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Former red light camera CEO pleads guilty to bribery, fraud in Ohio

A former CEO of Redflex, the embattled red light camera vendor, has pleaded guilty to bribery and wire fraud in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. In December 2013, Ars reported on red light cameras nationwide, and in particular, Redflex’s four cameras in the central California town of Modesto. Karen Finley was indicted on related charges in August 2014 in Chicago. She pleaded not guilty, and had been set to go to trial in October 2015. But new court filings show she is now scheduled to change her plea in August 2015. As prosecutors wrote in a statement on Friday: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former red light camera CEO pleads guilty to bribery, fraud in Ohio

‘Brain-to-Text’ Interface Types Thoughts of Epileptic Patients

Jason Koebler writes with a link to Motherboard’s article about research from the Schalk Lab of Albany, New York, where researchers “have just demonstrated for the first time that it’s possible to turn a person’s thoughts into a legible phrase using what they’re calling a “brain-to-text” interface, ” writing “It’s still still the early days of this technology—electrodes had to be placed directly on the brain and the ‘dictionary’ of phrases was limited. Still, brainwaves of thought patterns were turned into text at a rate much better than chance.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Brain-to-Text’ Interface Types Thoughts of Epileptic Patients

Unicode Consortium Releases Unicode 8.0.0

An anonymous reader writes: The newest version of the Unicode standard adds 7, 716 new characters to the existing 21, 499 – that’s more than 35% growth! Most of them are Chinese, Japan and Korean ideographs, but among those changes Unicode adds support for new languages like Ik, used in Uganda. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Unicode Consortium Releases Unicode 8.0.0

NASA mission sends back fuzzy, color ‘movies’ of Pluto

Sure, Pluto doesn’t have full-fledged planetary status anymore, but we’re still excited to get some pictures from the edge of the Solar System . The New Horizons spacecraft is carrying a “Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera” that takes stills in blue, red, and near-infrared, then puts them together for a color picture. It took a series of pictures between May 29th and June 3rd that show the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon revolving around their shared center of gravity. The mission will make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14th when it gets about 7, 800 miles above the surface (shown above in an artist rendering). You can check out the low-res animation after the break, and mark your calendar for the better look that’s just 24 days away. New images from @NASANewHorizons show Pluto and its moon Charon, now in color: http://t.co/yp6BZOrXmU pic.twitter.com/sCiFKTsa35 – NASA (@NASA) June 19, 2015 Filed under: Science Comments Source: NASA , New Horizons Mission

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NASA mission sends back fuzzy, color ‘movies’ of Pluto

5G Network Speed Defined As 20 Gbps By the International Telecommunication Union

An anonymous reader writes with a report at Mobipicker (linking to a Korea Times story) that a 12-member committee from the International Telecommunication Union has hashed out a formal definition of the speed requirements for 5G mobile networking; the result has been designated IMT-2020, and it specifies that 5G networks should provide data speeds of up to 20Gbps — 20 times faster than 4G. From the Korea Times story: The 5G network will also have a capacity to provide more than 100 megabits-per-second average data transmission to over one million Internet of Things devices within 1 square kilometer. Video content services, including ones that use holography technology, will also be available thanks to the expanded data transmit capacity, the ministry said. … The union also decided to target commercializing the 5G network worldwide by 2020. To do so, it will start receiving applications for technology which can be candidates to become the standard for the new network. Consequently, the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games will be the world’s first international event to showcase and demonstrate 5G technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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5G Network Speed Defined As 20 Gbps By the International Telecommunication Union

"Let’s Encrypt" Project To Issue First Free Digital Certificates Next Month

An anonymous reader writes: Let’s Encrypt, the project that hopes to increase the use of encryption across websites by issuing free digital certificates, is planning to issue the first ones next month. Backed by the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Akamai, IdenTrust, Automattic, and Cisco, Let’s Encrypt will provide free-of-charge SSL and TSL certificates to any webmaster interested in implementing HTTPS for their products. The Stack reports: “Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate will be cross-signed by IdenTrust, a public key CA owned by smartphone government ID card provider HID Global. Website operators are generally hesitant to use SSL/TLS certificates due to their cost. An extended validation (EV) SSL certificates can cost up to $1, 000. It is also a complication for operators to set up encryption for larger web services. Let’s Encrypt aims to remove these obstacles by eliminating the related costs and automating the entire process.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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"Let’s Encrypt" Project To Issue First Free Digital Certificates Next Month

British Government Instituted 3-Month Deletion Policy, Apparently To Evade FOIA

An anonymous reader writes: In late 2004, weeks before Tony Blair’s Freedom of Information (FOI) act first came into force, Downing Street adopted a policy of automatically deleting emails more than three months old (paywalled). The IT decision has resulted in a “dysfunctional” system according to former cabinet officials, with Downing Street workers struggling to agree on the details of meetings in the absence of a correspondence chain. It is still possible to preserve an email by dragging it to local storage, but the relevance of mails may not be apparent at the time that the worker must make the decision to do so. Former special adviser to Nick Clegg Sean Kemp said: “Some people delete their emails on an almost daily basis, others just try to avoid putting anything potentially interesting in an email in the first place.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Government Instituted 3-Month Deletion Policy, Apparently To Evade FOIA

Sprint stops throttling heavy users to avoid net neutrality complaints

Sprint has stopped throttling its heaviest data users, even when its network is congested, to avoid potential violations of the Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules that ban throttling. Instead, Sprint will manage congestion with a policy aimed at giving all customers a solid connection to the network. “Sprint said it believes its policy would have been allowed under the rules, but dropped it just in case,”  The Wall Street Journal reported . “Sprint doesn’t expect users to notice any significant difference in their services now that we no longer engage in the process,” Sprint told the newspaper. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint stops throttling heavy users to avoid net neutrality complaints

The world’s thinnest light bulb is made from graphene

Forget LED light bulbs… in the future, your lighting may be made from carbon . Columbia University researchers have built a light bulb chip that superheats graphene to produce illumination. While that’s the same basic concept that you see in an incandescent bulb, the graphene filament measures just one atom thick — this is the world’s thinnest light bulb, and may be close to being the thinnest possible . It’s transparent, too, which could suit it to see-through displays . The technology should have uses beyond lighting things up, too. Generating this kind of heat on a small scale could lead to “micro-hotplates” that heat up chemicals for the sake of studying chemical reactions. Also, creating light at this scale is key to developing photonic processors that are much faster than conventional chips. The light will need to switch on and off much faster for any computing uses, but it’s a realistic possibility. [Image credit: Myung-Ho Bae/KRISS] Filed under: Displays , Household , Science Comments Source: Columbia University , Nature

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The world’s thinnest light bulb is made from graphene

Rearranging jellyfish limbs may lead to self-healing robots

Normally when a jellyfish loses a limb, say to the jaws of a hungry sea turtle, it simply regenerates the lost appendage, no big deal. However, a Caltech research team has been studying a certain jellyfish species that doesn’t regrow its limbs but rather rearranges the remaining ones to maintain symmetry. They think that this body-modifying trick could one day help robots repair themselves after similar injuries. In a paper published June 15th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the team described its work with the moon jellyfish. They amputated the various numbers of limbs from anesthetized jellies and then monitored their recovery. While the jellies healed in a couple of hours (as they normally do), the team noticed that rather than beginning to regrow their limbs the jellies instead shifted their remaining appendages around to restore their symmetry. What’s really wild is that mechanical forces created by the jelly’s own muscle contractions appear to be behind its reorganization. “This is a different strategy of self-repair, ” Caltech assistant professor of biology Lea Goentoro said in a statement. “Some animals just heal their wounds, other animals regenerate what is lost, but the moon jelly ephyrae [juveniles] don’t regenerate their lost limbs. They heal the wound, but then they reorganize to regain symmetry.” This discovery could lead to new advances in robotics . “Symmetrization may provide a new avenue for thinking about biomaterials that could be designed to ‘heal’ by regaining functional geometry rather than regenerating precise shapes, ” Goentoro continued. “Other self-repair mechanisms require cell proliferation and cell death-biological processes that aren’t easily translated to technology. But we can more easily apply mechanical forces to a material.” Soon, injured robots may not drag their broken limbs behind them like this little guy , but simply rearrange their other legs instead. [Image Credit: Getty Images/Vetta (top); Caltech (inline)] Filed under: Science Comments Source: Caltech

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Rearranging jellyfish limbs may lead to self-healing robots