New submitter joshtops shares a report from Scientific American: As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet’s surface for fuel production, habitats and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power. NASA’s technology development branch has been funding a project called Kilopower for three years, with the aim of demonstrating the system at the Nevada National Security Site near Las Vegas. Testing is due to start in September and end in January 2018. The last time NASA tested a fission reactor was during the 1960s’ Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power, or SNAP, which developed two types of nuclear power systems. The first system — radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs — taps heat released from the natural decay of a radioactive element, such as plutonium. RTGs have powered dozens of space probes over the years, including the Curiosity rover currently exploring Mars. The second technology developed under SNAP was an atom-splitting fission reactor. SNAP-10A was the first — and so far, only — U.S. nuclear power plant to operate in space. Launched on April 3, 1965, SNAP-10A operated for 43 days, producing 500 watts of electrical power, before an unrelated equipment failure ended the demonstration. The spacecraft remains in Earth orbit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lyft reaches one million rides per day but is still well behind Uber
Today, Lyft announced that it’s now providing over one million rides per day. The company announced the milestone in a blog post , which highlighted some of its other achievements as well. Lyft noted that for the last four years, it has shown 100 percent year over year growth and it has launched in 160 new cities so far this year. That brings the company’s reach to 360 communities and 80 percent of the US population. While the continued growth shows Lyft is holding its own, it still has a long way to go before it catches up with Uber. Founded three years before Lyft, Uber reached the one million rides per day mark in 2014 and as of a year ago was giving an average of 5.5 million rides a day. Uber just recently surpassed its five billionth ride . But Uber has taken a hit recently. Business Insider reported last month that Uber’s market share fell from 84 percent earlier this year to 77 percent by the end of May and Lyft saw a substantial jump in activations in the week after the #DeleteUber campaign . Lyft has continued to adjust its service in order to make its ride-sharing more convenient for customers. And like its rival , Lyft is also working on self-driving cars . The company said in a post, “Since day one, we’ve worked to embed hospitality in everything we do. As more and more people choose Lyft and we continue to grow, we’ll remain focused on providing the best experience to our passengers and drivers.” Source: Lyft
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Lyft reaches one million rides per day but is still well behind Uber
Russian exoskeleton suit turns soldiers into Stormtroopers
In a bid to make its armed forces look even more intimidating, Russia has taken inspiration from science-fiction to create some futuristic-looking new combat suits. Developed by the state-owned Central Research Institute for Precision Machine Building, this very Star Wars-esque combat armor features a powered exoskeleton, ballistic protection from bullets and shrapnel and a heads-up display. While just a concept at the moment, the suit’s designers hope it will enter full production in the next few years. While they haven’t detailed what the heads-up display would be used for, the combat armor’s powered exoskeleton helps the wearer carry heavy loads, bearing some of the brunt to lower the soldiers’ fatigue. While its designers have clearly spent a lot of time playing video games, we’ve already seen that Russia’s not alone in its bid to create an army of Master Chiefs . Now, taking that idea one step further, a U.S program called Tactical Light Operator Suit (or TALOS) is underway, which is creating an Iron Man-esque suit for American special forces. With exoskeleton-powered soldiers and flying Volvos on the horizon, at this point we’re just patiently waiting for the first real-world superheroes to reveal themselves. Source: Reuters
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Russian exoskeleton suit turns soldiers into Stormtroopers
Chinese Court Seizes Millions in Assets of LeEco Founder as Conglomerate’s Troubles Grow
Chinese Internet tycoon and LeEco founder Jia Yueting’s ambition to challenge the likes of Apple and Tesla looks even more in doubt after $182 million of his assets were frozen by a Shanghai court following unpaid loans. From a report: Jia and LeEco came in for stinging criticism from Chinese media Wednesday, which warned that the Internet streaming company and hardware manufacturer was set to fall into further trouble, with the asset freeze as only the beginning. LeEco’s development “is too big, too quick and too reckless, ” Beijing Business Today wrote. “Developing TV [programs and TV sets], mobile phones, [electric] cars and sports programs all consume too much cash at the same time. Not only can the capital not sustain these developments; fractures are inevitable in areas ranging from human resources, technology and management.” According to the official Xinhua news agency, the Shanghai High People’s Court last week ruled in favor of China Merchants Bank’s application to freeze $182 million in assets belonging to Jia, his wife and three LeEco affiliates. Further reading: LeEco Said To Lay Off Over 80 Percent of US Workforce, LeEco’s CEO Jia Yueting Says Company Overstretched, Now Running Out of Cash, and China’s LeEco Calls Off Its $2 Billion Purchase of TV Maker Vizio. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chinese Court Seizes Millions in Assets of LeEco Founder as Conglomerate’s Troubles Grow
Atomic ‘photos’ help make gene editing safer
Believe it or not, scientists haven’t had a close-up look at CRISPR gene editing . They’ve understood its general processes, but not the minutiae of what’s going on — and that raises the risk of unintended effects. They’ll have a much better understanding going forward. Cornell and Harvard researchers have produced snapshots of the CRISPR-Cas3 gene editing subtype (not the Cas9 you normally hear about) at near atom-level resolution. They used a mix of cryo-electron microscopy and biochemistry to watch as a riboprotein complex captured DNA, priming the genes so the namesake Cas3 enzyme can start cutting. The team combined hundreds of thousands of particles into 2D averages of CRISPR’s functional states (many of which haven’t been seen before) and turned them into 3D projections you can see at the source link. As for what the researchers learned? Quite a bit, actually. They found that the riboprotein forces a small piece of DNA to unwind, allowing an RNA strand to bind and create a “seed bubble” that serves as a sort of fail-safe — if the targeted DNA matches the RNA, the bubble gets bigger and the rest of the RNA continues binding until it forms a loop structure. The riboprotein then locks down the DNA and lets the enzyme get to work. The whole process is surprisingly precise and accident-proof, so it shouldn’t cut the wrong genes. The Cas3 technique isn’t what you’d call delicate. The team likens it to a “shredder” that eats DNA past the point of no return where Cas9 is more of a surgical tool. The discoveries made here could improve gene editing across the board, however. They could modify CRISPR to improve its accuracy and avoid any inadvertent effects, and methods that have only a limited use right now (like Cas3) could be used for other purposes. Ultimately, this could give scientists the confidence they need to use gene editing to eliminate diseases and harmful bacteria — they can go forward knowing their genetic tweaking should be safe. Via: Reddit Source: Harvard , Cell
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Atomic ‘photos’ help make gene editing safer
California has so much solar power it has to pay Arizona to use its energy
…But California keeps green-lighting more natural gas plants, thanks to hydrocarbon industry pressure on state regulators, who operate at cross-purposes to the legislature and its targets for renewables. (more…)
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California has so much solar power it has to pay Arizona to use its energy
A robot that milks scorpions could aid cancer research
A scorpion-milking robot designed to extract and store venom could put an end to the tricky manual method traditionally used by scientists. Researchers at the Ben M’sik Hassan II University in Morocco claim their robot not only speeds up the extraction process, but also makes it safer. Scorpion venom is used in a variety of medical fields, including cancer research, and the development of anti-malarial drugs. Current harvesting methods include electrical and mechanical stimulation, which can prove deadly for the scorpions and troublesome for scientists, due to electric shocks from the equipment. Not to mention the fact that the mere thought of grasping a venomous arachnid sounds pretty darn terrifying. The lightweight VES-4 device created by Mouad Mkamel and his team of researchers is a portable robot that can be used in the lab and in the field. It works by clamping the scorpion’s tail and electrically simulating the animal to express droplets of venom, which it captures and stores. The VES-4 wouldn’t be the first robot to be utlized by medical scientists. In the past, robotic devices have been used to design drugs , with researchers also recently suggesting humanoid robots be employed to grow human tissue grafts. “[VES-4] is designed to extract scorpion venom without harming the animal and to provide more safety for the experimenters, ” said Mkamel. “It could [even] be used by one person using a remote control to safely recover scorpion venom remotely.” The robot has been tested on multiple species of scorpions and can be programmed to remember them via its adjustable settings. It also contains an LED screen that displays the name of the species being milked. Source: EurekAlert!
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A robot that milks scorpions could aid cancer research
Hulu Joins Netflix and Amazon In Promoting Royalty-free Video Codec AV1
theweatherelectric writes: Hulu has joined the Alliance for Open Media, which is developing an open, royalty-free video format called AV1. AV1 is targeting better performance than H.265 and, unlike H.265, will be licensed under royalty-free terms for all use cases. The top three over-the-top SVOD services (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) are now all members of the alliance. In joining the alliance, Hulu hopes “to accelerate development and facilitate friction-free adoption of new media technologies that benefit the streaming media industry and [its] viewers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hulu Joins Netflix and Amazon In Promoting Royalty-free Video Codec AV1
Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world, but too darn expensive
Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton) Intel’s latest 10-core, high-end desktop (HEDT) chip—the Core i9-7900X—costs £900 /$1000. That’s £500/$500 less than its predecessor, the i7-6950X. In previous years, such cost-cutting would have been regarded as generous. You might, at a stretch, even call it good value. But that was at a time when Intel’s monopoly on the CPU market was as its strongest, before a resurgent AMD lay waste to the idea that a chip with more than four cores be reserved for those with the fattest wallets. The i9-7900X—which debuts the “i9” moniker alongside the new X299 platform, replacing X99 —is the most powerful consumer desktop chip money can buy. In nearly every benchmark, it delivers the highest scores. In multitasking and heavily multithreaded applications like photo editors, video editors, and 3D computer graphics, it ably demonstrates the appeal of more cores. But as a product, a piece of aspirational tech to flaunt on Reddit, Intel’s HEDT chips are far less alluring. It doesn’t help that X299 is a confusing mess of chips, PCIe lanes, and consumer-unfriendly feature lockouts that hint at a rushed launch in the wake of increased competition from AMD. Nor does it help that, like Intel’s mainstream Kaby Lake architecture before it, Skylake-X offers little in the way of raw instructions-per-clock (IPC) performance improvement over Broadwell-E . Read 54 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world, but too darn expensive
Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself
Tens of millions of Winamp users are still out there. (credit: Flickr user uzi978 ) As many of us are busy crafting the perfect playlist for grilling outdoors, most likely such labor is happening on a modern streaming service or within iTunes. But during the last 15 years or so, that wasn’t always the case. Today, we resurface our look at the greatest MP3 player that was—Winamp. This piece originally ran on June 24, 2012 (and Winamp finally called it quits in November 2013). MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after “MP3” entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one’s music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience. Enter Winamp , the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that “really whips the llama’s ass.” In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million —and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge. Read 87 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself