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Skylar Tibbits’ 4D Printing: Energy + Materials + Geometry = Self-Assembly

Architect and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits heads up MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab , a sort of cross-disciplinary skunkworks that is completely re-thinking how objects are manufactured and assembled. By combining digital manufacturing techniques with the study of how particular materials react to particular types of energy, Tibbits’ team seeks to create things that, well, put themselves together—whether large or small—when the appropriate energy is introduced as a catalyst. Self-Assembly is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction. We have demonstrated that this phenomenon is scale-independent and can be utilized for self-constructing and manufacturing systems at nearly every scale. We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed within nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly promises to enable breakthroughs across every applications of biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration. The Self-Assembly Lab is working with academic, commercial, nonprofit, and government partners, collaborators, and sponsors to make our self-assembling future a reality. The concept sounds difficult to wrap your head around, until you see the video: Here’s a TED Talk Tibbits gave earlier this year going into more detail: (more…)

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Skylar Tibbits’ 4D Printing: Energy + Materials + Geometry = Self-Assembly

It’s official: A "number of" previously missing Doctor Who episodes have been "returned to the BBC,"

It’s official: A “number of” previously missing Doctor Who episodes have been “returned to the BBC, ” and we’ll find out how many, and which ones, later this week. Read more…        

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It’s official: A "number of" previously missing Doctor Who episodes have been "returned to the BBC,"

Amazon takes on PayPal, now offering Amazon login and pay service to online business

Amazon , having extended far beyond the realm of book selling into the world of tablets and online marketplaces, is reaching ever further in its latest effort: “Login and Pay with Amazon.” The new service does exactly what it sounds like, allowing online businesses to implement a login/pay system using existing Amazon accounts. For Amazon, that means a (unknown) cut in the sales margin by acting as middleman. For businesses, it means an easy implementation of a widely used system (a “set of widgets and APIs” are all that’s needed to get the pay service running on your site). And for customers — all 215 million active Amazon account holders — it means their Amazon login will now work across the web (where implemented, that is). Interested parties can head right here to get started, and readers looking for the dirt straight from Amazon can head below the official PR. Filed under: Misc , Internet , Software , Amazon Comments

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Amazon takes on PayPal, now offering Amazon login and pay service to online business

Microsoft Hands Out $28k In IE11 Bug Bounty Program

hypnosec writes “Microsoft paid out over $28, 000 in rewards under its first ever bug-bounty program that went on for a month during the preview release of Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). The preview bug bounty program started on June 26 and went on till July 26 with Microsoft revealing at the time that it will pay out a maximum of $11, 000 for each IE 11 vulnerability that was reported. Microsoft paid out the $28k to a total of six researchers for reporting 15 different bugs. According to Microsoft’s ‘honor roll’ page, they paid $9, 400 to James Forshaw of Context Security for pointing out design level vulnerabilities in IE11 as well as four IE11 flaws. Independent researcher Masato Kinugawa was paid $2, 200 for reporting two bugs. Jose Antonio Vazquez Gonzalez of Yenteasy Security Research walked off with $5, 500 for reporting five bugs while Google engineers Ivan Fratric and Fermin J. Serna were each handed out $1, 100 and $500 respectively.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Hands Out $28k In IE11 Bug Bounty Program

AMD Intentionally Added Artificial Limitations To Their HDMI Adapters

An anonymous reader writes “NVIDIA was caught removing features from their Linux driver and days later Linux developers have caught and confirmed AMD imposing artificial limitations on their graphics cards in the DVI-to-HDMI adapters that their driver will support. Over years AMD has quietly been adding an extra EEPROM chip to their DVI-to-HDMI adapters that are bundled with Radeon HD graphics cards. Only when these identified adapters are detected via checks in their Windows and Linux Catalyst driver is HDMI audio enabled. If using a third-party DVI-to-HDMI adapter, HDMI audio support is disabled by the Catalyst driver. Open-source Linux developers have found this to be a self-imposed limitation and that the open-source AMD Linux driver will work fine with any DVI-to-HDMI adapter.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Intentionally Added Artificial Limitations To Their HDMI Adapters

Yahoo Mail is rolling out a spiffy redesign on all major platforms today, including Android, iOS, Wi

Yahoo Mail is rolling out a spiffy redesign on all major platforms today, including Android, iOS, Windows 8, and the web, which also includes some previously premium features like POP access and disposable addresses. Read more here . Read more…        

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Yahoo Mail is rolling out a spiffy redesign on all major platforms today, including Android, iOS, Wi

Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan"

Dawn Kawamoto writes “Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10, 000 workers by 2015. The telecom equipment maker’s newly minted CEO calls this restructuring part of his Shift Plan. Under this plan, Alcatel-Lucent wants to save 1 billion Euros in costs and refocus its operations on next-gen IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access and away from legacy technologies like its 2G and 3G wireless. In the meantime, Wall Street thinks it may be cleaning itself up for a sale of some of its assets or its operations to Nokia, which will need to bolster its telecom equipment business after selling its smartphone operations to Microsoft. But a Nokia-Microsoft deal may be too little, too late.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan"

Intel Bay Trail benchmarks show big boost for Windows 8.1 and Android tablets

Things are changing at Intel. In the desktop world, the company is used to staggering its efforts with a “tick-tock” product cycle. First it manufacturers an existing chip design at a smaller size of transistor (“tick”) and then, usually a year later, it improves the architecture while sticking to the same transistor size (“tock”). Bay Trail , by contrast, is a mobile class chip that represents both a tick and a tock. It makes major changes on previous Clover Trail design, while also shifting from 32nm to 22nm transistors. A jump like that holds major promise, so we were keen to benchmark Bay Trail at the earliest opportunity. Intel allowed us into a hotel room in central London to do just that, using the highest-spec quad-core Z3770 chip inside a reference tablet, and the results look impressive. Read on for the stats and a quick assessment of what they mean. Filed under: Gaming , Tablets , Mobile , Intel Comments

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Intel Bay Trail benchmarks show big boost for Windows 8.1 and Android tablets

Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening

The NSA’s Utah Data Center. Swilsonmc A massive data center being built by the National Security Agency to aid its surveillance operations has been hit by “10 meltdowns in the past 13 months” that “destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center’s opening for a year, ” the  Wall Street Journal reported last night . The first of four facilities at the  Utah Data Center  was originally scheduled to become operational in October 2012, according to project documents described by the  Journal . But the electrical problems—described as arc fault failures or “a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box”—led to explosions, failed circuits, and melted metal, the report states: The first arc fault failure at the Utah plant was on Aug. 9, 2012, according to project documents. Since then, the center has had nine more failures, most recently on Sept. 25. Each incident caused as much as $100, 000 in damage, according to a project official. It took six months for investigators to determine the causes of two of the failures. In the months that followed, the contractors employed more than 30 independent experts that conducted 160 tests over 50, 000 man-hours, according to project documents. The 1 million square foot data center is slated to cost $1.4 billion to construct. One project official told the  Journal that the NSA planned to start turning on some of the computers at the facility this week. “But without a reliable electrical system to run computers and keep them cool, the NSA’s global surveillance data systems can’t function, ” the newspaper wrote. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening