The earthquake in Nepal was so violent it moved mountains. Satellite imagery shows that the parts of the Himalayas sank three feet—and the area around it as much as five feet—as tectonic plates snapped under extreme pressure. But the mountains will regain their height, slowly but surely, thanks to the geologic forces at work. Read more…
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The Himalayas Dropped 3 Feet After the Nepal Earthquake
2.2 million illegal downloads in 12 hours: That’s the piracy world record the latest Game of Thrones episode set last week . Read more…
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That Major Game of Thrones Leak Led to a New World Piracy Record
Curious about just how far they could take the company’s additive manufacturing technology, engineers at GE Aviation’s Additive Development Center in Cincinnati successfully created a simple jet engine, made entirely from 3D printed parts , that was able to rev up to 33, 000 RPM. Read more…
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GE 3D-Printed a Miniature Jet Engine That Runs at 33,000 RPM
It was six years ago this month that NASA shot the Kepler telescope to the heavens on a galactic, planet-finding mission. Today, the space agency released this graphic that could also be Kepler’s mic-dropping resume. Read more…
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NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovered 1,000 Planets In Its Quest to Find Life
Windows: Last year, Microsoft announced an app that would allow you to have real-time conversations with people who spoke different languages, built on Skype. While the service was only available to a small group of testers, it’s now open to everyone. Read more…
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Skype Translator Preview is Now Available to Everyone
Cash is expensive to manufacture. As we saw in our article on The U.S. Mint’s Production Materials Problem , a penny costs 2.4 cents to make, while a nickel costs more than double its actual value. But governments continue to manufacture physical currency because previously, that was the only way to enable commerce and hence, economic growth. Cash is also expensive (and time-consuming) to use. A 2013 Tufts University study found that using cash costs American citizens and businesses some $200 billion annually, which boils down to $1, 739 per household. And sadly, those costs are disproportionately borne by the poor. Theft ($40 billion from businesses and $500 million from individuals) and ATM fees of $8 billion make up a portion of these overall costs. But the majority of these costs come in terms of time: the average American spends 28 minutes per month traveling to get cash. It probably comes as no surprise that the cost of cash is higher for the poor and unbanked Americans. The unbanked pay on average about $3.66 per month more than banked consumers. Poor Americans carry larger amounts in cash and pay more fees for cash transactions than wealthier Americans. Those without bank accounts use greater amounts of cash in a month than those with bank accounts. One obvious solution would be to create affordable banking methods for the poor. Once we accomplish that, we can take the radical step that Denmark is taking: Ending cash, period. The country has announced that next year they’ll stop printing the stuff altogether , meaning there’s going to be some sweet printing presses for sale on Danish eBay. And the Danish government has announced a new proposal that will allow merchants—gas stations, restaurants, clothing stores, et cetera—to refuse cash transactions. According to Reuters , a financial institution lobbyist says that “going cashless would save shops money on security and time on managing change from the cash register.” What this won’t end, of course, is theft; it will simply shift to a different arena, less ski-mask-and-gun, more keyboard-and-mouse. But if Denmark’s cashless society works on balance, it’s not inconceivable to think other countries will follow suit. As Fusion’s Kevin Roose puts it, “It’s time to take a lesson from the Danes…and admit that the 5, 000-year reign of physical currency has run its course.”
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Denmark Leads the Way Towards Ending Cash
HAWTHORNE, Calif.—In the sleek warehouse of Tesla’s Design Studio, CEO and co-founder Elon Musk announced the company’s latest products—a line of stationary batteries for households and utilities meant to store energy so that it can be used when energy is scarce and/or expensive. The home stationary battery will be called the Powerwall and it will cost $3,500 for a 10kWh unit. That unit is optimized to deal with serving a house if the traditional power grid goes down. A cheaper, $3,000 version will have a 7kWh capacity, and it will be able to help a house with solar panels deal with the fluctuations in energy supply. The prices don’t include installation, and Tesla said it would be working with certified installers including SolarCity and others. In a Q&A before the event, Musk said that the batteries will have thermal management systems to allow them to power houses in hot and cold climates too—the batteries have an operating temperature range of -20C (-4F) to 43C (110F). Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Tesla’s new “Powerwall” home battery will cost $3,500 for 10kWh units [Updated]
Final Fantasy maker and tech-demo master Square Enix unveiled a doozie of a demo at Microsoft’s 2015 Build conference. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry] , the demo showcased a range of DirectX 12 technical and processing wizardries to create a real-time animation on par with pre-rendered cut scenes and movies. During the demo (which you can view below), Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer explained each scene contained around 63 million polygons, which is supposedly up to 12-times more than Square Enix managed to render in its Agni’s Philosophy DirectX 11 demo back in 2012. Running 63 million polygons with high-resolution textures—8K by 8K in this case—is no small feat. By comparison, Star Citizen’s biggest carrier ships run up to around seven million polygons , while Ryse’s protagonist Marius was made up of 85K polygons on the Xbox One. One of the most impressive moments in the demo is when Guggenheimer zooms into the character model, revealing an immense amount of detail right up to the individual pores on her skin. The character’s hair was also revealed to be made up of individual polygons rendered with over 50 shaders, and not the less expensive surface mapping technique that’s commonly used to create features such as hair. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley
schwit1 writes The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FBI Overstated Forensic Hair Matches In Nearly All Trials Before 2000
dcblogs writes An IT worker is accusing Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of discriminating against American workers and favoring “South Asians” in hiring and promotion. It’s backing up its complaint, in part, with numbers. The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in San Francisco, claims that 95% of the 14, 000 people Tata employs in the U.S. are South Asian or mostly Indian. It says this practice has created a “grossly disproportionate workforce.” India-based Tata achieves its “discriminatory goals” in at least three ways, the lawsuit alleges. First, the company hires large numbers of H-1B workers. Over from 2011 to 2013, Tata sponsored nearly 21, 000 new H-1B visas, all primarily Indian workers, according to the lawsuit’s count. Second, when Tata hires locally, “such persons are still disproportionately South Asian, ” and, third, for the “relatively few non-South Asians workers that Tata hires, ” it disfavors them in placement, promotion and termination decisions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IT Worker’s Lawsuit Accuses Tata of Discrimination