Tag: california

Bluetooth-tracking beacon programs uncovered in LA, Chicago

The Logan Square stop on the Chicago Transit Authority blue line. Kumar McMillan A report from BuzzFeed News Wednesday suggests that the tracking beacons that cropped up in New York phone booths last year have spread to new cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago. The beacons have been sprinkled around transit centers, including Chicago Transit Authority rail stops and LA bus stops. The beacons, created by Gimbal, connect with devices like smartphones via Bluetooth and can harvest information like the device’s Bluetooth address, as well as the date, time, and location of connection. The beacons in New York were installed as a “test” by advertising company Titan 360. Though officials called for their removal over a year ago, they were not taken out of phone booths until earlier this month, after they were used in promotions for the Tribeca Film Festival and shopping app ShopAdvisor. Marketing company Martin Outdoor Media confirmed the beacons’ existence in LA to BuzzFeed News, as did the CTA in Chicago. Martin called the beacons part of a “pilot program” in a press release last week, while the CTA stated its beacons were part of a “two-week test,” to be followed up by a bigger test for a longer period with beacons placed and tracked by Titan. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bluetooth-tracking beacon programs uncovered in LA, Chicago

45,000-year-old modern human bone yields a genome

The femur from which the DNA samples originated. Bence Viola, MPI EVA Svante Pääbo’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has mastered the process of obtaining DNA from ancient bones. With the techniques in hand, the research group has set about obtaining samples from just about any bones they can find that come from the ancestors and relatives of modern humans. In their latest feat, they’ve obtained a genome from a human femur found in Siberia that dates from roughly the time of our species’ earliest arrival there. The genome indicates that the individual it came from lived at a time where our interbreeding with Neanderthals was relatively recent, and Europeans and Asians hadn’t yet split into distinct populations. The femur comes from near the town of Ust’-Ishim in western Siberia. It eroded out of a riverbank that contains a mixture of bones, some from the time where the sediments were deposited (roughly 30-50,000 years ago), and some likely older that had been washed into the sediments from other sites. The femur shows features that are a mixture of those of paleolithic and modern humans, and lacks features that are typical of Neanderthal skeletons. Two separate samples gave identical carbon radioisotope dates; after calibration to the 14 C record, this places the bone at 45,000 years old, give or take a thousand years. That’s roughly when modern humans first arrived in the region. That also turned out to be consistent with dates estimated by looking at the DNA sequence, which placed it at 49,000 years old (the 95 percent confidence interval was 30-65,000 years). Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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45,000-year-old modern human bone yields a genome

First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

We’ve written before about Windows 10’s new updating policy, and today we’re seeing the real-world result for the first time. The Windows 10 Technical Preview, build 9849, is being updated to build 9860. That update will roll out automatically to members of the Windows Insider program, and it will be delivered through Windows Update. The operating system upgrade is a little more heavyweight than a regular hotfix; systems will need to reboot to finish installation, and Microsoft says that the reboot will take longer than normal. The major feature of the new build is that it contains the first iteration of Windows 10’s notification center. At the moment, it’s a simple collection of historic notifications. Microsoft says that future builds will add more capabilities to the notification center, such as the ability to take actions in response to notifications. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First major update to Windows 10 Preview, delivered through Windows Update

New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

Broadcom today unveiled DSL chips that use the new G.fast standard to deliver up to 1Gbps broadband over copper phone lines. That doesn’t mean everyone who has DSL will suddenly get a huge speed upgrade. G.fast, a standard from the International Telecommunication Union , is intended for fiber-and-copper networks in which fiber delivers data close to homes and copper takes it the rest of the way. These networks are cheaper to build than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper, but thus far they haven’t been able to match the gigabit speeds of fiber-only service. Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs  and the British telecom company BT  are both testing G.fast, with the latter using  Huawei technology . Broadcom is now joining the party with technology it plans to sell to Internet service providers, who would then roll it out to their customers. The chips will power both the back-end technology needed to deliver high speeds as well as home gateway systems for Internet users. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime

Leo Reynolds Geology rewards an active imagination. It gives us a lot of tantalizing clues about very different times and places in Earth’s history, leaving us to try to answer “Man, what would that be like? ” One of the things that’s tough to image involves changing something that most of us never give a second thought—the fact that compasses point north. That’s plainly true today , but it hasn’t always been. What we call the “north” magnetic pole—the object of your compass’ affection—doesn’t need to be located in the Arctic (it noticeably wanders  there, by the way). It feels equally at home in the Antarctic. The geologic record tells us that the north and south magnetic poles frequently trade places. In fact, the signal of this magnetic flip-flopping recorded in the seafloor was the final key to the discovery of plate tectonics, as it let us see how ocean crust forms and moves over time . That the poles flip is interesting in itself, but “Man, what would that be like? ” Does the magnetic pole slowly walk along the curve of the Earth over thousands of years, meaning your compass might have pointed to some part of the equator for long stretches of time? Do the poles weaken to nothing, disappearing for a while before re-emerging in the new configuration? Do they somehow flip in the blink of an eye? Given the number of species that use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate—especially for seasonal migrations—this is more than an academic curiosity. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The north pole moved to the North Pole in a single human lifetime

Natural underground CO2 reservoir reveals clues about storage

Sandia National Lab Reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide quickly enough to minimize the effects of climate change may require more than just phasing out the use of fossil fuels. During the phase-out, we may need to keep the CO 2 we’re emitting from reaching the atmosphere—a process called carbon capture and sequestration. The biggest obstacle preventing us from using CCS is the lack of economic motivation to do it. But that doesn’t mean it’s free from technological constraints and scientific unknowns. One unknown relates to exactly what will happen to the CO 2 we pump deep underground. As a free gas, CO 2 would obviously be buoyant, fueling concerns about leakage. But CO 2 dissolves into the briny water found in saline aquifers at these depths. Once the gas dissolves, the result is actually more dense than the brine, meaning it will settle downward. With time, much of that dissolved CO 2 may precipitate as carbonate minerals. But how quickly does any of this happen? Having answers will be key to understanding how well we really sequester the carbon. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Natural underground CO2 reservoir reveals clues about storage

Obama signs “BuySecure” initiative to speed EMV adoption in the US

A chip card and the inside of a card’s chip. Explain That Stuff On Friday, President Obama signed an executive order to speed the adoption of EMV-standard cards in the US. The transition to EMV—an acronym eponymous of Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the companies that developed the standard—has been slow to gain traction in the US. The EMV standard will require credit card companies to do away with the magnetic stripe cards that are common today in favor of cards with embedded-chips that will offer more secure credit card transactions. Lawmakers and credit card companies confirmed earlier this year that the US would make the transition to EMV cards in October 2015. But over the past several months, retail stores like Target , Home Depot , Michaels , Neiman Marcus , and more have sustained major hacks that caused the retailers to loose credit card information and personal information of millions upon millions of customers, giving new urgency to the call for more secure credit cards. Speaking at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday , President Obama said that the federal government would apply “chip-and-PIN technology to newly issued and existing government credit cards, as well as debit cards like Direct Express.” The White House also said that all payment terminals at federal agencies will soon be able to accept embedded chip cards. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Obama signs “BuySecure” initiative to speed EMV adoption in the US

The Current State Of The Apple SIM, And Its Possible Future

 Apple unveiled new gadgets on stage today, but they didn’t discuss one of its most interesting new innovations – the Apple SIM. As detailed earlier by TechCrunch, the new SIM card lets you switch between participating carriers, which include AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in the U.S., and EE in the U.K. So far, those are the only carriers who have signed on, but Apple is likely… Read More

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The Current State Of The Apple SIM, And Its Possible Future

How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Even in the download-only era, it’s easy to make yourself offline OS X install media. Andrew Cunningham It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media . Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still good reasons to want an old, reliable USB stick. For instance, if you find yourself doing multiple installs, a USB drive may be faster than multiple downloads (especially if you use a USB 3.0 drive). Or maybe you need a recovery disk for older Macs that don’t support the Internet Recovery feature. Whatever the reason, you’re in luck, because it’s not hard to make one. As with last year , there are two ways to get it done. There’s the super easy way with the graphical user interface and the only slightly less easy way that requires some light Terminal use. Here’s what you need to get started. A Mac, duh. We’ve created Yosemite USB from both Mavericks and Yosemite, but your experience with other versions may vary. An 8GB or larger USB flash drive or an 8GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. For newer Macs, use a USB 3.0 drive—it makes things significantly faster. The OS X 10.10 Yosemite installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary. If you want a GUI, you need the latest version of  Diskmaker X  app—we wrote this article based on version 4 beta 2, but if a “final” version is released alongside Yosemite we’ll update the article. This app is free to download, but  the creator accepts donations  if you want to support his efforts. An administrator account on the Mac you’re using to create the disk. The easy way Diskmaker X remains the easiest, most user-friendly way to get this done. Andrew Cunningham Once you’ve obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and run the Diskmaker X app. The app will offer to make installers for OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10, but we’re only interested in Yosemite today. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Chicago was raised over 4 feet in the 19th century to build its sewer

In the middle of the 19th century, Chicago embarked on a quest to literally lift itself out of the mud. Water couldn’t drain from the low-lying city, so its streets became impassable swamps. The most reasonable solution, Chicago decided, was just to raise the whole goddamn city by 4 to 14 feet. Read more…

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Chicago was raised over 4 feet in the 19th century to build its sewer