When 14-year-old Daniel Kristiansen was assigned a World War II project for history class, his father jokingly suggested he look for a German plane that had allegedly crashed at the family farm. Well wouldn’t you know it, he actually found the damned thing—along with the dead airman’s remains. It’s being called one of… Read more…
View article:
School Assignment Leads to Discovery of WWII Plane With Pilot’s Body Still Inside
My first question was, “What is a time crystal?” Harvard graduate students Soonwon Choi, Joonhee Choi and postdoctoral researcher Renate Landig all started laughing. “That’s a very good question, ” said Soonwon. The time crystal’s silly science fiction name shrouds its deep quantum mechanical nuance. Sometimes a name… Read more…
More:
Scientists Finally Observed Time Crystals—But What the Hell Are They?
The worldwide warehouse and logistics robot unit shipments will increase from 40, 000 robots in 2016 to 620, 000 robots annually by 2021, according to highly reliable numbers from Tractica, which adds that the $1.9 billion market in 2016 is expected to jump a staggering tenfold to an annual $22.4 billion by the end of 2021. From a report on TechRepublic: As a measure of global market value, Tractica also expects the robotic shipments to reach $22.4 billion by the end of 2021, up from an estimated $1.9 billion in 2016. The report, which highlights market drivers and challenges, profiles 75 “emerging industry players, ” and is divided into sections based on robot type. According to the report, “warehousing and logistics industries are looking for robotics solutions, more than ever before, to remain globally competitive, ” which will “lead to widespread acceptance and presence of robots in warehouses and logistics operations.” To allay fears about lost jobs due to automation, the report authors said they expect that the increase in robots will likely yield new jobs and opportunities for businesses. “The next 5 years will be a period of significant innovation in the space, bringing significant opportunities for established industry players and startups alike, ” said Manoj Sahi, a research analyst, in the report. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Continue reading here:
Robots in Warehouses To Jump 15X Over Next 4 Years
In response to a U.S. Justice Department order that requires colleges and universities make website content accessible for citizens with disabilities and impairments, the University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts. Officials said making the videos and audio more accessible would have proven too costly in comparison to removing them. Inside Higher Ed reports: Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university’s webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20, 000 audio and video files from those platforms — a process that will take three to five months — and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them. The university will continue to offer massive open online courses on edX and said it plans to create new public content that is accessible to listeners or viewers with disabilities. The Justice Department, following an investigation in August, determined that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues. Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education, made the announcement in a March 1 statement: “This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes U content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from ‘pirates’ who have reused content for personal profit without consent.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See original article:
University of California, Berkeley, To Delete Publicly Available Educational Content
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: A new bill intended to update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would allow victims of computer attacks to engage in active defense measures to identify the attacker and disrupt the attack. Proposed by Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), the bill would grant victims of computer intrusions unprecedented rights. Known as the Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act, the legislation seeks to amend the CFAA, the much-maligned 1986 law that is used in most computer crime prosecutions. The proposed legislation includes the caveat that victims can’t take any actions that destroy data on another person’s computer, causes physical injury to someone, or creates a threat to public safety. The concept of active defense has been a controversial one in the security community for several years, with many experts saying the potential downside outweighs any upside. Not to mention that it’s generally illegal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original post:
Bill Would Legalize Active Defense Against Hacks
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: In a new study published in the journal Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable. Erlich and his colleague Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at NYGC, chose six files to encode, or write, into DNA: a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, “Arrival of a train at La Ciotat, ” a $50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon. They compressed the files into a master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code made up of ones and zeros. Using an erasure-correcting algorithm called fountain codes, they randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, and mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T. The algorithm deleted letter combinations known to create errors, and added a barcode to each droplet to help reassemble the files later. In all, they generated a digital list of 72, 000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long, and sent it in a text file to a San Francisco DNA-synthesis startup, Twist Bioscience, that specializes in turning digital data into biological data. Two weeks later, they received a vial holding a speck of DNA molecules. To retrieve their files, they used modern sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by software to translate the genetic code back into binary. They recovered their files with zero errors, the study reports. The study also notes that “a virtually unlimited number of copies of the files could be created with their coding technique by multiplying their DNA sample through polymerase chain reaction (PCR).” The researchers also “show that their coding strategy packs 215 petabytes of data on a single gram of DNA.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taken from:
Researchers Store Computer OS, Short Movie On DNA
Amazon is apologizing for the disruptions to its S3 storage service that knocked down and — in some cases affected — dozens of websites earlier this week. The company also outlined what caused the issue — the event was triggered by human error. The company said an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended, ” the company said in a press statement Thursday. It adds: The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems. One of these subsystems, the index subsystem, manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region. This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects. Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart. While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Continue reading here:
An Incorrect Command Entered By Employee Triggered Disruptions To S3 Storage Service, Knocking Down Dozens of Websites, Amazon Says
The idea that a bit of gross mold would be worth $14, 617 seems absurd until you realize it may be the most important mold to that was ever grown. Read more…
As capable as Chromebooks have become , there are times when you might need to load up Photoshop, iTunes or something else that relies on Windows or macOS. Not only can Chrome OS do this, it’s not that difficult to set up…if you know the right plug-ins to use. Here’s how to get started. Read more…
More here:
How to Get Windows and macOS Apps on Your Chromebook
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: Annoying pauses in your streaming movies are going to become less common, thanks to a new trick Netflix is rolling out. It’s using artificial intelligence techniques to analyze each shot in a video and compress it without affecting the image quality, thus reducing the amount of data it uses. The new encoding method is aimed at the growing contingent of viewers in emerging economies who watch video on phones and tablets. “We’re allergic to rebuffering, ” said Todd Yellin, a vice president of innovation at Netflix. “No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of Bojack Horseman or Stranger Things.” Yellin hopes the new system, called Dynamic Optimizer, will keep those Netflix binges free of interruption when it’s introduced sometime in the next “couple of months.” He was demonstrating the system’s results at “Netflix House, ” a mansion in the hills overlooking Barcelona that the company has outfitted for the Mobile World Congress trade show. In one case, the image quality from a 555 kilobits per second (kbps) stream looked identical to one on a data link with half the bandwidth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
Netflix Uses AI in Its New Codec To Compress Video Scene By Scene