There are a few things that make America great, and blowing shit up on the Fourth of July is one of them. So when PBS decided to digitally add stock footage of fireworks to its “live” coverage of the Capitol’s Independence Day celebration, some viewers were left unimpressed. Faking shit? Very Un-American. Read more…
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PBS Caught Faking Fireworks During ‘Live’ Fourth of July Celebration
By 2026, there’s going to be a lot less hunger worldwide—and that’s something to celebrate. The reason is not that we’re growing more food, however. Food is just getting cheaper. Read more…
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Why World Hunger Is Going to Fall to Its Lowest Levels Ever This Decade
It’s been a bad couple of days / months / lifetime for the Transport Security Administration, but there’s some good news. The much loathed government agency is going to try to make airport screening less terrible with fancy new automated security checkpoints. Read more…
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The TSA Is About to Make Airport Security Less Terrible
Where will the first Hyperloop be? So far there are plans to use the tubular transportation system to move passengers in Slovakia and freight in Switzerland . But a proposed application for the Hyperloop announced today could solve a transportation conundrum that has been challenging planners for centuries: Connecting the neighboring nations of Sweden and Finland. Read more…
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Hyperloop Connecting Helsinki and Stockholm Turns 300-Mile Trip Into 28 Minute Ride
Nexus phones are essential tools for any Android fan or developer because of their lack of bloatware and regular system updates. Now, thanks to tweaks to the latest version of the operating system, it’s not that difficult to get a Nexus-style experience on any handset. Here’s how you can do it. Read more…
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How To Make Any Android Phone a Nexus
“Audio surveillance is increasingly being used on parts of urban mass transit systems, ” reports the Christian Science Monitor. Slashdot reader itwbennett writes “It was first reported in April that New Jersey had been using audio surveillance on some of its light rail lines, raising questions of privacy. This week, New Jersey Transit ended the program following revelations that the agency ‘didn’t have policies governing storage and who had access to data.'” From the article: New Jersey isn’t the only state where you now have even more reason to want to ride in the quiet car. The Baltimore Sun reported in March that the Maryland Transit Administration has used audio recording on some of its mass transit vehicles since 2012. It is now used on 65 percent of buses, and 82 percent of subway trains have audio recording capability, but don’t use it yet, according to the Sun. And cities in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Oregon and California have either installed systems or moved to procure them, in many cases with funding from the federal Department of Homeland Security. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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American Cities Are Installing DHS-Funded Audio Surveillance
You won’t have to wait too long to see how well Xbox Play Anywhere works in practice. Microsoft has confirmed to Polygon that the cross-purchase, cross-play feature will go live on both Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs on September 13th. You’ll still need games that support it, of course, but you can count on at least strong first-party support. Microsoft informs MCV that all the games it publishes from now onward will use Play Anywhere — in theory, that means the next Halo will be a PC title. The real unknown is whether or not many third-party games will follow suit. Source: Polygon , MCV
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Microsoft’s Play Anywhere reaches PC and Xbox on September 13th
You really don’t want a root canal, and not just because it’s potentially painful. Emptying the tooth of the infected tissue at its heart potentially weakens it, since you can’t grow that organic material back or put toxic fillings in its place. Researchers may have a solution, though. They’ve crafted fillings that get the tooth’s own stem cells to regenerate and repair tissue. This doesn’t mean that your pearly whites would return to normal, but the substance could heal the tooth enough to spare you a root canal or prevent fillings from going south. You’re not going to have this option for a while, but it’s designed to be practical. You can cure the filling with light, so your dentist wouldn’t have to resort to exotic techniques to rescue your teeth. And importantly, it might be less expensive overall — you might not need a cap or crown to reduce the chances that the tooth will break after the surgery. Via: Popular Science , Gizmodo Source: University of Nottingham
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Regenerative tooth fillings could put an end to root canals
Solar Roadways’ dreams of sunlight-gathering paths are one step closer to taking shape. Missouri’s Department of Transportation is aiming to install a test version of the startup’s solar road tiles in a sidewalk at the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center in Conway. Okay, it won’t be on Route 66 just yet, but that’s not the point — the goal is to see whether or not the technology is viable enough that it could safely be used on regular streets. You should see it in action toward the end of the year. The tiles will be familiar if you’ve followed Solar Roadways before. Each one combines a solar cell with LED lighting, a heating element and tempered glass that’s strong enough to support the weight of a semi-trailer truck. If successful, the panels will feed the electrical grid (ideally paying for themselves) and make the roads safer by both lighting the way as well as keeping the roads free of rain and snow. They should be easier to repair than asphalt, too, since you don’t need to take out whole patches of road to fix small cracks. Of course, “if successful” is the operative term here. The real litmus test comes if and when Solar Roadways subjects the tiles to the legions of cars traveling on Route 66 and beyond. Missouri has a strong incentive to make that happen, though. As the Transportation Department’s Tom Blair observes , it would be odd to push self-driving cars in the state’s Road to Tomorrow initiative when the streets aren’t as smart as the vehicles using them. Via: Inhabitat , CleanTechnica , The Verge Source: Kansas City Star , News Tribune
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Solar road technology comes to Route 66
“Men, bring out the sniffer locusts.” That’s something a bomb squad chief could say in the future, thanks to a team of engineers working to turn the insects into cyborgs that can be sent anywhere to sniff out explosives. It won’t be an easy feat — the researchers, who hail from the Washington University in St. Louis, will have to equip the insects with several pieces of technology. Good thing they have a powerful backer: the Navy. Team leader Baranidharan Raman has received a three-year $750, 000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to make his dreams a reality. Raman has been studying how the bug processes smell for years now. He and his team found that locusts can identify particular scents, such as those they’re trained to detect, even in the presence of other odors. Raman believes the cyborg bugs will be much more effective than robots, because their antennae have a ton of natural sensors. “Why reinvent the wheel? Why not take advantage of the biological solution?” he asked. “That is the philosophy here. Even the state-of-the-art miniaturized chemical sensing devices have a handful of sensors. On the other hand, if you look at the insect antenna, where their chemical sensors are located, there are several hundreds of thousands of sensors and of a variety of types.” To turn ordinary locusts into bomb-sniffing machines, the engineers plan to implant an electrode into their brains to hijack their antennae and read electrical activity. Since operators need to get whatever info the bugs collect, the researchers are also developing a tiny backpack that can transmit data. The receiver’s red LED lights up in the presence of explosives, while the green LED lights up in the absence of any. Finally, the engineers plan to tattoo the bugs’ wings with biocompatible silk that can convert light into heat. A laser, probably installed on the backpack, will allow an operator to control the cyborg bug. Focus the laser on the left wing to make the insect go left, and vice versa. It will function much like a remote-controlled drone. If Raman and his team don’t hit a snag along the way, they could be testing the first prototypes within a year’s time and could be done within two. Via: BBC Source: Washington University in St. Louis
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Cyborg locusts with tattooed wings can sniff out bombs