No one’s exactly sure how fraudsters stole over $680,000 from hijacked chip-and-PIN credit cards in Belgium, because the cards are still evidence and can’t be subjected to a full tear-down but based on the X-rays of the tampered cards, it’s a good bet that the thieves glued a 0.3mm hobbyist FUN chip over the card’s own chip, and programmed it to bypass all PIN entries. (more…)
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Solder a 0.3mm chip onto a credit card and Chip-and-PIN is yours to pwn
szczys writes: Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene breakthroughs pop up in the news often enough for them to be considered buzzwords. Most of the time it’s the superconducting properties of graphene that are touted, but molecule-scale structures also hold the promise of building mechanical computing devices that are unimaginably small. The reason we don’t have these things yet comes down to the manufacturing process. Building machines out of carbon molecules is commonly called Rod Logic — a topic many know from the seminal novel The Diamond Age. Al Williams discusses how Rod Logic works and highlights some of the places we’re already seeing these materials like to help cool LED light bulbs, and to strengthen composites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Rod Logic Computers and Why We Don’t Already Have Them
For many years scientists have been trying to find a way to measure the pressure in a patient’s brain without having to drill a hole in the person’s skull. Although this remains the most reliable way to measure pressure in the brain it is invasive, expensive and comes with the risk of infection and bleeding. Read more…
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How Neurosurgeons Can Now Look at Your Brain Through Your Eyes
In developing countries, an unbelievable 45% of food goes bad because of a lack of cold storage. It’s an especially big problem during transportation from farms to outdoor markets, where food sits in the scorching sun for hours on end. But one startup has a solution: solar-powered refrigeration stations that could save the livelihoods of half a billion farmers worldwide. Read more…
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In Nigeria, Solar-Powered Fridges at Outdoor Markets Save Food From Spoiling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4XXLb_Vuw Point this gernsbeckian invisible ray gun at a drone, and it will drop from the sky, according to Battelle, the non-profit company that made it. The DroneDefender doesn’t make a cool sound when you pull the trigger, though, so I don’t like it. From Make : In a press release from Battelle, the gun is stated to use “radio control frequency disruption technologies to safely stop drones in the air, before they can pose a threat to military or civilian safety.” A video accompanying the post describes that it operates on standard GPS and ISM radio bands, allowing for it to interference with commercial UAV signals. Reportedly, the DroneDefender can hit objects up to 400 meters with an effective cone diameter of 30°. This is about as far as Battelle goes with the technical details, so the actual frequency ranges of the rifle still remain unknown.
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Long distance jammer knocks drones from the sky
A newborn mouse. (credit: Credit: Wikimedia Commons ) As marijuana is legalized in more states, questions about its safety and the health consequences of cannabis use are becoming mainstream. A new study published in PNAS finds that use of cannabis by pregnant women can have implications for the neural development of her child, and that some of the consequences continue into adulthood, So, like alcohol, another recreational drug that is legal in the US, marijuana is likely best avoided by pregnant women. The most prominent active ingredient in marijuana is a compound known as THC, which interacts with the naturally occurring cannabinoid receptors in the nervous system. Cannabinoid receptors are known to play an important role in the regulation of brain development, and this paper examines the influence of a prenatal THC exposure on the maturation of pathways regulated by these receptors. The study examined prenatal cannabis consumption in mice, with the aim of identifying the mechanisms responsible for cannabis-related changes in brain function. During the study, pregnant mice were exposed to daily injections of THC or injections of a control liquid. Then the offspring were run through a battery of behavioral tests. The animals’ brains were also examined closely using immunoflouresence and confocal microscopy. Embryonic brain tissue from some litters was also collected and checked for irregularities. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Marijuana exposure in utero has lifelong consequences
Waze is one of the most popular maps and traffic apps on iOS and Android. For good reason, too: It’s fast, intuitive and, often times, more accurate than the highly rated Google Maps. Today, Waze’s making its mobile application even better, thanks to an overhaul designed to offer a cleaner, prettier user interface and quicker access to useful actions. With a single tap, you can now send directions, location or estimated time of arrival to your contacts. You can also get traffic-based reminders, making it easier to get to any destination on time — as long as your calendar is synced with Waze. Last but not least, this new version of the app “significantly” reduces battery consumption, according to the company; if true, that’ll definitely be appreciated by users who rely on the app for their daily commutes or casual trips. The 4.0 update is already available for iOS , while Android’s expected to get it ” soon .” [Image credits: AFP/Getty Images] Source: Waze
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Waze’s maps and traffic app gets a cleaner and smarter design
The Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro was one of our favorite laptops of 2014, but mostly for impractical reasons: At 2.62 pounds and half an inch thick, it was exceptionally thin and light, even for an ultraportable, but it suffered from relatively short battery life and performance that trailed some rivals. Fortunately, the company just announced a new flagship, the Yoga 900, and it appears to improve on its predecessor in every way that matters. For starters, it movies from one of Intel’s low-powered Core M chips to a sixth-gen Core i5 or i7 CPU. Between that and a new option for 16GB of RAM, the performance here should be faster than it was just a year ago. At the same time, Lenovo didn’t have to compromise much on weight: the Yoga 900 is just heftier, at 2.8 pounds and 14.9mm (0.59 inch) thick.Slideshow-330250 That addresses performance. As for battery life, Lenovo bumped up the battery capacity by about 50 percent, promising between eight and nine hours of runtime. Last year’s model lasted around seven and a half hours in our tests, so if the new model can indeed reach nine, that would be a marked improvement. Lenovo also increased the base storage from 128GB to 256GB, and plans to offer a 512GB on the highest-end configuration. This time, too, the Yoga starts with 8GB of RAM, going up to 16GB on the top-tier model. Additionally, Lenovo made a couple tweaks to the hardware, though this was admittedly one of the Yoga 3 Pro’s strong points in the first place. For one, Lenovo ditched last year’s five-row keyboard for a six-row setup, allowing the user to adjust things like brightness from the top row without holding down the Function key. Also, though the”Watchband” hinge in the back looks the same, Lenovo tightened it so that it feels sturdier when you’re flipping the 3, 200 x 1, 800 screen into different usage modes. Indeed, I noticed in my hands-on that the flex I complained about in my review was gone; no more creaking sound when you rotate the display back into tablet mode.Slideshow-330251 The Yoga 900 starts at $1, 200, and is available today at Best Buy and on Lenovo’s website. Colors include gold, silver and “clementine orange, ” and this time, the watchband hinge around back matches the rest of the chassis. Given that this is the direct replacement to one of our favorite laptops from last year, you can bet we intend to review this as soon as we’re able to get our hands on one. Until then, enjoy the hands-on photos.
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Lenovo’s flagship Yoga 900 laptop is an improvement in every way that matters
Conservationists working at the University of Virginia’s Rotunda have inadvertently uncovered a chemical hearth designed by Thomas Jefferson. The discovery is offering fresh insights into how chemistry was taught over 200 years ago. Read more…
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Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Chemistry Lab Found Hidden Behind Wall
(credit: Google) Shortly after the announcement of iOS 8 in 2014, Google made headlines by saying that it would make full-device encryption mandatory for new Android devices running version 5.0. It then made more headlines several months later when we discovered that the company backed down , “strongly recommending” that Android device makers enable encryption but stopping short of actually requiring it. Now Google has published an updated version of the Android Compatibility Definition Document ( PDF ) for Android 6.0, and it looks like mandatory encryption is back with a couple of exceptions. New devices that come with Marshmallow and have AES crypto performance above 50MiB-per-second need to support encryption of the private user data partition (/data) and the public data partition (/sdcard). The relevant portion of the document, emphasis ours: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Android 6.0 re-implements mandatory device encryption for new devices