reader – Page 22 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Researchers infuse plants with chemicals to glow for hours

MIT researchers have figured out how to infuse common plants like watercress and arugula with luciferase, the chemical that makes fireflies glow. The process make the plants emit a dim glow for up to four hours. Via MIT : Previous efforts to create light-emitting plants have relied on genetically engineering plants to express the gene for luciferase, but this is a laborious process that yields extremely dim light. Those studies were performed on tobacco plants and Arabidopsis thaliana, which are commonly used for plant genetic studies. However, the method developed by Strano’s lab could be used on any type of plant. So far, they have demonstrated it with arugula, kale, and spinach, in addition to watercress. For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to develop a way to paint or spray the nanoparticles onto plant leaves, which could make it possible to transform trees and other large plants into light sources. “Our target is to perform one treatment when the plant is a seedling or a mature plant, and have it last for the lifetime of the plant,” Strano says. “Our work very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.” • Engineers create plants that glow (MIT)

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Researchers infuse plants with chemicals to glow for hours

Samsung’s mega-wide gaming monitor is first to be HDR certified

Last week VESA (finally) launched an HDR standard for computer displays to tell consumers whether a pricey monitor will show games and movies the way the creators intended. Samsung has announced that it’s 49-inch QLED super ultra-wide monitor, the CHG90 , is the first to receive the DisplayHDR 600 certification. That means it delivers enough brightness (600 cd/m2 peak and 350 cd/m2 average), contrast (3, 000:1) and color accuracy (10-bits) to deliver on the HDR promise. The CHG90 has a very weird 3, 840 x 1, 080 resolution (a 32:9 aspect ratio), 144 Hz refresh, AMD FreeSync support, deep curvature and a $1, 300 price tag, so it’s not for everyone. It’s built mainly to replace multi-monitor setups so that you can, say, game on one half and stream on the other. As a single screen, it could give you more visibility and flexibility with controls, but does not, obviously, deliver full 4K resolution. It’s interesting that a gaming monitor is first to receive the VESA DisplayHDR certification, as there are plenty of professional graphics monitors designed for maximum color accuracy and contrast. However, many of those use IPS panels that lack brightness and likely wouldn’t meet the 600/350 cd/m2 threshold. Samsung has mostly used its QLED tech for 4K TVs, and while the blacks aren’t as good as on OLED displays, they’re definitely bright. On the color side, VESA says that monitors must display a billion colors (10 bits), but 8-bit panels with 2 bits of “dithering” to simulate 10 bits also qualify. Very few monitors have true 10-bit panels, but most of Samsung’s QLED TVs do (Samsung’s specs for the CHG90 don’t say ). VESA promised to announce multiple DisplayHDR certified monitors on or before CES 2018, so you can expect to see others soon. It will be interesting to see which is the first to conform to DisplayHDR 1000, which is much more demanding for brightness and black levels (contrast). If consumers start pushing manufacturers to meet those specs, it will be a big plus for both gamers and streamers. Via: Tom’s Hardware Source: Samsung

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Samsung’s mega-wide gaming monitor is first to be HDR certified

King Tut exhibition starts its final world tour in Los Angeles (March 2018)

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of discovering the tomb of King Tut, many of the Boy King’s artifacts and other ancient Egyptian items will be touring the United States in the new year. Lonely Planet writes : The largest ever international exhibition of ancient Egyptian artefacts from the tomb of its most famous pharaoh will open early next year in Los Angeles. King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh will visit ten different cities as it tours the world starting off on the West Coast of America on 24 March. More than 150 items from Tutankhamun’s tomb will be on display at the California Science Center. The exhibition will be an absolute treat for Egyptologists – both amateur and professional – as never before have so many ancient items associated with King Tut been on display together outside Egypt. Many of the items would have been used by the Boy King himself including golden jewellery, elaborate carvings, sculptures, and ritual antiquities. Forty per cent of the objects will be leaving home for both the first and last time before returning for permanent display in the Grand Egyptian Museum , which is currently under construction. You can first see the exhibit in Los Angeles before it heads to Europe and then to its new permanent home at The Grand Egyptian Museum (which is located near the Pyramids of Giza). Be sure to pre-register for the L.A. exhibit now. https://youtu.be/YTP3pZyzb_U Of course you can’t talk about a King Tut without being reminded of Steve Martin’s bit on Saturday Night Live in 1978. The now-39-year-old sketch was satire on the Tutankhamun exhibit’s popularity when it traveled the US from 1976 to 1979. It has recently come under fire for being racist (“That’s like somebody … making a song just littered with the n-word everywhere”) by some Reed College students : https://youtu.be/FYbavuReVF4 Biggest ever King Tut exhibition coming to America next year Thanks, Karen!

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King Tut exhibition starts its final world tour in Los Angeles (March 2018)

Complete tour of the LEGO House in Denmark

The Beyond the Brick channel headed to Billund, Denmark for a superfan’s tour of the LEGO House . What’s great about this tour is that the host knows the names of many of the builders, and has met a lot of them personally, giving the tour a real insider’s feel. (more…)

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Complete tour of the LEGO House in Denmark

Watch this experiment on mice squeezing through tiny holes

Woodworker Matthias Wandel has mice in his workshop, and he wanted to see how small a hole mice could crawl through . But after setting up his ingenious little test, a challenger appears: the wily shrew! (more…)

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Watch this experiment on mice squeezing through tiny holes

Plexamp, Plex’s Spin on the Classic Winamp Player, Is the First Project From New Incubator Plex Labs

Media software maker Plex today announced a new incubator and community resource called Plex Labs. “The idea here is to help the company’s internal passion projects gain exposure, along with those from Plex community members, ” reports TechCrunch. “Plex Labs is also unveiling its first product: a music player called Plexamp, ” which is designed to replace the long-lost Winamp. From the report: The player was built by several Plex employees in their free time, and is meant for those who use Plex for music. As the company explains in its announcement, the goal was to build a small player that sits unobtrusively on the desktop and can handle any music format. The team limited itself to a single window, making Plexamp the smaller Plex player to date, in terms of pixel size. Under the hood, Plexamp uses the open source audio player Music Player Daemon (MPD), along with a combination of ES7, Electron, React, and MobX technologies. The end result is a player that runs on either macOS or Windows and works like a native app. That is, you can use media keys for skipping tracks or playing and pausing music, and receive notifications. The player can also handle any music format, and can play music offline when the Plex server runs on your laptop. The player also supports gapless playback, soft transitions and visualizations to accompany your music. Plus, the visualizations’ palette of colors is pulled from the album art, Plex notes. Additionally, Plexamp makes use of a few up-and-coming features that will be included in Plex’s subscription, Plex Pass, in the future. These new features are powering functionality like loudness leveling (to normalize playback volume), smart transitions (to compute the optimal overlap times between tracks), soundprints (to represent tracks visually), waveform seeking (to present a graphical view of tracks), Library stations, and artist radio. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Plexamp, Plex’s Spin on the Classic Winamp Player, Is the First Project From New Incubator Plex Labs

China’s most popular game is about to launch in the US

You might not have even heard of Arena of Valor (outside of a Twitch tourney ), but it’s all-consuming in its native China, with 200 million registered players and over 80 million daily active users. Tencent’s mobile-only MOBA game, known as Honor of Kings in its original form, is so popular in its homeland that tournaments are everywhere and the game has time limits to prevent kids from playing too long. And now, Tencent wants it to become a household name in the rest of the world. In a confirmation of some earlier rumors , the tech giant is formally launching Arena of Valor worldwide on December 19th, with users in North and South America getting their first crack at the Android and iOS hit. Watch Arena of Valor MAJOR Announcement & Giveaways! from ArenaofValor on www.twitch.tv Arena sticks to Honor’s core MOBA formula, where teams of five distinctive heroes clash in a bid to take over each other’s bases. The largest change is a cultural one: Arena drops Chinese legends in favor of Western fantasy tropes, and it switches to Facebook for connecting friends instead of WeChat. The game has been available in Europe since August, and has had at least some success with more than 2 million downloads. The problem, as The Verge notes, is that Chinese companies have historically had problems translating the success of their domestic games to an international audience. The titles rarely have any name recognition outside of China, and there are differences in gaming habits that make success difficult. Where limited access to games has led to MOBAs becoming wildly popular on phones in China, there’s a stigma against mobile gaming in North America. Tencent is creating an eSports league to boost competitive play and is partnering with livestreamers to drum up hype, but there’s no guarantee of success — certainly not when it has to take on established titles like Vainglory . However, it’s the attempt that matters. Chinese behemoths like Tencent know they’ll have to move beyond their home turf to keep growing, and that means doing more than acquiring foreign companies (Tencent owns League of Legends ‘ Riot Games and a piece of Activision Blizzard) to ride on their successes. Source: The Verge , Twitch

US government names North Korea as the source of WannaCry

Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “after careful investigation, the U.S. today publicly attributes the massive ” WannaCry ” cyberattack to North Korea.” Coming during increasing tensions between the two countries over nuclear threats and Twitter outbursts, Bossert said this attribution is based on evidence and agrees with the findings from the UK and Microsoft. In the op-ed we did not see traces of the evidence used to link the May attack to the “Lazarus Group” (also blamed for the Sony Pictures hacking incident ) and North Korea, but the White House will reportedly follow up Tuesday with a more formal statement. While some, like Microsoft , have blamed the US government for stockpiling vulnerabilities — the WannaCry attack used an exploit based on technology apparently stolen from the NSA — the op-ed says: Stopping malicious behavior like this starts with accountability. It also requires governments and businesses to cooperate to mitigate cyber risk and increase the cost to hackers. The U.S. must lead this effort, rallying allies and responsible tech companies throughout the free world to increase the security and resilience of the internet. Bossert also called the attack reckless, while Reuters cites a “senior administration official” who declined to comment on whether or not the US believes it was a deliberate attack or accidental. So what happens now? According to the piece, the Trump administration “will continue to use our maximum pressure strategy to curb Pyongyang’s ability to mount attacks, cyber or otherwise.” Source: Wall Street Journal

CDC Director Says No Words Are Actually Banned At the CDC

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald on Sunday addressed a report that President Donald Trump’s administration had banned the CDC from using seven words or phrases in next year’s budget documents. The terms are “fetus, ” “transgender, ” “vulnerable, ” “entitlement, ” “diversity, ” “evidence-based” and “science-based, ” according to a story first reported on Friday in The Washington Post. But Fitzgerald said in a series of tweets on Sunday said there are “no banned words, ” while emphasizing the agency’s commitment to data-driven science. “CDC has a long-standing history of making public health and budget decisions that are based on the best available science and data and for the benefit of all people — and we will continue to do so, ” she said. A group of the agency’s policy analysts said senior officials at the CDC informed them about the banned words on Thursday, according to the Post’s report. In some cases, the analysts were reportedly given replacement phrases to use instead. But in follow-up reporting, The New York Times cited “a few” CDC officials who suggested the move was not meant as an outright ban, but rather, a technique to help secure Republican approval of the 2019 budget by eliminating certain words and phrases. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, said the reported decree on banned words was a misrepresentation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CDC Director Says No Words Are Actually Banned At the CDC

Microsoft Disables Word DDE Feature To Prevent Further Malware Attacks

An anonymous reader writes: As part of the December 2017 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has shipped an Office update that disables the DDE feature in Word applications, after several malware campaigns have abused this feature to install malware. DDE stands for Dynamic Data Exchange, and this is an Office feature that allows an Office application to load data from other Office applications. For example, a Word file can update a table by pulling data from an Excel file every time the Word file is opened. DDE is an old feature, which Microsoft has superseded via the newer Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) toolkit, but DDE is still supported by Office applications. The December Patch Tuesday disables DDE only in Word, but not Excel or Outlook. The reason is that several cybercrime and spam groups have jumped on this technique, which is much more effective at running malicious code when compared to macros or OLE objects, as it requires minimal interaction with a UI popup that many users do not associate with malware. For Outlook and Excel, Microsoft has published instructions on how users can disable DDE on their own, if they don’t want this feature enabled. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Disables Word DDE Feature To Prevent Further Malware Attacks