Cryonics enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that scientists have demonstrated the ability to revive frozen life not just after a couple years or even a couple of decades. They can bring something back to life that’s been frozen for fifteen centuries. The previous record was just 20 years. Read more…
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Scientists Revive Moss That Was Encased In Ice For 1,500 Years
Smart rings may seem like something from an impossible (or at least highly unlikely ) vision of the future, but surprisingly enough, tech you can wrap around your little finger isn’t anything new. Just take this itty-bitty abacus from the 17th century as proof. Read more…
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This Wearable Abacus Is Basically the World’s Oldest Smart Ring
Machines fill the floor of the Exploratorium , San Francisco’s beloved interactive science museum. Over there is a contraption called Bicycle Legs , in which visitors manipulate air pumps to replicate muscles we use when pedaling (it’s trickier than it sounds). A few hundred feet away is a perennial favorite, the Wave Machine , which demonstrates transverse waves with the turn of a crank (even I can manage that one). Read more…
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The Government-Surplus Machines Powering a Cutting-Edge Science Museum
Honestly, we’re a little surprised that it took this long for OneNote to land on OS X — Microsoft’s powerful tool for taking and organizing notes has been around for a decade now. Oddly it came to iOS and Android before finally finding a home in the Mac version of the Office suite of products. With its launch on Apple desktops, OneNote is also going completely gratis. The new Mac version is available for free in the App Store and the Windows edition is becoming a free download as well. The Metro-fied version designed for Windows 8 has been free for sometime now, but the full desktop version of OneNote 2013 was a paid part of the Office productivity suite. Premium features, like SharePoint support and Outlook integration still require you to cough up some cash, however. In addition to ditching the price tag, Microsoft is adding a bunch of new features to OneNote. Most notably is the launch of an API that allows developers to integrate their own creations with the service. As a demonstration of its most basic functionality, Redmond launched a collection of web clipper extensions for IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Of course, capturing web pages is just the tip of the iceberg. Feedly, IFTTT, Genius Scan and a host of others have added the ability to save to OneNote from their own apps and we’re sure plenty more will join the fray soon. Lastly, today also marks the launch of Office Lens , a Windows Phone app that turns your smartphone camera into a scanner. Evernote and Google Drive (previously Google Docs ) have offered the ability to snap photos of documents or handwritten missives for a while now. Lens finally brings OCR (optical character recognition) to Microsoft’s apps, bringing it closer to complete feature parity with its competitors. You can go download OneNote and its various companion apps now. Filed under: Software , Apple , Microsoft Comments Source: Office Blogs
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Microsoft’s OneNote goes completely free, launches for Macs
Microsoft has a special deal for Windows XP users. If you buy a new PC, the company will give you a $50 gift card, 90 days of tech support, and free data transfer. Or, in the words of one Wall Street Journal reporter , “Microsoft is bribing people to stop using Windows XP.” Read more…
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Microsoft has a special deal for Windows XP users.
The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately. By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the BICEP microwave telescope located at the South Pole. Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
GitHub’s staff. GitHub GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee. Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch . The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account. Julie Ann Horvath. “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim
BGPMon’s alert on the detection of the change to the route to Google’s primary DNS server. BGPmon.net For about a half hour on Saturday, some requests to one of Google’s DNS servers in the US were re-routed through a network in Venezuela. A false Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcement from the Venezuelan network caused the diversion, which affected networks primarily in Venezuela and Brazil, as well as a university network in Florida. It all started at 5:23pm Greenwich Time (UTC). Andree Toonk of the network monitoring service BGPmon.net told Ars that the false routing request was dropped 23 minutes later, “most likely because the network that announced this route realized what happened and rolled back the change (to their router) that caused this.” During the intervening period, he said, traffic may have been re-routed back to Google, or it just may have been dropped. The result was failed DNS requests for those on the affected networks. Network rerouting through bogus BGP “announcements”—advertisements sent between routers that are supposed to provide information on the quickest route over the Internet to a specific IP address, such as the Google DNS service’s 8.8.8.8—have become increasingly common as a tool for Internet censorship. They’re used to stage “man-in-the-middle” attacks on Web users and to passively monitor traffic to certain domains. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela
Mr.TinDC Comcast, Time Warner Cable (TWC), and all other top cable companies lost pay-TV subscribers in 2013, but the companies were able to boost their total broadband Internet subscribers, according to research by Leichtman Research Group. Comcast and TWC, the two biggest cable companies in the US, combined for 1.1 million lost video subscribers. Comcast finished 2013 with 21.7 million multi-channel video subscribers, down 305,000 according to Leichtman’s research . TWC lost 825,000 video subscribers, dropping to 11.4 million.”The top nine cable companies lost about 1,735,000 video subscribers in 2013—compared to a loss of about 1,410,000 subscribers in 2012,” the research said. At the same time, Comcast added 1.3 million broadband Internet subscribers to hit a total of 20.7 million . TWC gained 211,000 broadband subscribers to bring its total to 11.6 million. Comcast’s 1.3 million broadband subscriber gain accounted for “49 percent of the total net additions for the top providers in the year,” the research said. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Comcast and Time Warner Cable lost 1.1 million video customers in 2013
While you might sometimes find it annoying that you can’t remember faces, names and details, forgetting is an important part of the brain if we’re not to become cognitively overwhelmed. And, it turns out, the brain takes a very controlled approach to how it goes about it. Read more…
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Your Brain Forgets Stuff Carefully and on Purpose