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Watching two waves of hot lava in the Solar System’s largest volcano

Enlarge / Loki Patera, in the lower-center, has a central island that divides two waves of molten material. (credit: NASA/JPL/USGS ) Volcanic activity appears to be a common feature in our Solar System; we have evidence of it on three planets and two moons and hints of it elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean all volcanic activity is the same. Venus’ activity is driven by a simple version of plate tectonics. On the Moon, massive lava flows were released by large impacts, and Mars just seems to have vented heat left over from its formation. There are also hints of cryovolcanoes, which belch up ice rather than lava, on some of the bodies of the outer Solar System. But when it comes to sheer volume of activity, all of this takes a back seat to Jupiter’s moon Io. Io is partially molten due to gravitational stress from its proximity to three large moons and a massive planet. The results are active volcanoes and vast pools of molten material on the Moon’s surface. And we just got a good look inside the biggest of them. Slicing up Loki Loki Patera is the most powerful active volcano in the Solar System. It’s an enormous crater with a central island; around that island is a sea of hot material that covers more than 20,000 square kilometers. By all appearances, that hot material isn’t stable, since the entire surface seems to be reworked every few years, temporarily replaced by new hot material. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Watching two waves of hot lava in the Solar System’s largest volcano

Today’s Massive Ransomware Attack Was Mostly Preventable—Here’s How To Avoid It

Ransomware may be mostly thought of as a (sometimes costly) nuisance, but when it hinders the ability of doctors and nurses to help people with an emergency medical problems, that qualifies as armed robbery. Read more…

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Today’s Massive Ransomware Attack Was Mostly Preventable—Here’s How To Avoid It

Mozilla and Thunderbird are continuing together, with conditions

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla) The Thunderbird e-mail client still has its supporters, but for the past couple of years, Mozilla has been making moves to distance itself from the project . In late 2015, Mozilla announced that it would be looking for a new home for Thunderbird, calling its continued maintenance “a tax” on Firefox development. Yesterday, Mozilla Senior Add-ons Technical Editor Philipp Kewisch announced Mozilla’s future plans for Thunderbird—the Mozilla Foundation will “continue as Thunderbird’s legal, fiscal, and cultural home,” but on the condition that the Thunderbird Council maintains a good working relationship with Mozilla leadership and that Thunderbird works to reduce its “operational and technical” reliance on Mozilla. As a first step toward operational independence, the Thunderbird Council has been soliciting donations from users, which Kewisch says has become “a strong revenue stream” that is helping to pay for servers and staff. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mozilla and Thunderbird are continuing together, with conditions

An Old Satellite Dish Found on Google Maps Is Becoming West Africa’s First Radio Telescope

Astronomy needs expensive things, and lots of them. You might remember that astronomers almost literally turned the Earth into a telescope just to see a black hole, by combining lots of existing radio telescope dishes. Read more…

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An Old Satellite Dish Found on Google Maps Is Becoming West Africa’s First Radio Telescope

Rare dinosaur with preserved skin and bone-crushing tail found in Montana

Illustration by Danielle Dufault The armored beasts of the Cretaceous known as ankylosaurine dinosaurs don’t get as much love as the charismatic T. rex . But now, one of the world’s only complete ankylosaurid skeletons has been acquired and analyzed by the Royal Ontario Museum—and the artifact even has a significant amount of mummified tissues like skin. At this point, there’s no denying that this creature, whose body was covered in spikes, horns, and scales like a medieval dragon, has earned the wholly scientific designation of “badass.” In a paper for the Royal Society Open Science , Royal Ontario Museum paleontologists Victoria Arbour and David Evans describe the 75 million-year-old creature, a new species they dubbed Zuul crurivastator . Yes, its name is a reference to the demon Zuul from the original Ghostbusters movie. “Crurivastator” means “crusher of shins,” which is exactly what this creature could do with its spiked, hammer-tipped tail. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rare dinosaur with preserved skin and bone-crushing tail found in Montana

This Laser Printer Creates High-Res Color Images Without a Single Drop of Ink

Anyone with a color printer knows that selling replacement ink cartridges is the quickest way to become a millionaire. But what if your printer never needed a single drop of ink to produce color images at impossibly high resolutions? A new laser printer can already do that by etching microscopic patterns onto sheets… Read more…

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This Laser Printer Creates High-Res Color Images Without a Single Drop of Ink

Tesla starts pre-orders on solar roof for $1,000, rolls out calculator for costs

Enlarge / Tesla is starting pre-orders on smooth and textured black glass solar roofs. (credit: Tesla) Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter on Wednesday that the company’s solar roof panels would be available for pre-order that afternoon. In a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Tesla and SolarCity executives said the roof would be cheaper, on the whole, than installing a regular tile roof (although not cheaper than an asphalt roof). Pre-orders require a $1,000 payment to secure a place on the list. Tesla also rolled out a calculator on its website using data from Google Sunroof , a 2015 project from the search giant that used 3D modeling to map out every house’s potential for solar panel output. Tesla’s calculator factors in the cost of a 14kWh Powerwall, although purchase of a Powerwall is not required to get a solar roof, as well as any tax incentives that a customer might receive in their state. The “energy value” number featured most prominently is calculated over 30 years, which is the length of the warranty covering power production from the tiles. (Tesla is offering an “infinity warranty” on the tiles themselves.) Tesla Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tesla starts pre-orders on solar roof for $1,000, rolls out calculator for costs

Keylogger Found in Audio Driver of HP Laptops, Says Report

An anonymous reader writes: The audio driver installed on some HP laptops includes a feature that could best be described as a keylogger, which records all the user’s keystrokes and saves the information to a local file, accessible to anyone or any third-party software or malware that knows where to look. Swiss cyber-security firm modzero discovered the keylogger on April 28 and made its findings public today. According to researchers, the keylogger feature was discovered in the Conexant HD Audio Driver Package version 1.0.0.46 and earlier. This is an audio driver that is preinstalled on HP laptops. One of the files of this audio driver is MicTray64.exe (C:windowssystem32mictray64.exe). This file is registered to start via a Scheduled Task every time the user logs into his computer. According to modzero researchers, the file “monitors all keystrokes made by the user to capture and react to functions such as microphone mute/unmute keys/hotkeys.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Keylogger Found in Audio Driver of HP Laptops, Says Report

Ubuntu Arrives in the Windows Store, Suse and Fedora Are Coming To the Windows Subsystem For Linux

At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced that Ubuntu has arrived in the Windows Store. From a report: The company also revealed that it is working with Fedora and Suse to bring their distributions to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in Windows 10. At the conference last year, Microsoft announced plans to bring the Bash shell to Windows. The fruits of that labor was WSL, a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on Windows, which arrived with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update released in August 2016. Microsoft also partnered with Canonical to allow Ubuntu tools and utilities to run natively on top of the WSL. By bringing Ubuntu to the Windows Store, the company is now making it even easier for developers to install the tools and run Windows and Linux apps side by side. Working with other Linux firms shows that Microsoft’s deal with Canonical was not a one-time affair, but rather part of a long-term investment in the Linux world. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Arrives in the Windows Store, Suse and Fedora Are Coming To the Windows Subsystem For Linux

Windows 10 fall update will restore (and improve) OneDrive’s best feature

Microsoft Windows 10 was a big improvement over Windows 8.1 in most important ways, but it made a big change to the way OneDrive syncing worked. In Windows 8.1, you could see all the files you had stored in OneDrive, but the operating system would only actually download and open the file when you needed to open it. At least for PCs that usually have Internet connections, this was a neat way to offer cloud file syncing without consuming gigabytes of space for infrequently used files on every computer you were signed into. But the behavior could be error-prone—apps could attempt to open the placeholder files created by OneDrive rather than the files themselves—and it could create confusion about which files were actually available offline. So in the initial releases of Windows 10, Microsoft changed the behavior to be more Dropbox-esque . All OneDrive files are now downloaded to your PC when you sign in, though as with Dropbox you can choose to only sync selected folders based on what you need to have available at all times. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 fall update will restore (and improve) OneDrive’s best feature