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NASA Scientist Revive 10,000-Year-Old Microorganisms

“Scientists have extracted long-dormant microbes from inside the famous giant crystals of the Naica mountain caves in Mexico — and revived them, ” reports the BBC. An anonymous reader writes: “The organisms were likely to have been encased in the striking shafts of gypsum at least 10, 000 years ago, and possibly up to 50, 000 years ago, ” according to the BBC, which calls the strange lifeforms “another demonstration of the ability of life to adapt and cope in the most hostile of environments.” With no light, extremophile species must “chemosynthesise, ” deriving all their energy by extracting minerals from rocks. These ancient microbes “are not very closely related to anything in the known genetic databases, ” according to the new director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, who helped conduct the research, and believes that the microbes could help suggest what life might look like on other planets. The BBC adds that many other scientists “suspect that if life does exist elsewhere in the Solar System, it is most likely to be underground, chemosynthesising like the microbes of Naica.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NASA Scientist Revive 10,000-Year-Old Microorganisms

Used Cars Can Still Be Controlled By Their Previous Owners’ Apps

An IBM security researcher recently discovered something interesting about smart cars. An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Charles Henderson sold his car several years ago, but he still knows exactly where it is, and can control it from his phone… “The car is really smart, but it’s not smart enough to know who its owner is, so it’s not smart enough to know it’s been resold, ” Henderson told CNNTech. “There’s nothing on the dashboard that tells you ‘the following people have access to the car.'” This isn’t an isolated problem. Henderson tested four major auto manufacturers, and found they all have apps that allow previous owners to access them from a mobile device. At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Friday, Henderson explained how people can still retain control of connected cars even after they resell them. Manufacturers create apps to control smart cars — you can use your phone to unlock the car, honk the horn and find out the exact location of your vehicle. Henderson removed his personal information from services in the car before selling it back to the dealership, but he was still able to control the car through a mobile app for years. That’s because only the dealership that originally sold the car can see who has access and manually remove someone from the app. It’s also something to consider when buying used IoT devices — or a smart home equipped with internet-enabled devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Used Cars Can Still Be Controlled By Their Previous Owners’ Apps

RSA Conference Attendees Get Hacked

The RSA Conference “is perhaps the world’s largest security event, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a secure event, ” reports eSecurityPlanet. Scanning the conference floor revealed rogue access points posing as known and trusted networks, according to security testing vendor Pwnie Express. storagedude writes: What’s worse, several attendees fell for these dummy Wi-Fi services that spoof well-known brands like Starbucks. The company also found a number of access points using outdated WEP encryption. So much for security pros… At least two people stayed connected to a rogue network for more than a day, according to the article, and Pownie Express is reminding these security pros that connecting to a rogue network means “the attacker has full control of all information going into and out of the device, and can deploy various tools to modify or monitor the victim’s communication.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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RSA Conference Attendees Get Hacked

MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari’s unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes MAME.net: Way back in 1997, Nicola Salmoria merged a few stand-alone arcade machine emulators into the first Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Could he have possibly imagined the significance of what he’d built? Over the past two decades, MAME has brought together over a thousand contributors to build a system that emulates more machines than any other program. But MAME is more than that: MAME represents the idea that our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations. MAME strives to accurately represent original systems, allowing unmodified software to run as intended. Today, MAME documents over thirty thousand systems, and usably emulates over ten thousand. MAME meets the definitions of Open Source and Free Software, and works with Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD running on any CPU from x86-64 to ARM to IBM zSeries. A 20th-anniversary blog post thanked MAME’s 1, 600 contributors — more than triple the number after its 10th anniversary — and also thanks MAME’s uncredited contributors. “if you’ve filed a bug report, distributed binaries, run a community site, or just put in a good word for MAME, we appreciate it.” I’ve seen MAME resurrect everything from a rare East German arcade game to a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine. Anybody else have a favorite MAME experience to share? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports describes research “designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather than from primary cells taken directly from a pig, ” says co-author Dr. Nicholas Genovese, a stem-cell biologist. “This entailed understanding the biology of relatively uncharacterized and recently-derived porcine induced pluripotent stem cell lines. What conditions support cell growth, survival and differentiation? These are all questions I had to figure out in the lab before the cells could be turned into muscle.” Digital Trends reports: It may not sound like the most appetizing of foodstuffs, but pig skeletal muscle is in fact the main component of pork. The fact that it could be grown from a stem-cell line, rather than from a whole pig, is a major advance. This is also true of the paper’s second big development: the fact that this cultivation of pig skeletal muscle didn’t use animal serum, a component which has been used in other livestock muscle cultivation processes. [Genovese] acknowledges that there are other non-food-related possibilities the work hints at. “There is a contingent interest in using the pig as a model to study disease and test regenerative therapies for human conditions, ” he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab

These Crazy ‘Living’ Gloves Glow When You Touch Certain Chemicals

Imagine a near future when detectives looking for evidence in a murder investigation could slap on a pair of rubber gloves that would light up when the cop touched a certain chemicals. MIT scientists just created an early version of this technology , and it looks super cool. Read more…

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These Crazy ‘Living’ Gloves Glow When You Touch Certain Chemicals

Pioneer’s New Lightning Earbuds Solve an Annoying iPhone Problem

After the initial outrage of Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 died down, users not wanting to go wireless soon realized that using the phone’s Lightning port meant they could no longer charge while listening to music. Pioneer’s new Rayz Plus earbuds include a simple solution to that problem, but… Read more…

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Pioneer’s New Lightning Earbuds Solve an Annoying iPhone Problem

Cram a Raspberry Zero and Screen Into an Altoids Tin for a Portable Micro Computer

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a good Altoids tin project, but over on Hackmypi, they’ve got a guide from stuffing the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero and a touch screen into a tin. Read more…

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Cram a Raspberry Zero and Screen Into an Altoids Tin for a Portable Micro Computer

Encrypted Email Is Still a Pain in 2017

Bristol-based software developer James Stanley, who used to work at Netcraft, shares how encrypted emails, something which was first introduced over 25 years ago, is still difficult to setup and use for even reasonably tech savvy people. He says he recently tried to install Enigmail, a Thunderbird add-on, but not only things like GPG, PGP, OpenPGP were — for no reason — confusing, Enigmail continues to suffer from a bug that takes forever in generating keys. From his blog post: Encrypted email is nothing new (PGP was initially released in 1991 — 26 years ago!), but it still has a huge barrier to entry for anyone who isn’t already familiar with how to use it. I think my experience would have been better if Enigmail had generated keys out-of-the-box, or if (a.) gpg agreed with Enigmail on nomenclature (is it a secring or a private key?) and (b.) output the paths of the files it had generated. My experience would have been a lot worse had I not been able to call on the help of somebody who already knows how to use it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Encrypted Email Is Still a Pain in 2017

How UPS Trucks Saved Millions of Dollars By Eliminating Left Turns

Some people probably already know this, but for those who don’t: UPS truck drivers don’t take left turns, and despite this usually resulting in longer route, they are saving millions of dollars in fuel costs. From a report: The company decided on eliminating left turns (or right turns in left-hand driving countries such as India) wherever possible after it found that drivers have to sit idly in the trucks while waiting to take the left turn to pass through traffic. So, it created an algorithm that eliminated left turns from drivers’ routes even if meant a longer journey. This meant that drivers do not have to wait in traffic to take a left turn and can take the right turn at junctions. Of course, the algorithm does not entirely eliminate left turns, but the number of left turns taken by UPS trucks is less than 10 percent of all turns made. Turns out that UPS was right — the idea really paid off. In 2005, a year after it announced that it will minimize left turns, the company said that the total distance covered by its 96, 000 trucks was reduced by 747, 000km, and 190, 000 litres of fuel had been saved. In 2011, Bob Stoffel, a UPS Senior Vice President, told Fortune that the company had reduced distance traveled by trucks by 20.4 million miles, and reduced CO2 emissions by 20, 000 metric tons, by not taking left turns. A recent report by The Independent says that the total reduction in distance traveled by UPS trucks now stands at 45.8 million miles, and there are 1, 100 fewer trucks in its fleet because of the algorithm. Even by conservative estimates, that’s tens of millions of dollar of savings in fuel costs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How UPS Trucks Saved Millions of Dollars By Eliminating Left Turns