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Google Accused of ‘Extreme’ Gender Pay Discrimination By US Labor Department

The U.S. Department of Labor is accusing Google of discriminating against its female employees and violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women. “We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce, ” Janette Wipper, a Department of Labor regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday. The Guardian reports: Google strongly denied the accusations of inequities, claiming it did not have a gender pay gap. The allegations emerged at a hearing in federal court as part of a lawsuit the DoL filed against Google in January, seeking to compel the company to provide salary data and documents to the government. Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its its compliance with equal opportunity laws. Last year, the department’s office of federal contract compliance programs requested job and salary history for Google employees, along with names and contact information, as part of the compliance review. Google, however, repeatedly refused to hand over the data, which was a violation of its contractual obligations with the federal government, according to the DoL’s lawsuit. Labor officials detailed the government’s discrimination claims against Google at the Friday hearing while making the case for why the company should be forced to comply with the DoL’s requests for documents. Wipper said the department found pay disparities in a 2015 snapshot of salaries and said officials needed earlier compensation data to evaluate the root of the problem and needed to be able to confidentially interview employees. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Restaurant Meal Add-Ons With the Highest Markups

Restaurant meals cost a lot more than meals you make at home—you know this. But what you might not realize is those add-ons, like that oh-so-delicious guac on your burrito, can be some of the most costly offenders. Read more…

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The Restaurant Meal Add-Ons With the Highest Markups

These Are the Wildly Advanced Space Exploration Concepts Being Considered by NASA

Earlier today, NASA announced funding for 22 projects as part of its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. From a planet hopping laser-driven sail and a solar powered Venusian weather balloon to an autonomous rover on Pluto, the future of space exploration looks incredibly bright. Read more…

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These Are the Wildly Advanced Space Exploration Concepts Being Considered by NASA

Do you want to play a game? Ransomware asks for high score instead of money

Rensenware’s warning screen asks for a high score, rather than the usual pay off, to decrypt your files. At this point, Ars readers have heard countless tales of computer users being forced to pay significant sums to unlock files encrypted with malicious ransomware . So we were a bit surprised when word started to trickle out about a new bit of ransomware that doesn’t ask for money. Instead, “Rensenware” forces players to get a high score in a difficult PC shoot-em-up to decrypt their files. As Malware Hunter Team noted yesterday , users on systems infected with Rensenware are faced with the usual ransomware-style warning that “your precious data like documents, musics, pictures, and some kinda project files” have been “encrypted with highly strong encryption algorithm.” The only way to break the encryption lock, according to the warning, is to “score 0.2 billion in LUNATIC level” on TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object . That’s easier said than done, as this gameplay video of the “bullet hell” style Japanese shooter shows. Gameplay from TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object on Lunatic difficulty. Players needed to get 200 million points to unlock the “Rensenware” malware. As you may have guessed from the specifics here, the Rensenware bug was created more in the spirit of fun than maliciousness. After Rensenware was publicized on Twitter, its creator, who goes by Tvple Eraser on Twitter and often posts in Korean, released an apology for releasing what he admitted was “a kind of highly-fatal malware.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This Tricorder-Like Device Can Tell if Your Brain Is Bleeding

Following a head injury, patients typically undergo a CT scan to rule out brain bleeding. A new head worn device that scans the brain’s electrical patterns has shown tremendous promise in clinical trials, presenting an inexpensive way for physicians to make a potentially life-saving diagnosis. Read more…

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This Tricorder-Like Device Can Tell if Your Brain Is Bleeding

The iPhone 7 Has Arbitrary Software Locks That Prevent Repair

Jason Koebler, reporting for Motherboard: Apple has taken new and extreme measures to make the iPhone unrepairable. The company is now using software locks to prevent independent repair of specific parts of the phone. Specifically, the home buttons of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are not user replaceable, raising questions about both the future repairability of Apple products and the future of the thriving independent repair industry. The iPhone 7 home button will only work with the original home button that it was shipped with; if it breaks and needs to be replaced, a new one will only work if it is “recalibrated” in an Apple Store. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The iPhone 7 Has Arbitrary Software Locks That Prevent Repair

Mice brains store backup copies of memories

Turns out that even the human brain might use redundancy when it comes to storage. New research out of the Riken-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics suggests that memories are stored in two places in the brain: the hippocampus for short-term and the cortex for longterm. Previously, the prevailing theory was that once a memory was formed in the hippocampus , it would then move to the cortex for storage. But that may not be the case, according to a paper published in Science . Recently, researchers called in the mice (of course) and watched a cluster of brain cells that formed after the rodents were administered a shock. From there, the scientists used light to “control the activity of individual neurons, ” as the BBC reports , which let them turn memories on and off. As a result, the mice forgot about the jolt of electricity until the memories were manually activated in the cortex. This hasn’t been proven to hold true in humans just yet, and it’s only one experiment, but the learnings could shape how we understand brain disease in the future. Specifically, this might give us a chance to see how things like dementia and Alzheimers affect the way memories are formed and stored, and devise ways to sidestep those heartbreaking conditions. Via: BBC Source: Science

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Mice brains store backup copies of memories

Scuttlebutt: an "off-grid" P2P social network that runs without servers and can fall back to sneakernet

Dominic Tarr is a developer who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand; he created Scuttlebutt, a secure messaging system that can run without servers, even without ISPs. (more…)

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Scuttlebutt: an "off-grid" P2P social network that runs without servers and can fall back to sneakernet

Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets

brindafella writes: A participant in a TV program “Stargazing Live” on Australia’s ABC TV channel has found four planets closely orbiting a star, using an online database. Astrophysicist Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse, reported on Thursday’s show that four “Super Earth” planets had been identified in the data. They orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to our Sun. The person responsible for the find, Andrew Grey, is a mechanic by day and amateur astronomer in his spare time, and lives in the city of Darwin, Northern Territory. The data is sourced from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. “Stargazing Live” host Professor Brian Cox said he could not be more excited about the discovery. “In the seven years I’ve been making Stargazing Live this is the most significant scientific discovery we’ve ever made. The results are astonishing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets

Inuit cartography: maps carved in driftwood

The Inuit carve portable, waterproof, floating maps out of driftwood for use in navigating the littoral. These three wooden maps show the journey from Sermiligaaq to Kangertittivatsiaq, on Greenland’s East Coast. The map to the right shows the islands along the coast, while the map in the middle shows the mainland and is read from one side of the block around to the other. The map to the left shows the peninsula between the Sermiligaaq and Kangertivartikajik fjords. From The Decolonial Atlas , an antidote to all the other ones: Kurdistan in Kurdish , Lakota Territory , Agricultural Maps .

Ken May

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