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Sea anemones could be the key to treating hearing loss

Sea anemones could soon do a lot to help those of us living above the water. Researchers have discovered that proteins used by starlet sea anemones to repair their cells also repair the sound-sensing cells in mice and other mammals. If you bathe cells in those proteins for long enough (the team tried for an hour), they rapidly restore molecular links that bundle hearing-related hair cells together. In theory, you could reverse hearing damage among cells that haven’t been permanently lost — that exceptionally loud concert might not permanently limit your listening enjoyment. There’s a lot of work to be done before there’s an actual treatment. However, scientists don’t think you’d always need anemone cells to make this work. At least in mice, there are repair proteins that parallel those from the underwater creatures. If researchers can find a way to improve their effectiveness (mammal proteins are much less useful right now), you wouldn’t need to harvest them from sealife to deliver effective treatments. Via: ScienceNews Source: Journal of Experimental Biology

MIT-designed windows can rapidly switch from clear to opaque

Imagine not having to use curtains or blinds anymore. Instead of covering your windows when the sun’s too strong, you simply have to flip a switch to turn them completely opaque. A team of MIT researchers have developed a method that could make that scenario a reality. Their technique uses electrochromic materials that can instantly change the color of glass from transparent to nearly black by applying a bit of electricity. It’s certainly not the first method developed to change a window’s color, but according to the researchers, their creation has a much faster response time and requires lesser energy. Other techniques take a few minutes to change the shade of the material, and some can’t achieve the opacity that it can. Further, there are methods that need a constant flow of voltage for the window to remain opaque. This one only needs electricity when switching colors — the window can remain in its nearly black state without being connected to a source of energy. To make sure it has near instantaneous response time, the researchers used sponge-like materials called metal-organic frameworks that can quickly conduct electrons and ions. Electricity is applied to give the window a negative charge, and positive ions attack in an effort to neutralize it. That is what causes the color-changing effect. They also mixed two different chemicals that dye the window red and green to get to a color that’s very nearly black. MIT professor of chemistry Mircea Dincă said the technique could lead to “pretty significant energy savings” by reducing the need for air conditioning. “You could just flip a switch when the sun shines through the window, and turn it dark, ” he added. He also believes that it could lead to low-power smart displays, similar to e-ink found on Kindles. While the researchers already proved that their method works in the lab, they still need to create an actual working sample to entice investors and get their creation into our homes. Source: MIT

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MIT-designed windows can rapidly switch from clear to opaque

Why are these children "sieg heiling" the American flag?

In this 1915 photo, the children appear to be raising their arms in a siege heil salute of the American flag. Actually, this gesture was part of the Pledge of Allegiance ritual for decades. Then, um, Hitler happened. From Smithsonian : Originally known as the Bellamy Salute, the gesture came to be in the 1890s, when the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis J. Bellamy. The Christian socialist minister was recruited to write a patriotic pledge to the American flag as part of magazine mogul Daniel Sharp Ford’s quest to get the flag into public schools. At the time… Bellamy and his boss both agreed that the Civil War had divided American loyalties and that the flag might be able to bridge those gaps. His campaign centered around the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the new world. He published his new Pledge as part of a unified Columbus Day ceremony program in September 1892 in the pages of the Youth’s Companion, a popular children’s magazine with a circulation of 500,000. “At a signal from the Principal,” Bellamy wrote, “the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute—right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag…’” Then in the 1930s, Hitler reportedly saw Italian Fascists doing a similar gesture, likely based on an ancient Roman custom, and adopted it for the Nazi party.

Personal Information of Nearly 200 Democrats Leaked in Latest Hack

We already knew that a recent hack that targeted Democratic officials was going to be more than just access to possibly incriminating emails, but we didn’t realize it would be this soon. Read more…

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Personal Information of Nearly 200 Democrats Leaked in Latest Hack

12 Things You Can Now Do With Windows 10 After the Anniversary Update

It’s Windows 10 update time! The so-called “Anniversary Update” marks a year since the OS officially made it out of Redmond and it’s the biggest update yet. We’ve already posted our initial impressions of the update, but with the hefty patch now rolling out for everybody, here are 12 new tricks to try on your Windows 10 machine. Read more…

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12 Things You Can Now Do With Windows 10 After the Anniversary Update

‘GoldenEye: Source’ Updated: A Classic, Free Multiplayer Game

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: GoldenEye: Source received its first update in more than three years this week. It’s free to download and it features 25 recreated maps, 10 different multiplayer modes, and redesigned versions of the original game’s 28 weapons. It was created using Valve’s Source engine, the same set of tools used to create Counter Strike and Half-Life games. So it’s a massive step up in both visuals and performance for one of the more drastically dated gaming masterpieces of the last 20 years… GoldenEye 007, the beloved N64 first-person shooter, has been recreated in high-definition glory by a team of dedicated fans over the course of 10 years…the attention to detail and the amount of effort that went into GoldenEye: Source make it one of the most polished HD remakes of a N64 classic. With 8 million copies sold, Wikipedia calls it the third best-selling Nintendo 64 game of all-time (although this version doesn’t recreate its single-player campaigns). Anyone have fond memories of playing Goldeneye 007? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘GoldenEye: Source’ Updated: A Classic, Free Multiplayer Game

Temporarily Speed Up a Time Machine Backup With a Terminal Command

Time Machine is a great service for backing up your computer, and by default it doesn’t use much CPU power to do it. That’s great most of the time, but sometimes you need to get stuff backed up as soon as possible. Defaults-Write points out the Terminal command for doing so. Read more…

Venus May Have Been Habitable, Says NASA

EzInKy writes: Science Daily has an article speculating that Venus may have been habitable which is suggested by NASA climate modeling, which proposes that Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to two billion years of its early history. Talk about global climate change run amok. Venus may represent a near Earth example of what is in store for the future of our world if we don’t make it a number one priority to address. Science Daily reports: “Venus today is a hellish world. It has a crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere 90 times as thick as Earth’s. There is almost no water vapor. Temperatures reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius) at its surface. Scientists have long theorized that Venus formed out of ingredients similar to Earth’s, but followed a different evolutionary path. Measurements by NASA’s Pioneer mission to Venus in the 1980s first suggested Venus originally may have had an ocean. However, Venus is closer to the sun than Earth and receives far more sunlight. As a result, the planet’s early ocean evaporated, water-vapor molecules were broken apart by ultraviolet radiation, and hydrogen escaped to space. With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to a so-called runaway greenhouse effect that created present conditions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Venus May Have Been Habitable, Says NASA

Your hard drive’s sounds could help hackers crack your system

File this under a totally bizarre and improbable way to hack someone . Security researchers have recently demonstrated a way to use the sounds of your computer’s hard drive to possibly transmit information. In short, they can use it to gather your data without you knowing. Weirdly enough, the DiskFiltration hack, as it’s called, works by taking control of a hard drive’s actuator. Much like the arm of a record player it moves back and forth across a hard drive’s platters to read and write data, and while it moves it makes a series of various sounds. Using the right type of malware, hackers can use those very sounds for some extremely shady machinations. If the right person is listening for the right thing, those noises can let go of a lot of information like an encryption key. The DiskFiltration method only works up to about six feet and it’s limited to a data rate of about 180 bits per minute. That’s obviously not very fast at all, but it’s quick enough to capture an encryption key in about a half hour. The entire idea and method of execution is massively impractical but it does work, except with solid-state drives. Still, it’s a very weird and very real way of intercepting data. As if people needed another way to do so. Via: Gizmodo Source: Cornell University Library

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Your hard drive’s sounds could help hackers crack your system

Everything Revealed in the New Rogue One Trailer

We finally got another trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story last night, and it was packed full of new stuff—including, of course, Darth Vader. We’ve gone through it with a magnifying glass and all of our nerdery to see what secrets and details are hiding inside it. Read more…

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Everything Revealed in the New Rogue One Trailer

Ken May

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