HughPickens.com writes Clifford Davis reports that only 30% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are qualified to become soldiers primarily due to three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories. While cognitive and moral disqualifications have held steady, weight issues account for 18% of disqualifications, and the number is rising steadily and it’s projected to hit 25% by 2025, which Batschelet calls “troubling.” The current Army policy is that every recruit, whether enlisting for infantry or graphic design, has to meet the same physical requirements to join — but that requirement may be changing. “Today, we need cyber warriors, so we’re starting to recruit for Army Cyber, ” says Batschelet. “One of the things we’re considering is that your [mission] as a cyber warrior is different. Maybe you’re not the Ranger who can do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and run the 2-mile inside of 10 minutes, but you can crack a data system of an enemy.” “We’re looking for America’s best and brightest just like any Fortune 500 company out there, ” says Lt. Col. Sharlene Pigg. “We’re looking for those men and women who excel in science, technology, engineering and math.” Batschelet admits that a drastic change in physical requirements for recruits may be hard for some to swallow. “That’s going to be an institutional, cultural change for us to be able to get our heads around that is kind of a different definition of quality, ” says Batschelet. “I would say it’s a modernizing, or defining in a more precise way, what is considered quality for soldiers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Army May Relax Physical Requirements To Recruit Cyber Warriors
The largest companies consume a shockingly huge amount of the world’s natural resources. Ikea, for instance, uses 17.8 million cubic yards of wood a year. When it comes to cotton, there’s VF Corp., a relatively unknown corporation that owns some of the best-known clothing brands in the world. Read more… 
3D printing can make an action figure copy of your body and face, but the hair usually ends up looking like a Lego minifig wig. The mad scientists at Disney Research just solved that, with an algorithm so powerful it can trace your hair’s shape and color with ultra-realism. Read more… 
First time accepted submitter PotatoHead (12771) writes “This is a big win for Open Hardware Proponents! The Parallax Propeller Microcontroller VERILOG code was released today, and it’s complete! Everything you need to run Open Code on an Open CPU design. This matters because you can now build a device that is open hardware, open code all the way down to the CPU level! Either use a product CPU, and have access to it’s source code to understand what and how it does things, or load that CPU onto a suitable FPGA and modify it or combine it with your design.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes Oxford University engineering professor Dr Thomas Povey just invented a new cooking pot that heats food 40% faster. The pot is made from cast aluminum, and it features fins that direct flames across the bottom and up the sides, capturing energy that would otherwise be wasted. The pot is set to hit the market next month in the UK. “Povey specializes in the design of high-efficiency cooling systems for next-generation jet engines. He is also an avid mountaineer and says that this invention was spurred by the long time it takes for water to reach a boil at high altitudes. He and a group of his students worked three years experimenting with different designs before they came up with one being marketed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “Even though it’s been a couple months since the Heartbleed bug was discovered, many servers remain unpatched and vulnerable. “Two months ago, security experts and web users panicked when a Google engineer discovered a major bug — known as Heartbleed — that put over a million web servers at risk. The bug doesn’t make the news much anymore, but that doesn’t mean the problem’s solved. Security researcher Robert David Graham has found that at least 309, 197 servers are still vulnerable to the exploit. Immediately after the announcement, Graham found some 600, 000 servers were exposed by Heartbleed. One month after the bug was announced, that number dropped down to 318, 239. In the past month, however, only 9, 042 of those servers have been patched to block Heartbleed. That’s cause for concern, because it means that smaller sites aren’t making the effort to implement a fix.”” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
