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

Archaeologists uncover Tenochtitlan’s legendary tower of skulls

Henry Romero/Reuters An ongoing excavation in the heart of Mexico City, once the great Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, has revealed a legendary tower inlaid with hundreds of skulls. This tower was first described by Europeans in the early 16th century, when a Spanish soldier named Andres de Tapia came to the city with Hernan Cortez’ invading force. In his memoirs, de Tapia described an “ediface” covered in tens of thousands of skulls. Now his account is corroborated by this historic find. A tzompantli, illustrated in the 16th-century Aztec manuscript, the Durán Codex. (credit: Wikimedia) According to a report from Reuters , the tower is 6 meters in diameter, and once stood at the corner of a massive temple to Huitzilopochtli, an Aztec god associated with human sacrifice, war, and the sun. It’s likely the tower was part of a structure known as the Huey Tzompantli, which many of de Tapia’s contemporaries also described. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Archaeologists uncover Tenochtitlan’s legendary tower of skulls

‘Severe’ Systemd Bug Allowed Remote Code Execution For Two Years

ITWire reports: A flaw in systemd, the init system used on many Linux systems, can be exploited using a malicious DNS query to either crash a system or to run code remotely. The vulnerability resides in the daemon systemd-resolved and can be triggered using a TCP payload, according to Ubuntu developer Chris Coulson. This component can be tricked into allocating less memory than needed for a look-up. When the reply is bigger it overflows the buffer allowing an attacker to overwrite memory. This would result in the process either crashing or it could allow for code execution remotely. “A malicious DNS server can exploit this by responding with a specially crafted TCP payload to trick systemd-resolved in to allocating a buffer that’s too small, and subsequently write arbitrary data beyond the end of it, ” is how Coulson put it. Affected Linux vendors have pushed out patches — but the bug has apparently been present in systemd code since June of 2015. And long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd also reports a recently-discovered bug where systemd unit files that contain illegal usernames get defaulted to root. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Severe’ Systemd Bug Allowed Remote Code Execution For Two Years

Researchers create temperature sensor that runs on almost no power

Researchers at UC San Diego have developed a temperature sensor that runs on tiny amounts of power — just 113 picowatts, around 10 billion times less power than a watt. The sensor was described in a study recently published in Scientific Reports . “We’re building systems that have such low power requirements that they could potentially run for years on just a tiny battery, ” Hui Wang, an author of the study, said in a statement . The team created the device by reducing power in two areas. The first was the current source. To do that, they made use of a phenomenon that many researchers in their field are actually trying to get rid of. Transistors often have a gate with which they can stop the flow of electrons in a circuit, but transistors keep getting tinier and tinier. The smaller they get , the thinner the gate material becomes and electrons start to leak through it — a problem called “gate leakage.” Here, the leaked electrons are what’s powering the sensor. “Many researchers are trying to get rid of leakage current, but we are exploiting it to build an ultra-low power current source, ” said Hui. The researchers also reduced power in the way the sensor converts temperature to a digital readout. The result is a temperature sensor that uses 628 times less power than the current state-of-the-art sensors. The near-zero-power sensor has a temperature range of -4 to 104 degrees fahrenheit and could potentially be used in wearables and both environmental and home monitoring systems. One power tradeoff is that it gives readouts slightly slower than currently used sensors, at around one temperature read per second. But the researchers said that shouldn’t be a problem when giving reads on things like the human body where temperatures don’t change too quickly. They’re now working on optimizing the design and improving its accuracy. [Image: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering] Via: UCSD Source: Scientific Reports

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Researchers create temperature sensor that runs on almost no power

California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It

“On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power, ” reported the Los Angeles Times. Mic reports: California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California’s contribution. The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides — it single-handedly has nearly half of the country’s solar electricity generating capacity… When there’s too much solar energy, there is a risk of the electricity grid overloading. This can result in blackouts. In times like this, California offers other states a financial incentive to take their power. But it’s not as environmentally friendly as one would think. Take Arizona, for example. The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse gas emissions aren’t getting any better due to California’s overproduction. The Los Angeles Times suggests over-construction of natural gas plants created part of the problem — Californians now pay roughly 50% more than the rest of the country for power — but they report that power supplies could become more predictable when battery storage technologies improve. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It

With a Single Wiretap Order, US Authorities Listened In on 3.3 Million Phone Calls

US authorities intercepted and recorded millions of phone calls last year under a single wiretap order, authorized as part of a narcotics investigation, ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker reports. From the article: The wiretap order authorized an unknown government agency to carry out real-time intercepts of 3.29 million cell phone conversations over a two-month period at some point during 2016, after the order was applied for in late 2015. The order was signed to help authorities track 26 individuals suspected of involvement with illegal drug and narcotic-related activities in Pennsylvania. The wiretap cost the authorities $335, 000 to conduct and led to a dozen arrests. But the authorities noted that the surveillance effort led to no incriminating intercepts, and none of the handful of those arrested have been brought to trial or convicted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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With a Single Wiretap Order, US Authorities Listened In on 3.3 Million Phone Calls