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The Coolest Attractions Coming to Shanghai Disneyland

The new Disneyland in Shanghai doesn’t open until June 16th, but we’ve got a new drone’s-eye view of the progress at the new park. It will be the first Disney park in mainland China, and we can expect three things from it: It’s going to be busy; it’s going to have some cool new rides; and it’s going to make Disney a ton of money. Read more…

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The Coolest Attractions Coming to Shanghai Disneyland

MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License

New submitter _merlin writes: MAMEdev just announced that MAME (formerly Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is now entirely available under OSI-comliant, FSF-approved licenses. The project as a whole is available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0), while individual source files are available under BSD-3-Clause, LGPL-2.1 or GPL-2.0 (all compatible with GPL-2.0). Over 90% of the code, including core functionality, is available under the BSD-3-Clause license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License

Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

szczys writes: Google is building a 100kW transmitter at Spaceport America. As is becoming the regular source of early info, this comes via an FCC filing in which Google has asked the agency to keep the project secret. The signal strength itself isn’t [groundbreaking] until you learn this is a directional antenna. Some of the most powerful FM radio transmitters get to 100kW, but those are omnidirectional. This is a highly focused directional antenna and that makes it sound like a big piece of Google’s hushed Broadband Drone program. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

HughPickens.com writes: Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can’t rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate. A number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning over the past year that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic. “Many in the US Bitcoin community had hoped that hitting this crisis point — a network maxed out, transactions faltering — would result in closure, with miners quickly moving to adopt whichever chain proved more valuable to their economic interests, ” says Popper. “But so far the debate is dragging on without one side claiming a clear victory, leaving tens of thousands of consumer transactions stranded in limbo.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

Frank Miller’s Batman Was ‘Too Nice’ for Darren Aronofsky

Later this month, we’ll see Batman v. Superman , loosely based on Frank Miller’s Batman comics. But we almost got a Batman film from Miller and Darren Aronofsky, based on Batman: Year One . In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter , Miller explained what that looked like, and it was very, very strange. Read more…

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Frank Miller’s Batman Was ‘Too Nice’ for Darren Aronofsky

Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

(credit: Larson, et. al., Science) For many of us, the term “robot” still evokes an image of R2D2 or a terminator-style collection of metal parts. But there’s no reason to limit our construction materials to hard parts. A number of labs are working on soft-bodied robots, and have shown they can do some rather interesting things, like squeezing through narrow spaces . A team of researchers from Cornell and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have taken a soft-bodied robot and made it glow. Their method of producing the light, however, has some interesting side effects: it allows the robot to determine how much it has flexed, and it makes the robot responsive to touch. These days, “glow” is usually synonymous with “LED.” But the authors used a very different technique, relying on what’s called an electroluminescent phosphor—basically, something that glows when it’s place in an alternating electric field. The phosphors (zinc sulfide, in this case) can be embedded in a silicone gel, making them stretchable and bendable. Different dopants in the phosphor will cause it to glow in different colors. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

Scientists May Have Found Molecular Gatekeeper Of Long-Term Memory

hackingbear writes: While the general steps of forming a long-term memory are clear, the details, such as how exactly the molecular signals get shuttled to the command center, which generally has tight security, are unclear. A new study, led by neuroscientist Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, may finally have that answer. In the tiny minds of fruit flies, a protein called importin-7 acts to shuttle the memory-triggering signal into the nucleus with its top-level clearance to the restricted area, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With genetic tweaking, the researchers dialed up and down the amount of importin-7 in the flies and then put them through the memory training and test. They found that cranking up levels of the shuttle protein strengthened the long-term memories of the flies, while turning it off weakened their memory. “The current work confirms that [importin-7] is indeed critical at the behavioral level in mediating [long-term memory] consolidation, ” the authors concluded. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists May Have Found Molecular Gatekeeper Of Long-Term Memory

Samsung’s 16TB SSD Is Now an Actual Thing People Can Buy

Last year, Samsung made the rest of the world feel mighy inadequate by announcing a world-record 16TB SSD. Turns out that was more than just talk—Samsung is shipping drives to (very wealthy) customers today. Read more…

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Samsung’s 16TB SSD Is Now an Actual Thing People Can Buy

Ikea Is Growing New Eco-Friendly Mushroom Packaging

To stop all those $20 side tables getting banged up, Ikea has to use a lot of polystyrene packaging every year. Unfortunately, polystyrene isn’t biodegradable, and people are bad at recycling, leaving Ikea looking for a better material to stick between sheets of ply. Read more…

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Ikea Is Growing New Eco-Friendly Mushroom Packaging