Watch Korea’s Real Gundam Take Its First Steps With A Human Pilot

It’s a little hard to believe at first sight, but Korea’s Hankook Mirae Technology company has released video of their human piloted mech walking. It’s called the Method-2, and the 13 foot 1.3 ton machine looks like something CG plucked out of a movie. Though untrue, this isn’t terribly wrong, since its lead designer, Vitaly Bulgarov, has a professional background in SFX. The Method-2 is being conceived of as an option for emergency response in dangerous conditions, but it’ll need a better power pack before it gets unleashed. In the meantime, it’s already handling well upright, both in forward and backward modes, and its arms function well too. Here’s the first video of the mega mech walking, posted to Facebook by Bulgarov. IS THIS THE REAL LIFE In this video Bulgarov himself enters and pilots the arms:  IS THIS JUST FANTASYYY At this point, it sounds like the team’s short term plan is to modify a legless version for faster response time in industrial settings. That sounds wise, but now that I’ve seen this awesome walker in action, I’ll be sitting on my (puny flesh) hands until we see more of it.

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Watch Korea’s Real Gundam Take Its First Steps With A Human Pilot

Bitcoin Is Crashing

An anonymous reader writes: Bitcoin is getting smashed. The cryptocurrency was down 18% to about $892 per coin as of 8:17 a.m. ET on Thursday. It is the biggest drop in two years. Earlier this week, on its first trading day of the new year, Bitcoin crossed above the $1, 000 mark for the first time since 2013, but it has now tumbled below that level. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Is Crashing

Lucasfilm Creates A 4K Ultra-HD Restoration of the Original ‘Star Wars’

An anonymous reader quotes 4K.com: When the first ever of the Star Wars films, “A New Hope” turns 40 in 2017, millions of dedicated fans of the immensely popular franchise might get a very unique treat in the form of a limited theater screening in beautifully restored form with theatrical 4K resolution of the first movie released in the series. According to recent comments made by Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, a 4K restoration of Star Wars Episode IV “A New Hope” does indeed exist and now the only real question is whether or not the cleaned up and sharpened version of the movie will be hitting the big screen once again. White it’s release status is unknown, the ultra-high definition footage is said to be spectacular. In the interview, Edwards says “You can’t watch it without getting carried away… It just turns you into a child.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lucasfilm Creates A 4K Ultra-HD Restoration of the Original ‘Star Wars’

Verizon and AT&T Prepare to Bring 5G To (Select) Markets In 2017

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: This year, Verizon and AT&T plan to deliver broadband internet to select homes or businesses using fixed wireless networks built with early 5G technologies. These 5G pilot programs will give the public its first glimpse into a wireless future that isn’t due to fully arrive until the early 2020s. With 5G, carriers hope to deliver data to smartphone users at speeds 10 times as fast as on today’s 4G networks, and with only 1 millisecond of delay… Over the past year, companies have completed a flurry of lab tests and trials to figure out what types of radios, antennas, and signal processing techniques will work best to deliver 5G in hopes of bringing those technologies and their capabilities to market as soon as possible. The article notes that standards groups are halfway through their eight-year process of finalizing technical specifications (set to finish in 2020), but “With so much cash on the line, and facing pressure from data-hungry customers, carriers are moving fast.” In Japan, NTT Docomo has even tested dozens of programmable antennas simultaneously transmitting signals, resulting in transmissions at 20 gigabits per second. “At that speed, a complete 2-hour, 1080p, high-definition movie can be transmitted in a second and a half.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Verizon and AT&T Prepare to Bring 5G To (Select) Markets In 2017

Baby’s Skull Rebuilt With Help From A 3D Printer

schwit1 writes: A team at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital was able to use a 3-D printer to produce a replica of baby Vincent’s skull, which, in turn, allowed the medical team to fully rehearse the surgery long before they stepped into the operating room. Through a collaboration with Medical Modeling in Colorado, known now as 3D Systems, Egnor and Duboys were able to virtually plan the entire surgery in advance. Duboys said images from a CT scan of baby Vincent’s head were sent to the company, which then manufactured a model skull using the CT information as a template. The company also created a model of what Vincent’s skull should look like after surgery. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Baby’s Skull Rebuilt With Help From A 3D Printer

Pull Requests Are Accepted At About The Same Rate, Regardless of Gender

An anonymous reader writes: Remember that story about how women “get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they’re women).” The study actually showed that men also had their code accepted more often when their gender wasn’t known, according to Tech In Asia — and more importantly, the lower acceptance rates (for both men and women) applied mostly to code submitters from outside the GitHub community. “Among insiders, there’s no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree.” Eight months after the story ran, the BBC finally re-wrote their original headline (“Women write better code, study suggests”) and added the crucial detail that acceptance rates for women fell “if they were not regulars on the service and were identified by their gender.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pull Requests Are Accepted At About The Same Rate, Regardless of Gender

Firefox 52 Borrows One More Privacy Feature From the Tor Browser

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla engineers have added a mechanism to Firefox 52 that prevents websites from fingerprinting users using system fonts. The user privacy protection system was borrowed from the Tor Browser, where a similar mechanism blocks websites from identifying users based on the fonts installed on their computers, only returning a list of “default fonts” per each OS. While sabotaging system font queries won’t stop user fingerprinting as a whole, this is just one of the latest privacy-related updates Mozilla has added to Firefox, taken from Tor. Back in July 2016, Mozilla engineers started the Tor Uplift project, which aims to improve Firefox’s privacy features with the ones present in the Tor Browser. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 52 Borrows One More Privacy Feature From the Tor Browser

Scientists Develop a Breathalyzer That Detects 17 Diseases With One Breath From a Patient

randomErr quotes a report from Quartz: In the last 10 years, researchers have developed specific sniff tests for diagnosing tuberculosis, hypertension, cystic fibrosis, and even certain types of cancer. A group of global researchers led by Hossam Haick at the Israel Institute of Technology have taken the idea a step further. They’ve built a device — a kind of breathalyzer — that is compact and can diagnose up to 17 diseases from a single breath of a patient. The breathalyzer has an array of specially created gold nanoparticles, which are sized at billionths of a meter, and mixed with similar-sized tubes of carbon. These together create a network that is able to interact differently with each of the nearly 100 volatile compounds that each person breaths out (apart from gases like nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide). Haick’s team collected 2, 800 breaths from more than 1, 400 patients who were each suffering from at least one of 17 diseases (in three classes: cancer, inflammation, and neurological disorders). Each sample of the disease was then passed through the special breathalyzer, which then produced a dataset of the types of chemicals it could detect and in roughly what quantities. The team then applied artificial intelligence to the dataset to search for patterns in the types of compounds detected and the concentrations they were detected at. As they report in the journal ACS Nano, the data from the breathalyzer could be used to accurately detect that a person is suffering from a unique disease nearly nine out of ten times. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Develop a Breathalyzer That Detects 17 Diseases With One Breath From a Patient

Windows 10 Getting a Game Mode That Would Improve Game Performance – Report

Microsoft may have plans to improve gaming experience on Windows 10. The speculation comes after long time watcher @h0x0d found a new “gamemode.dll” in the latest Windows 10 developer build, reports GameSpot. The feature appears to allow Windows 10 to adjust CPU and GPU resources when running a game to allocate more power for the game that’s running instead of toward any background apps. From the article: The feature will reportedly launch as part of the Creators update and will be enabled for Windows Insider users soon. What’s unclear is exactly which games this is compatible with. It’s possible it could be limited to only to those downloaded from the Windows Store, or it might be much more far-reaching. We should know more once Windows Insiders testers get their hands on the feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Getting a Game Mode That Would Improve Game Performance – Report

Overclocker Pushes Intel Core i7-7700K Past 7GHz Using Liquid Nitrogen

MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: If you’ve had any doubts of Intel’s upcoming Kaby Lake processor’s capabilities with respect to overclocking, don’t fret. It’s looking like even the most dedicated overclockers are going to have a blast with this series. Someone recently got a hold of an Intel Core i7-7700K chip and decided to take it for an overclocking spin. Interestingly, the motherboard used is not one of the upcoming series designed for Kaby Lake, but the chip was instead overclocked on a Z170 motherboard from ASRock (Z170M OC Formula). That bodes well for those planning to snag a Kaby Lake CPU and would rather not have to upgrade their motherboard as well. With liquid nitrogen cooling the processor, this particular chip peaked at just over 7GHz, which helped deliver a SuperPi 32M time of 4m 20s, and a wPrime 1024M time of 1m 33s. It’s encouraging to see the chip breaking this clock speed, even with extreme methods, since it’s a potential relative indicator of how much headroom will be available for overclocking with more standard cooling solutions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Overclocker Pushes Intel Core i7-7700K Past 7GHz Using Liquid Nitrogen