One day we might be able to make home refrigerators without any chemicals or industrial coolants. The main hope for this comes from a special property of metal and a quirk of entropy. Read more…
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Magnetic Refrigeration is a Real Thing. Here’s How it Works.
Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access. A few days ago, TorrentFreak reported that the Oslo District Court had sided with several Hollywood studios and domestic Norwegian rights holders in a case that sought to block a number of sites, including The Pirate Bay, Viooz, and ExtraTorrent. The court ordered that the country’s major ISPs, including Telia, TeliaSonera, NextGenTel, and Altibox, must block the sites. The Norwegian Pirate Party, as you can probably imagine, isn’t happy with the court-ordered block. In response, it has set up an unblocked DNS server—dns.piratpartiet.no—and a website that shows you how to change your DNS server settings on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade
An anonymous reader writes: Constructions workers in Carlsbad, CA. have recently discovered Ice Age mammoth and prehistoric bison fossils during an excavation. The fossils were taken to the San Diego Museum of Natural History for examination and storage. “The bison fossil, which includes a skull and partial skeleton, is the most unusual and probably the most complete of the larger animals found at the project site. These are big animals, much larger than modern plains bison, ” said curator of paleontology at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, Tom Deméré. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ice-Age Fossils Unearthed At Construction Site In California
It’s not the first time Mark Pollock tested Ekso Bionics’ exoskeleton , but he can now move more naturally, as you can see in the video below the fold. That’s because Pollock, who’s been paralyzed from the waist down since 2010, gained back some control of and feelings in his legs, thanks to a process known as “transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation.” A team of UCLA scientists attached electrodes on his skin and stimulated his spine with jolts of electricity . After the process, Pollock’s legs tingled when exercising, regained enough voluntary control — he can raise them and flex his knees now — and even started sweating, which hasn’t happened since his accident. As a result, his legs and the battery-operated exoskeleton now work in tandem to give him a more natural gait. While he might never be able to walk unassisted, the result of his five-day training in UCLA sounds promising: he successfully walked thousands of steps. According to one of the researchers, Reggie Edgerton, restoring at least some of paraplegics’/quadriplegics’ ability to move on their own is essential despite advances in exoskeleton technologies, as it “will greatly improve their overall health and quality of life.” Filed under: Robots , Science Comments Source: The Washington Post , NIH , UCLA , IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Tags: exoskeleton, medical, medicine
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Robotic exoskeleton and zaps of electricity helped man walk again
techtsp writes: Marcia J. Bates, UCLA Professor Emerita of Information Studies recently explained why Google’s birth led to the downfall of AltaVista. According to Bates, early search engines including AltaVista adapted the classical IR methods. At the other hand, Google founders started off with a completely different approach in mind. Google successfully recognized the potential of URLs, which could be added to the algorithms for the sake of information indexing altogether. Google’s modern age techniques were a huge boost to those older techniques. Whatever other business and company management issues AltaVista faced, it was the last of the old style information retrieval engines. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why AltaVista Lost Ground To Google Sooner Than Expected
darthcamaro writes: Mark Shuttleworth, BDFL of Ubuntu is clearing the air about how Ubuntu will make use of .deb packages even in an era where it is moving to its own Snappy (‘snaps’) format of rapid updates. Fundamentally it’s a chicken and egg issue. From the serverwatch article: “‘We build Snappy out of the built deb, so we can’t build Snappy unless we first build the deb, ‘ Shuttleworth said. Going forward, Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu users will still get access to an archive of .deb packages. That said, for users of a Snappy Ubuntu-based system, the apt-get command no longer applies. However, Shuttleworth explained that on a Snappy-based system there will be a container that contains all the deb packages. ‘The nice thing about Snappy is that it’s completely worry-free updates, ‘ Shuttleworth said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Shuttleworth Says Snappy Won’t Replace .deb Linux Package Files In Ubuntu 15.10
It’s no secret that Earth’s volcanoes are the result of magma rising through the planet’s mantle, but have you wondered just where those ‘roots’ run? UC Berkeley can provide an answer. It just created the first-ever detailed 3D map of the Earth’s interior by studying the path of seismic waves. The model shows mantle plumes (where the hot rock flows) starting at the bottom of the core-to-mantle boundary and climbing to the top, where they connect to volcanic hotspots in the Earth’s crust. As it turns out, the plumes don’t take a straight path — they often spread out as they merge with the colder upper mantle. It’s also clear that most of the world’s volcanoes (such as those in the Pacific’s island chains) ultimately come from two large “blobs” of hot rock at the core boundary. The model isn’t perfect. It didn’t link plumes to some volcanoes, such as the one at Yellowstone National Park . However, it’s good enough to represent the first hard evidence of magma plumes, and there are promises of higher-resolution maps in the future thanks to gravity-sensing satellites. While it’s doubtful that scientists will ever know as much about Earth’s insides as they do about the top layer, this below- longer as mysterious as it once was. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Science Comments Source: UC Berkeley , Nature Tags: ctscan, LawrenceBerkeleyNationalLaboratory, science, UcBerkeley, video, volcano
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First 3D map of Earth’s interior shows where volcanoes come from
Talk about an in-demand craftsman: After knifemaker Bob Kramer was first featured in Saveur Magazine in the ’90s, he was so deluged with orders that it took him ten years to catch up. Of all the certified Master Bladesmiths in the United States—there were 67 when he started out, and now just over 120 of them—Kramer is the only one who specializes in kitchen knives. “I have devoted my life, ” writes Kramer, “to the single-minded pursuit of crafting the perfect kitchen knife, and I am so grateful to those who appreciate my work.” When Anthony Bourdain went to visit the lone craftsman in his Washington-state shop, Kramer had something special in store for him. Not only would he make a knife before Bourdain’s eyes, he’d make it using a chunk of meteorite. Watch the master as he makes a knife from outer space:
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Watch a Master Bladesmith Make a Kitchen Knife Out of Meteorites
The way federal prosecutors tell it , not only did four men conspire to steal a large quantity of MacBook Airs, but they did a poor job of covering it up. The men were arrested on Wednesday and appeared before a federal judge in White Plains, New York. They are accused of “participating in a scheme to steal, transport, and sell a shipment of approximately 1,200 computers, valued at over $1 million, that were bound for two public high schools in New Jersey.” According to the criminal complaint , one of the men, Anton Saljanin, was hired to transport 1,195 laptops from a vendor in Massachusetts on January 15, 2014, after having successfully delivered 1,300 other laptops. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs
By the looks of things, Google’s self-driving cars have been learning a lot in Austin, Texas . In its first report since it began testing autonomous vehicles in the city, the company details the challenges its cars have had to face while driving on its roads. For instance, they’ve been spotting and avoiding a lot of deer, some of which might have ended up as road kill if they happened to come across ordinary vehicles instead. The system also had to learn to identify new infrastructure, such as horizontal traffic signals. Google has learned, however, that one of the major problems it has to tackle is pedestrians stepping off the curb onto the road while hidden by other vehicles. On August 20th, a Lexus unit was rear ended after spotting a person starting to cross the road. See, its human driver took over to make sure he doesn’t end up harming anyone, but it turns out — based on the footage of the incident — that the accident wouldn’t have happened if he just allowed the car to brake on its own. Clearly, Google’s doing what it can to achieve its original goal of developing autonomous vehicles that can drive better than humans. In addition to discussing what it has learned in Austin, Mountain View has also revealed through the report that it’s deploying more of its egg-like prototype models in the city this September. Filed under: Transportation , Google Comments Via: USA Today Source: Google Tags: google, googlecar, self-drivingcar
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Google’s driverless cars skirt deer and pedestrians in Texas