Three years ago, Kevin Bates created a Tetris -playing business card to showcase his engineering skills to potential employers. But his creation quickly went viral on the internet, and everyone reminiscing about their beloved childhood Game Boy clamored for their own. After testing the waters with the equally tiny… Read more…
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Playing Tetris on a Business Card Is Everything I Hoped It Would Be
National parks are great any time of year (yes, even in winter ), but if you don’t want to shell out for the park pass, take advantage of the National Park Service’s fee free days this year. Here are all of them. Read more…
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All the Days You Can Visit National Parks for Free in 2017
The number of Americans dying of cancer has dropped to a 25-year low, equaling an estimated 2, 143, 200 fewer deaths in that period, says the new annual report from the American Cancer Society. In that time, the racial and gender disparities that exist in cancer rates have also narrowed somewhat, but they remain wide in many places. From a report on The Outline: Though the incidence of cancer remained stable for women and dropped slightly — by 2 percent — in men, rates remain overall 20 percent higher in men while rate of death for men is 40 percent higher than in women. The rates of both incidence and death vary wildly based on the type of cancer. The data that the ACS is using run through the end of 2014 for incidents of cancer and through 2013 for deaths. Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in the United States for both men and women.. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Fewer People Are Dying of Cancer Than Ever Before
According to a study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, an experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus was found to be 100 percent effective. The results offer hope of better protection against the disease that ravaged West Africa in 2014, killing more than 11, 000 people. From a report on BBC: A highly effective vaccine that guards against the deadly Ebola virus could be available by 2018, says the World Health Organization. Trials conducted in Guinea, one of the West African countries most affected by an outbreak of Ebola that ended this year, show it offers 100% protection. The vaccine is now being fast-tracked for regulatory approval. Manufacturer Merck has made 300, 000 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine available for use should Ebola strike. GAVI, the global vaccine alliance, provided $5m for the stockpile. Results, published in The Lancet medical journal, show of nearly 6, 000 people receiving the vaccine, all were free of the virus 10 days later. In a group of the same size not vaccinated, 23 later developed Ebola. Only one person who was vaccinated had a serious side effect that the researchers think was caused by the jab. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ebola Vaccine Gives 100 Percent Protection, Could Be Readily Available By 2018
Despite the gloriously colorful screens used in devices like the new iPhone 7, monochromatic E Ink displays have remained a popular choice for devices like e-readers since they’re cheap, durable, and work fine in direct sunlight. It also means they’re the perfect technology for turning trucks into in-your-face rolling billboards. Read more…
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Giant E Ink Screens Turn Trucks Into Dynamic Rolling Billboards
Amazon has just announced some nice improvements to the cheapest Kindle . The price is still crazy good at $80, and the battery still lasts for weeks. (It also still has a middling 167 ppi display.) But it’s also thinner, lighter, and now comes in black and white. Read more…
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The Cheapest Kindle Just Got Better
An anonymous reader writes: FitnessKeeper, the company behind running app Runkeeper, is in hot water in Europe. The company has received a formal complaint from the Norwegian Consumer Council for breaching European data protection laws. But why? Runkeeper tracks its users’ location at all times — not just when the app is active — and sends that data to advertisers. The NCC, a consumer rights watchdog, is conducting an investigation into 20 apps’ terms and conditions to see if the apps do what their permissions say they do and to monitor data flows. Tinder has already been reported to the Norwegian data protection authority for similar breaches of privacy laws. The NCC’s investigation into Runkeeper discovered that user location data is tracked around the clock and gets transmitted to a third party advertiser in the U.S. called Kiip.me.Finn Myrstad, the council’s digital policy director, said: We checked the apps technically, to see the data flows and to see if the apps actually do what they say they do. Everyone understands that Runkeeper tracks users while they exercise, but to continue after the training has ended is not okay. Not only is it a breach of privacy laws, we are also convinced that users do not want to be tracked in this way, or for information to be shared with third party advertisers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Fitness App Runkeeper Secretly Tracks Users At All Times, Sends Data to Advertisers
If you’ve noticed that solid-state drives (and the PCs that include them) no longer cost an arm and a leg, you’re not alone. Researchers at DRAMeXchange understand that the price per gigabyte of an SSD has fallen off a cliff in the past three years, and the trend is only accelerating. If the company’s estimates are on the mark, these drives could cost just 11 cents more per gig than conventional hard drives by 2017. At that rate, you might not have to choose between high capacity and breakneck speed when you’re on a budget — you could easily afford both. Via: Computerworld Source: TrendForce
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Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind
Before the sun sets on 2015, Adobe has another round of updates for its Creative Cloud software. The new features span a number of apps, but we’ll focus on Photoshop CC . To boost overall productivity, and to save you time and a few headaches, Adobe is giving the photo-editing software custom toolbars. This means that you’ll be able to add, delete and rearrange what appears in that set of tools on the left side of the interface. The new feature allows to you customize the layout of your workspace so that only the items you use are taking up valuable space. In theory, you’ll spend less time hunting for the tool you’re after, too. Slideshow-344396
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Adobe Photoshop update brings custom toolbars and artboards
Researchers at Stanford University announced Tuesday that they had successfully leveraged the “spooky” interaction of entangled electrons to send a message between them over a span of 1.2 miles. This is by far the longest distance that scientists have managed to send entangled particles and provides the strongest evidence to date that quantum computing can have practical applications. Quantum computers exploit the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement , what Einstein famously referred to as ” spooky action over distance “, wherein two particles are connected regardless of the distance between them. That is, as in this case, if two electrons are entangled, the direction of their spin will always be the same. If one electron is spinning clockwise, the other will be too. If one reverses the direction of its spin, the other will as well. Doesn’t matter if they’re on the opposite sides of a molecule or on opposite sides of the galaxy, the two particles and their behaviors are inextricably linked. “Electron spin is the basic unit of a quantum computer, ” Stanford physicist Leo Yu said in a statement. “This work can pave the way for future quantum networks that can send highly secure data around the world.” The problem is that electrons are confined to atoms. And in order to get two electrons to entangle over long distances (and allow their quantum computer networks to communicate with one another) they need photons to act as the messengers. This is accomplished by “pairing” the photon and electron, a process called “quantum correlation”. But that runs into another issue: photons love to change the direction of their spin while travelling through fiber optic lines. So while you can get the first electron and the photon to correlate pretty easily, keeping the photon on task as it travels to the second electron is way more difficult. To overcome this, the Stanford team created “time-stamps” for the photons that act as reference points for the photons, allowing them to confirm that they arrived with the same spin orientation that they left with. Using this method, the team successfully entangled a pair of electrons over 2 kilometers of fiber optic line. Their research has been published in the journal Nature Communications . [Image Credit: L.A. Cicero] Via: Stanford University Source: Nature Communications
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Scientists use ‘spooky action’ to mail electron messages a mile