Over at The Atlantic ’s CityLab , there’s a great post about how Japanese kids can run errands around town and take public transportation free of worry or supervision. It’s thanks to the country’s incredible infrastructure and culture of safety. Read more…
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Japanese Six-Year-Olds Can Ride Trains Alone Thanks to the Country’s Amazing Infrastructure
Last year, scientists in China used a gene-editing technique to produce pint-sized pigs for medical research. Now they want to sell them as pets. Critics say the precedent could lead to bizarre versions of cats and dogs, while at the same time preventing biologists from focusing on more important research. Read more…
NASA announced the finalists for its next round of planetary explorations. There were the usual suspects—Venus, Jupiter’s asteroids—and, then, there was this: An asteroid, composed almost entirely of (possibly magnetic) metal, with a crust literally beaten away by interstellar collisions, named Psyche. Pardon? Read more…
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This Is the Insane Metallic World NASA Wants to Explore Next
T-Mobile customers should be on alert: Hackers stole the personal information of around 15 million Uncarrier users from its credit reporting agency , Experian. The stolen data including social security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers. Read more…
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15 Million T-Mobile Customers Hacked in Vendor Data Breach
An international team of scientists has scanned the genomes of 2, 504 people from around the world to create the world’s largest catalog of human genetic variation (HGV). The extensive database will help them understand why some people are susceptible to certain diseases. Read more…
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Mapping the 88 Million Ways That Humans Are Genetically Different
If you’re still using TrueCrypt to protect your Windows disks, even though its developers abandoned it and said it was “not secure” last year, you may want to stop that. Google Project Zero researcher James Forshaw found two “privilege elevation” holes in the popular software that would give attackers full access to your data. Worse yet, TrueCrypt was audited earlier this by a crowdfunded team of iSec security researchers and found to be error-free. Google’s James Forshaw said on Twitter that the miss was understandable, though: “iSec phase 1 audit reviewed this specific code but Windows drivers are complex beasts (and) easy to miss.” Forshaw hasn’t disclosed the bugs yet, saying he usually waits seven days after a patch is released. He and other researchers agree that the vulnerabilities — which can reportedly be exploited by “abusive drive letter handling” — weren’t deliberately installed. And they won’t, of course, be fixed in the original program’s code. @v998n @VeraCrypt_IDRIX I don’t tend to open up security bug reports until 7 days or so after the release of the patch, just in case 🙂 — James Forshaw (@tiraniddo) September 27, 2015 However, if you’re using TrueCrypt because “free” is a good price, there are other options –VeraCrypt and CipherShed are open source forks of TrueCrypt, and VeraCrypt has already patched the bugs. Suffice to say, you should stop using TrueCrypt within the seven day window before Forshow releases the exploitable code. Even if you do, however, we likely haven’t heard the end of this type of Windows vulnerability. VeraCrypt’s Mounir Idrassi gold Threatpost that “These are the kind of vulnerabilities that exist in (lots of) software on Windows, ” and that will be (and have been) used by hackers for years. Via: PC World Source: James Forshaw (Twitter)
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TrueCrypt Windows encryption app has critical security flaws
Researchers have found a scourge for the 33 million tons of plastic dumped each year in the US: mealworms. A team from Stanford and China’s Beihang University found that the beetle larvae stay perfectly healthy eating just Styrofoam, which is normally considered non-biodegradable. Better still, the worms convert the plastic to CO2 and waste that’s safe to use as soil for crops. The scientists were as surprised by the discovery as you might be. “There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places, ” said Stanford professor Craig Criddle. “This is a shock.” Mealworms don’t have some kind of magic digestive system, of course. Earlier research has showed that microorganisms in the stomachs of Indian mealmoths can digest the polyethylene plastic used in garbage bags. The scientists now plan to study such bacteria to see whether they can biodegrade plastics used in automotive components and microbeads that pollute water supplies. The goal is to eventually cut out the middleman (“middleworm”?) and isolate the bioenzymes used by microorganisms to break down the plastics. That could result in new methods of reducing plastic waste that’s already in the environment, and new types of bio-plastics that won’t accumulate on land or at sea. Source: Stanford University
We’ve been seeing teasers about the Tesla Model X for years, but as the first six vehicles finally make their way into the hands of owners tonight we’ve got more info on falcon-doors, mono-post seats, and the SUV’s bioweapon defense mode. Read more…
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Tesla Model X: This Is It
the_newsbeagle writes: With electrodes implanted in their neural tissue and a new brain-computer interface, two paralyzed people with ALS used their thoughts to control a computer cursor with unprecedented accuracy and speed. They showed off their skills by using a predictive text-entering program to type sentences, achieving a rate of 6 words per minute. While paralyzed people can type faster using other assistive technologies that are already on the market, like eye-gaze trackers and air-puff controllers, a brain implant could be the only option for paralyzed people who can’t reliably control their eyes or mouth muscles. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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ALS Patients Use a Brain Implant To Type 6 Words Per Minute
Enlarge / Even in the download-only era, it’s easy to make yourself offline OS X install media. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media . Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still good reasons to want an old, reliable USB stick. For instance, if you find yourself doing multiple installs, a USB drive may be faster than multiple downloads (especially if you use a USB 3.0 drive). Or maybe you need a recovery disk for older Macs that don’t support the Internet Recovery feature. Whatever the reason, you’re in luck, because it’s not hard to make one. As with last year , there are two ways to get it done. There’s the super easy way with the graphical user interface and the only slightly less easy way that requires some light Terminal use. Here’s what you need to get started. A Mac that you have administrator access to, duh. We’ve created El Capitan USB stick from both Yosemite and El Capitan, but your experience with other versions may vary. An 8GB or larger USB flash drive or an 8GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. For newer Macs, use a USB 3.0 drive—it makes things significantly faster. The OS X 10.11 El Capitan installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary. If you want a GUI, you need the latest version of Diskmaker X app. As of this writing, version 5 is the one you’ll want for official El Capitan support, and it has been promised but not yet delivered. We’ll show you how to do it with version 4 and update the article when the update is released. Diskmaker X is free to download, but the creator accepts donations if you want to support his efforts. The easy way Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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How to make your own bootable OS X 10.11 El Capitan USB install drive