways data centre inadvertently switched off the power supply, knocking out the airline’s computer systems and leaving 75, 000 people stranded last weekend, according to reports. A BA source told The Times the power supply unit that sparked the IT failure was working perfectly but was accidentally shut down by a worker. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Airways IT Outage Caused By Contractor Who Accidentally Switched off Power

Curiosity rover finds its crater was habitable for 700 million years

Enlarge / This fracture with discoloration may provide an indication of groundwater intrusion later in the history of Gale Crater. (credit: NASA ) Gale Crater, the site being explored by the Curiosity rover, was chosen as a landing site because its structure and composition suggested that it might preserve information about Mars’ past. And, as Curiosity’s climbed the slopes of the crater’s central peak, various discoveries have clearly indicated that Mars had a watery past. Now, scientists have put all these individual discoveries into a big-picture view of the history of Gale Crater. And the picture shows that the crater was water-filled for hundreds of millions of years—and warm for much of that time. Plus, a separate paper indicates that, long after the crater filled up with wind-blown sand, groundwater still percolated through the area. Reading the layers of history The new study is built on lots of individual analyses of rock samples done by Curiosity as it headed up the slopes. Various instruments revealed the types of rocks and their chemical composition at specific locations up the slopes, building a picture of the different layers of deposits. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Curiosity rover finds its crater was habitable for 700 million years

Researchers will attempt to ‘reanimate’ a corpse with stem cells

Brain death may no longer be a life sentence if one Philadelphia-based biomedical startup has its way. The company, Bioquark, plans to initiate a study later this year to see if a combination of stem cell and protein blend injections, electrical nerve stimulation, and laser therapy can reverse the effects of recent brain death. They’re literally trying to bring people back from the dead. “It’s our contention that there’s no single magic bullet for this, so to start with a single magic bullet makes no sense. Hence why we have to take a different approach, ” Bioquark CEO, Ira Pastor, told Stat News . As Pastor told the Washington Post last year, he doesn’t believe that brain death is necessarily a permanent condition, at least to start. It may well be curable, he argued, if the patient is administered the right combination of stimuli, ranging from stem cells to magnetic fields. The resuscitation process will not be a quick one, however. First, the newly dead person must receive an injection of stem cells derived from their own blood. Then doctors will inject a proprietary peptide blend called BQ-A into the patient’s spinal column. This serum is supposed to help regrow neurons that had been damaged upon death. Finally, the patient undergoes 15 days of electrical nerve stimulation and transcranial laser therapy to instigate new neuron formation. During the trial, researchers will rely on EEG scans to monitor the patients for brain activity. This isn’t the first time that Bioquark has attempted this study. Last April, the company launched a nearly identical study in Rudrapur, India. However, no patients enrolled and the study wound up getting shut down that November by the Indian government over clearance issues with India’s Drug Controller General. Bioquark is reportedly nearing a deal with an unnamed Latin American country to hold a new trial later this year. Whether the treatment will actually work is an entirely different matter. Bioquark admits that it has never actually tested the regimen, even in animals, and the various component treatments have never themselves been applied to brain death. They’ve shown some promise in similar cases like stroke, brain damage and comas but never actually Lazarus-ing a corpse. “I think [someone reviving] would technically be a miracle, ” Dr. Charles Cox, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, told Stat News . “I think the pope would technically call that a miracle.” Source: Stat News

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Researchers will attempt to ‘reanimate’ a corpse with stem cells

Ethiopia shuts down national internet "to prevent exam cheating"

The entire nation of Ethiopia — a corrupt, oligarchic state with the distinction of being “the world’s first turnkey surveillance state” where spy technology from the “free world” is used to spy on the whole country — just dropped off the internet. (more…)

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Ethiopia shuts down national internet "to prevent exam cheating"

Hackers jailbreak permanent mods onto Super Mario World save files

The practice of hacking standard Super Mario World cartridges on stock Super Nintendo hardware has come a long way in a short time. Three years ago, it required a robot entering thousands of button presses per second to insert arbitrary code on top of the game. By last year, streamer SethBling was proving that this kind of code insertion was possible for a human acting with pixel-perfect precision. Now, SethBling and others in the SMW hacking community have taken things a step further, permanently writing a full hex editor and gameplay mods onto a stock Super Mario World cartridge using nothing but standard controller inputs. SethBling’s ten-minute video explaining the entire “jailbreaking” process is a must-watch for anyone interested in the particulars of perpetually altering a 25-year-old game without any special hardware. In short, the jailbreak builds on an exploit discovered by Cooper Harrsyn that lets players write data directly to the small, 256-byte save files that are permanently stored on the Super Mario World cartridge. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hackers jailbreak permanent mods onto Super Mario World save files

Controversy over DNA sequencing of 90 Egyptian mummies

One of the most hotly-contested fields of genetics revolves around the genetic lineage of ancient Egyptians. A new study of 90 Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic, and Roman mummies raises as many questions as it answers. (more…)

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Controversy over DNA sequencing of 90 Egyptian mummies

Intel adopts e-SIM to support Microsoft’s connected PC vision

PCs are making a comeback, if the news out of Computex 2017 is any indication, and Microsoft wants to make sure they’re all constantly connected . To support that vision, Intel is making its current and future modems compatible with e-SIMs, so future laptops can connect to LTE networks without physical SIM-card trays. That’s because the technology you’d typically find in a SIM card will be embedded into its modems, so you can connect your machine just by entering a phone number and avoid having to fiddle with a tiny tray. The chip maker says it is working on validating “e-SIM-enabled always-connected platforms with multiple carriers using the Intel XMMTM 7260 modem and our upcoming Intel XMM 7360 modem.” At its keynote, Microsoft announced a slew of carriers that will support the e-SIM devices, including T-Mobile, AT&T, Vodafone and other international service providers. The always connected PC project is another part of the two brands’ Project Evo collaboration to deliver Windows devices across multiple product categories. So this could mean e-SIM-enabled speakers or VR headsets in future, too. Click here to catch up on the latest news from Computex 2017!

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Intel adopts e-SIM to support Microsoft’s connected PC vision