Four days ago, the rage comic above was posted to Reddit by CappnPoopdeck . It described the true story of her friend, a man who decided to try his ex-girlfriend’s pregnancy test himself. To his surprise and confusion, the results came back positive. Funny? Sure, sort of. But also, Reddit commenters quickly noted, a symptom of a potentially deadly disease. More »
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How a Reddit Rage Comic Saved a Man’s Life
The company’s plants would be designed to handle LCD TV production, according to the report. [Read more]
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Foxconn looks to U.S. to open manufacturing plants, report says
TechCrunch is reporting that a number of users received an email from Twitter this morning claiming their account was compromised and that they should change their passwords now. Many users are also finding spammy tweets coming from their account that they didn’t send. More »
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An Unknown Number of Twitter Accounts Have Been Compromised, Time to Change Your Passwords
You wouldn’t immediately think of the ear’s cochlea as an energy source, but MIT knows that every mammal effectively has a pair of very small power plants because of the ionized environment. School researchers are trying to harness that energy through a new sensor that exploits the whole ear canal system. As eardrum vibrations naturally create a usable voltage from brain signals, the prototype can build enough charge in a capacitor to drive a very low-power wireless transmitter that relays the electrochemical properties of the ear and potentially diagnoses balance or hearing problems. The beauty of the system is its true self-sustainability: once the transmitter has been been jumpstarted with radio waves, it powers itself through the resulting transmissions. Energy use is also sufficiently miserly that the sensor doesn’t interrupt hearing. Work is still early enough that there’s a long way to go before such implants are part of any treatments, but there’s hope that future chip iterations could help fix inner ear maladies, not just report on them. Something tells us, however, that the doctor won’t ask us to take two dubstep tracks and call back in the morning. Filed under: Wearables , Science , Alt MIT ear-powered wireless sensor sustains its charge through sound originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink CrazyEngineers | MIT | Email this | Comments
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MIT ear-powered wireless sensor sustains its charge through sound
Cray has just fired a nuclear salvo in the supercomputer wars with the launch of its XC30, a 100 petaflop-capable brute that can scale up to one million cores. Developed in conjunction with DARPA , the Cascade -codenamed system uses a new type of architecture called Aries interconnect and Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors to easily leapfrog its recent Titan sibling, the previous speed champ. That puts Cray well ahead of rivals like China’s Tianhe-2 , and the company will aim to keep that edge by supercharging future versions with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs . High-end research centers have placed $100 million worth of orders so far (though oddly, DARPA isn’t one of them yet), and units are already shipping in limited numbers — likely by the eighteen-wheeler-full, from the looks of it. Continue reading Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores Filed under: Misc , Science Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink The Register | | Email this | Comments
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Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores
When we do eventually reduce the Earth to an uninhabitable wasteland through our careless consumption of natural resources and inevitable nuclear wars, we’ll need someplace else to go. We haven’t picked a successor yet, but a new candidate has been identified a mere 44 light years away, orbiting dwarf star HD 40307. The super-Earth orbits its host star right at the edge of the so-called habitable zone , where a stable atmosphere and liquid water are possible. We don’t know for sure the planet is, in fact, capable of supporting life, but there’s at least a chance. And given that it’s roughly seven-times the mass of Earth, it shouldn’t have much trouble playing host to our exploding population. Filed under: Science , Alt Potentially inhabitable super-Earth discovered in 6 planet solar system originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink | Astrobiology Magazine | Email this | Comments
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Potentially inhabitable super-Earth discovered in 6 planet solar system
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art When ancient Egyptians play Dungeons & Dragons with this D20 die above, we betcha they played with real dungeons! The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a nifty collection of the Ptolemaic Period (304 – 30 B.C.) dice, carved out of serpentinite rock: Link – via CNET’s Crave
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Ancient Egyptian D20 Die
That hourglass-shaped device is the PowerPac, an energy storage device meant to be powered by a human on a stationary bicycle. Conceived of by South African design firm Ideso , the PowerPac won a Red Dot Design Award in the “Best of the Best” category. “Our aim was to create an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and functional design that marries the fluidity of cycling with dynamic power generation,” says Ideso MD, Marc Ruwiel. “It can be used by avid cyclists who can reduce CO2 emissions and generate their own electrical power, while enjoying a good workout at home.” I’m all for people-powered electricity generators, and I would’ve loved to have one of these during the recent blackout, but something struck me in the copy: “…An average cyclist could fully charge the battery from empty with 80 minutes of cycling and 132Wh of charge/potential energy can be stored in the battery.” The “Wh” designation stands for watt-hour , and “132Wh” means you could power a 132-watt device for 1 hour. For 80 minutes of cycling to yield, say, just over two hours of light from a 60-watt bulb sounds like a low yield, doesn’t it? My first thought was, can that be right? I did a little digging, and here’s what I found. It turns out hooking a bicycle up to something that directly powers a mechanical device is a fairly efficient way to generate energy. Rig a bicycle up to drive a sewing machine or a hand mixer and you get decent bang for your buck. But the second you get batteries and electricity involved, the efficiency drops way, way off. An article in Low-tech Magazine called ” Bike powered electricity generators are not sustainable ” explains why: …Generating electricity is far from the most efficient way to apply pedal power, due to the internal energy losses in the battery, the battery management system, other electronic parts, and the motor/generator. These energy losses add up quickly: 10 to 35 percent in the battery, 10 to 20 percent in the motor/generator and 5 to 15 percent in the converter (which converts direct current to alternate current). The energy loss in the voltage regulator (or DC to DC converter, which prevents you from blowing up the battery) is about 25 percent. This means that the total energy loss in a pedal powered generator will be 42 to 67.5 percent…. And it even turns out that the bicycle itself has mechanical inefficiencies that suck up more energy: (more…)
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Surprising News About Bicycle-Powered Electricity Generators
ax2groin On Tuesday, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 35, which ratcheted up penalties for those convicted of sex crimes, including human trafficking. The proposition included a provision requiring registered sex offenders to disclose to law enforcement all of their Internet connections and online identities. On Wednesday, two of the 73,900 registered sex offenders in the state who would be affected by the law filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these provisions. The two plaintiffs argued that forcing them to expose their online identities would violate their First Amendment right to speak anonymously. Their appeal is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Late on Wednesday, Judge Thelton Henderson granted a temporary restraining order barring the law from going into effect until he had time to consider the plaintiffs’ constitutional arguments. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders
astroengine writes “The family of planets circling a relatively close dwarf star has grown to six, including a potential rocky world at least seven times more massive than Earth that is properly located for liquid water to exist on its surface, a condition believed to be necessary for life. Scientists added three new planets to three discovered in 2008 orbiting an orange star called HD 40307, which is roughly three-quarters as massive as the sun and located about 42 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. Of particular interest is the outermost planet, which is believed to fly around its parent star over 320 days, a distance that places it within HD 40307’s so-called “habitable zone.”” Read more of this story at Slashdot.