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The World’s Oldest Computer May Have Predicted the Future

Gizmodo reports: Discovered in an ancient shipwreck near Crete in 1901, the freakishly advanced Antikythera Mechanism has been called the world’s first computer. A decades-long investigation into the 2, 000 year-old-device is shedding new light onto this mysterious device… It wasn’t programmable in the modern sense, but it’s considered the world’s first analog computer. schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press:: For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism — named after the southern Greek island off which it was found — was a tantalizing puzzle…. After more than a decade’s efforts using cutting-edge scanning equipment, an international team of scientists has now read about 3, 500 characters of explanatory text — a quarter of the original — in the innards of the 2, 100-year-old remains. They say it was a kind of philosopher’s guide to the galaxy, and perhaps the world’s oldest mechanical computer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The World’s Oldest Computer May Have Predicted the Future

Air Force Has Lost 100,000 Inspector General Records

schwit1 shares an article from The Hill: The Air Force announced on Friday that it has lost thousands of records belonging to the service’s inspector general due to a database crash. “We estimate we’ve lost information for 100, 000 cases dating back to 2004, ” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Hill in an email. “The database crashed and there is no data…” The database, called the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS), holds all records related to IG complaints, investigations, appeals and Freedom of Information Act requests…. “We also use ACTS to track congressional/constituent inquiries.” The Air Force said they were “aggressively” trying to recover the data, adding that they had no evidence of malicious intent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Air Force Has Lost 100,000 Inspector General Records

Mozilla Will Fund Code Audits For Open Source Software

Reader Orome1 writes: The Mozilla Foundation has set up the Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund, whose aim is to help open source software projects get rid their code of vulnerabilities. Projects that want Mozilla’s help must be open source/free software and must be actively maintained, but they have a much better probability to being chosen if their software is commonly used and is vital to the continued functioning of the Internet or the Web. Three open source projects — PCRE, libjpeg-turbo, and phpMyAdmin — have already gone through the process, and the result was removal of 43 vulnerabilities (including one critical). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Will Fund Code Audits For Open Source Software

iMessage for Android Would Change Everything

As is tradition, some last-minute rumors are sneaking their way into the news before Apple’s big reveal on Monday morning in San Francisco. We already have a good idea what of what we think is coming , but this latest bit that says iMessage is coming to Android is very intriguing. Read more…

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iMessage for Android Would Change Everything

Gawker declares bankruptcy, will auction itself off in wake of Hulk Hogan lawsuit

(credit: Miguel Discart ) UPDATE 3:00pm ET : The Verge located and published Gawker’s federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing, which we have mirrored here . In that document, owner Nick Denton estimates the company’s assets at $50 million to $100 million, and liabilities at $100 million to $500 million. Ryan Mac, a reporter at Forbes , provided Ars with a three-page statement from Gawker, that we have published in full , here. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gawker declares bankruptcy, will auction itself off in wake of Hulk Hogan lawsuit

US coal production drops to levels not seen since a 1980s miners’ strike

(credit: US EIA ) The first three months of 2016 saw a plunge in the US’ coal production that may be without precedent. The US Energy Information Administration, which has figures going back to the 1970s, shows only a single quarterly drop of similar magnitude—and that one came during a workers’ strike back in the early 1980s. Excepting periods of labor problems, US coal production has not been this low since the EIA started tracking it. Part of the problem is temporary. The winter was unusually mild, which lowers energy use in general. As a result, many of the coal-burning electrical plants had large stockpiles of coal on hand; they burned through these reserves rather than ordering new coal. But most of the issues are systemic. Coal is now being undercut by renewables and natural gas, which are displacing some of the demand. Utilities are responding to those low prices by adding new renewable and gas capacity. That additional capacity comes at a time when the US’ electricity demand has been growing at an unexpectedly slow pace. Combined, these factors have resulted in less use of existing coal plants. New environmental regulations are also forcing the oldest and least efficient plants to shut down early. Most of these are also coal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US coal production drops to levels not seen since a 1980s miners’ strike

Risky stem cell treatment reverses MS in 70% of patients in small study

MS brain lesion as seen on an MRI. (credit: James Heilman, MD ) By obliterating the broken immune systems of patients with severe forms of multiple sclerosis, then sowing fresh, defect-free systems with transplanted stem cells, researchers can thwart the degenerative autoimmune disease—but it comes at a price. In a small phase II trial of 24 MS patients, the treatment halted or reversed the disease in 70 percent of patients for three years after the transplant. Eight patients saw that improvement last for seven and a half years, researchers report in the Lancet . This means that some of those patients went from being wheelchair-bound to walking and being active again. But to reach that success, many suffered through severe side effects, such as life threatening infections and organ damage from toxicity brought on by the aggressive chemotherapy required to annihilate the body’s immune system. One patient died from complications of the treatment, which represents a four percent fatality rate. Moreover, while the risks may be worthwhile to some patients with rapidly progressing forms of MS—a small percentage of MS patients—the researchers also caution that the trial was small and did not include a control group. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Risky stem cell treatment reverses MS in 70% of patients in small study

“Bluetooth 5” spec coming next week with 2x more range and 4x better speed

Bluetooth 5.0, the latest version of the ubiquitous wireless standard, is set to be announced on June 16, according to an e-mail sent by Bluetooth SIG Executive Director Mark Powell. The update will apparently be called “Bluetooth 5” without a point number in an effort to “[simplify] marketing.” It’s primarily of interest because the update promises to double the range and quadruple the speed of Bluetooth 4.2. It also adds “significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions,” which is more exciting than it sounds because it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what you normally think of when you think of “advertising.” In the Bluetooth spec, an “advertising packet” allows Bluetooth devices to send small snippets of information to other Bluetooth devices even if the two aren’t actually paired or connected to one another. For instance, when you go to pair a Bluetooth keyboard or speaker with one of your devices, advertising packets can let you see the name of the device before you’ve paired it so you can distinguish it from all the other Bluetooth devices that are within range. The same technology is used by wireless beacons to transmit information about the location you’re in and by Apple’s AirDrop and Handoff features to let your Macs and iDevices know what your other Macs and iDevices are up to. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Bluetooth 5” spec coming next week with 2x more range and 4x better speed

Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks — it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin. The report goes on to mention that the movie was made by Oscar Sharp for the annual film festival Sci-Fi London. You can watch the short film (~10 min) on The Scene here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Movie Written By Algorithm Turns Out To Be Hilarious and Intense