3D printing can make an action figure copy of your body and face, but the hair usually ends up looking like a Lego minifig wig. The mad scientists at Disney Research just solved that, with an algorithm so powerful it can trace your hair’s shape and color with ultra-realism. Read more…
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Disney Research 3D-Prints Figurines With the Most Lifelike Hair Ever
sciencehabit (1205606) writes “Researchers tracked the sleep patterns of 85 crew members aboard the International Space Station and space shuttle and found that despite an official flight schedule mandating 8.5 hours of sleep per night, they rarely got more than five. In fact, getting a full night’s rest was so difficult that three-quarters of shuttle mission crew members used sleep medication, and sometimes entire teams were sedated on the same night. Given that sleep deprivation contributes to up to 80% of aviation accidents, it’s important to better understand why sleep is so difficult in space, the authors say.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Study Finds That Astronauts Are Severely Sleep Deprived
It began rather quietly as a underground fire at a dump in Canada’s remote northern reaches. Then in May, the fire “erupted, ” spewing forth flames and toxic fumes over the city of Iqaluit. Faced with a football field-sized smoldering dump fire, this week the city council finally scrounged up the $2.2 million to put it out. How the hell does a dump fire spontaneously ignite—and why is it so expensive to put out? Read more…
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A "Dumpcano" of Trash Erupted in the Arctic and Won’t Stop Burning
You’ve had the option of texting 911 in a handful of US cities for a couple of months, thanks in part to voluntary efforts from bigger cellphone carriers. However, the FCC doesn’t want you to be left out solely because you’re on a smaller network. The agency has just adopted rules requiring that all American wireless providers have the capability for text-to-911 by the end of the year. You won’t necessarily get emergency messaging by that point, but carriers will have six months to implement it in a given region if a local call center makes a request. Right now, the new regulation won’t make a big difference. Only Maine and Vermont are fully prepared to handle SMS in a crisis, and you’ll only find some form of coverage in 16 states. However, the FCC’s move means that adoption could grow very quickly — now that carriers can’t say no, 911 facilities are more likely to push for the technology. Don’t be surprised if you can soon send a text-based cry for help at any moment when a voice call would be difficult or dangerous. Filed under: Cellphones , Wireless , Mobile Comments Via: GigaOM Source: FCC
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Carriers have to let you text 911 by the end of the year
David Roentgen’s transforming gaming table is the most amazing piece of furniture I’ve ever seen. It’s also from the 18th Century. But here in the 21st, a company called Geek Chic is making modern-day gaming tables. Their stuff is beautiful, and as the company’s name suggests, the products are aimed at the Dungeons-and-Dragons roleplaying game crowd. Their top-of-the-line model is called the Sultan , and no, it ain’t a table for eating on. The center surface is what the company calls the Game Vault, where the Gamemaster lays out the unspoilt fantasyland devoid of your landlord, boss, spouse and parents. The sides feature integrated flip-out trays and drawers within, as well as little pull-out shelves to hold your dice and/or a cup of magic potion. (more…)
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Dungeons, Dragons & Design: Geek Chic’s Gorgeous Gaming Tables
Gmail doesn’t display a true message count by default, because Gmail uses the conversation view. Turn the conversation view off to see the real number of individual messages in your Gmail account. Read more…
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Find the Real Number of Email Messages in Your Gmail Account
An anonymous reader writes Facebook today revealed details about Autoscale, a system for power-efficient load balancing that has been rolled out to production clusters in its data centers. The company says it has “demonstrated significant energy savings.” or those who don’t know, load balancing refers to distributing workloads across multiple computing resources, in this case servers. The goal is to optimize resource use, which can mean different things depending on the task at hand. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How Facebook Is Saving Power By 10-15% Through Better Load Balancing
Seth Kroll, Wyss Institute As if a brain-like processing chip weren’t bad enough news for us humans, this week’s edition of Science also describes a robot that, after being laid out as a flat sheet, can fold itself into the appropriate shape to take its on-board electronics for a walk. Why would we possibly want self-assembling, flat-packed electronics of this kind? The authors of the Science paper, who are part of a Harvard/MIT collaboration, offer two reasons. First, it’s much easier to assemble something as a planar surface. With the right layers in place, it’s simple to cut them into the appropriate shapes and then embed the electronics where they’re needed, since there’s no awkward internal spaces to deal with. The second reason is that it’s easy to transport things when they’re shaped like a sheet. Since the devices can assemble themselves, they can be shipped to any destination and used without any hassle or high-level technical knowledge. Of course, having a good idea and actually knowing how to create a self-assembling device are two different things. Fortunately, the ability to construct elaborate three-dimensional items from a flat sheet is a solved problem, thanks to origami. Software like Origamizer can even determine how to cut and fold a sheet in order to produce a specified three-dimensional structure. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Researchers design flat sheet that can fold itself into a robot, walk away
Thanks to the efforts of a North Carolina-based company, solar panels are about to get a lot more efficient. Semprius produces the collection devices by stacking materials on top of each other in order to catch more frequencies of light. In the process, cell stacking boosted efficiency to around 45 percent during tests. The new tech can be produced quickly using cells that are one millimeter across to reduce cooling needs while combining semiconductor materials and reusing the components cells are grown on. All of that will help Semprius achieve 50 percent efficiency in the next three to five years — up from the current 25 percent range. Unfortunately, the new method will be quite expensive until demand warrants mass production. However, more efficient collection will lead to lower overall cost in the long run, and make solar power as cheap as that produced by natural gas facilities. Filed under: Science Comments Source: MIT Technology Review
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Stacking solar cells leads to more efficient energy collection, lower bills
An anonymous reader writes with news that bogus BGP announcements can be used to hijack work done by cryptocurrency mining pools. Quoting El Reg: Researchers at Dell’s SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) have identified an exploit that can be used to steal cryptocurrency from mining pools — and they claim that at least one unknown miscreant has already used the technique to pilfer tens of thousands of dollars in digital cash. The heist was achieved by using bogus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to multiple large hosting companies, including Amazon, Digital Ocean, and OVH, among others. After sending the fake BGP updates miners unknowingly contributed work to the attackers’ pools. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Network Hijacker Steals $83,000 In Bitcoin