Amazon Echo is a speaker that has a voice assistant built in. If you ask it a question its got an answer. If you tell it to do stuff, it complies. Well, this is different. Read more…
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Amazon Echo: An Intelligent Speaker That Listens to Your Commands
Using sound to hunt for food is a pretty ingenious adaptation for bats flying at night. But it doesn’t work if another bat is messing with you. Scientists have discovered that a species of bats can purposely jam the sonars of others to keep rivals away from their insect prey. Read more…
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Bats Can Use Sonar Jamming to Steal Food From Each Other
sciencehabit writes The Amazon is home to perhaps dozens of isolated tribes who make their living far off the grid from the wider society, growing crops and hunting and gathering in the forest. These reclusive peoples are threatened by drug running, illegal logging, and highway construction, even if they dwell in ‘protected’ reserves in Peru or Brazil; one group, apparently pushed out of its lands, made contact this summer. Now, researchers have a new way of examining their fate without disruptive and frightening flyovers by aircraft. Researchers use high-resolution WorldView or GeoEye satellite images to monitor demographic changes in isolated Amazon tribes. The scientists got location and population estimates for five isolated villages along the Brazil-Peru border from Brazilian government reports and other sources. Then they examined 50-centimeter resolution satellite images taken in 2006, 2012, and 2013 and could spot the peoples’ horticultural fields and characteristic pattern of either longhouses or clusters of small houses; these villages could be clearly differentiated from the transient camps of illegal loggers or drug runners. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Satellites Spot Hidden Villages In Amazon
davidshenba writes: Facebook has revealed that government requests for user data has increased by 24% to nearly 35, 000 during the first six months of the year. Also content restrictions due to local laws increased by 19% in the same period. According to Facebook, they scrutinize every government request for legal sufficiency and “push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests.” Already Facebook is fighting its largest ever legal battle against a U.S. court order to handover 400 users’ data. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
vinces99 writes University of Washington researchers have successfully replicated a direct brain-to-brain connection between pairs of people as part of a scientific study following the team’s initial demonstration a year ago. In the newly published study, which involved six people, researchers were able to transmit the signals from one person’s brain over the Internet and use these signals to control the hand motions of another person within a split second of sending that signal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
jones_supa writes If you have looked carefully, the clock has traditionally been always set to 9:42 in Apple advertisements. You could see it across various commercials, print ads, and even on Apple’s website. The explanation is simple: That’s the time in the morning that Steve Jobs announced the very first iPhone in 2007. Around 42 minutes into his keynote address he said “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” The picture of the phone was carefully scheduled to pop up at that moment. “We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation”, Apple’s Scott Forstall confirms. The time was even slightly tweaked in 2010, when the very first iPad was released, so that when it was revealed, it displayed a different time: 9:41. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why the Time Is Always Set To 9:41 In Apple Ads
Jason Koebler writes The CERN particle collider is 17 miles long. China just announced a supercollider that is supposed to be roughly 49 miles long. The United States’ new particle collider is just under 12 inches long. What the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s new collider lacks in size, it makes up for by using plasma to accelerate particles more than 500 times faster than traditional methods. In a recent test published in Nature, Michael Litos and his team were able to accelerate bunches of electrons to near the speed of light within the tiny chamber.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past couple of years, Google has implemented some changes to how Android handles SD cards that aren’t very beneficial to users or developers. After listening to many rounds of complaints, this seems to have changed in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Google’s Jeff Sharkey wrote, “[I]n Lollipop we added the new ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent. Apps can launch this intent to pick and return a directory from any supported DocumentProvider, including any of the shared storage supported by the device. Apps can then create, update, and delete files and directories anywhere under the picked tree without any additional user interaction. Just like the other document intents, apps can persist this access across reboots.” Android Police adds, “All put together, this should be enough to alleviate most of the stress related to SD cards after the release of KitKat. Power users will no longer have to deal with crippled file managers, media apps will have convenient access to everything they should regardless of storage location, and developers won’t have to rely on messy hacks to work around the restrictions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android 5.0 Makes SD Cards Great Again
For its next stab at original programming, Netflix is venturing into kid-land with a series based on Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket books . The series is a partnership with Paramount, which produced the 2004 Jim Carrey film. How great would it be if Carrey starred in the series, too? [ Variety ] Read more…
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For its next stab at original programming, Netflix is venturing into kid-land with a series based on
The IRS doesn’t often raise the amount that you can contribute to your 401(k), so when they do, we tend to take notice. As of 2015, you’ll be able to contribute an additional $500 to both your regular 401(k) as well as another $500 to catch-up contributions if you’re over 50. Read more…
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You Can Increase Your 401(k) Contribution by $500 Next Year