Tag: games

Patent Troll Wins $15.7M From Samsung By Claiming To Own Bluetooth

An anonymous reader writes: A jury has upheld patent claims against Samsung and awarded the patent-holder $15.7 million. “The patents relate to compatibility between different types of modems, and connect to a string of applications going back to 1997. The first version of Bluetooth was invented by Swedish cell phone company Ericsson in 1994.” Lawyers for the plaintiff argue that the patents cover all devices that use Bluetooth 2.0 or later, so further cases could extend far beyond Samsung. Of course, the company that won the lawsuit wasn’t the one who made the invention, or the one who patented it. The company is Rembrandt IP, “one of the oldest and most successful” patent trolls. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Patent Troll Wins $15.7M From Samsung By Claiming To Own Bluetooth

US Military Working On 3D Printing Exact Replicas of Bones & Limbs

ErnieKey writes The U.S. military is working with technology that will allow them to create exact virtual replicas of their soldiers. In case of an injury, these replicas could be used to 3D print exact medical models for rebuilding the injured patient’s body and even exact replica implants. Could we all one day soon have virtual backups of ourselves that we can access and have new body parts 3D printed on demand? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Military Working On 3D Printing Exact Replicas of Bones & Limbs

Researcher Developing Tattoo Removal Cream

BarbaraHudson writes During tattooing, ink is injected into the skin, initiating an immune response, and cells called “macrophages” move into the area and “eat up” the ink. The macrophages carry some of the ink to the body’s lymph nodes, but some that are filled with ink stay put, embedded in the skin. That’s what makes the tattoo visible under the skin. Dalhousie Uiversity’s Alec Falkenham is developing a topical cream that works by targeting the macrophages that have remained at the site of the tattoo. New macrophages move in to consume the previously pigment-filled macrophages and then migrate to the lymph nodes, eventually taking all the dye with them. “When comparing it to laser-based tattoo removal, in which you see the burns, the scarring, the blisters, in this case, we’ve designed a drug that doesn’t really have much off-target effect, ” he said. “We’re not targeting any of the normal skin cells, so you won’t see a lot of inflammation. In fact, based on the process that we’re actually using, we don’t think there will be any inflammation at all and it would actually be anti-inflammatory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researcher Developing Tattoo Removal Cream

Oldest Twin Remains Found In Siberia

astroengine writes A team of Canadian and Russian researchers investigating an early Neolithic cemetery in Siberia have identified the world’s oldest set of human twins, buried with their young mother. The skeleton of the woman was exhumed in 1997 from a hunter-gatherer cemetery in south-eastern Siberia. Found with 15 marmot teeth — decorative accessories which were probably attached to clothing — the remains were photographed and labelled, but were not investigated by anthropologists. Now Angela Lieverse, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and colleagues Andrzej Weber from the University of Alberta, Canada, and Vladimir Bazaliiskii from Irkutsk University, Russia, have examined the skeleton and found remains of twin fetuses nestled between the pelvis and upper legs. The twins, about 36 to 40 weeks old, probably suffocated during their mother’s troubled labor nearly 8, 000 years ago. “This is not only one of the oldest archaeologically documented cases of death during childbirth, but also the earliest confirmed set of human twins in the world, ” Lieverse said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Oldest Twin Remains Found In Siberia

VESA Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a Paves Way For 8K Displays, Longer Battery Life

MojoKid writes: The VESA standards organization has published the eDP v1.4a specification (Embedded DisplayPort) that has some important new features for device manufacturers as they bump up mobile device displays into the 4K category and start looking towards even higher resolutions. eDP v1.4a will be able to support 8K displays, thanks to a segmented panel architecture known as Multi-SST Operation (MSO). A display with this architecture is broken into two or four segments, each of which supports HBR3 link rates of 8.1 Gbps. The updated eDP spec also includes VESA’s Display Stream Compression (DSC) standard v1.1, which can improve battery life in mobile devices. In another effort to conserve battery power, VESA has tweaked its Panel Self Refresh (PSR) feature, which saves power by letting GPUs update portions of a display instead of the entire screen. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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VESA Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a Paves Way For 8K Displays, Longer Battery Life

Demonii Tracker Tops 30 Million Connected Peers

An anonymous reader writes Demonii is the tracker behind the scenes for many BitTorrent sites serving pirated content. This week the tracker broke through the barrier of 30 million connected peers, handling no less than 2 billion connections per day. In other words, the scale of operation has become massive. TorrentFreak interviewed an operator of the site, and it was revealed that the tracker runs smoothly on just three dedicated servers, communicating at 180 Mb/s while serving 4 million torrents. Some people have argued that trackers are obsolete in the first place, as DHT and PEX allow peers to share the same information among each other, but Demonii’s operator reminds that having trackers speeds up the initial peer finding significantly. In any case, Demonii is not going away anytime soon. The tracker is already on its way to another milestone. The 40 million peer milestone will probably come into view later this year, but first there are a trillion more connections to process. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Demonii Tracker Tops 30 Million Connected Peers

Most Survival Games Have Problems That S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Solved Long Ago

Bulletstorm and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter lead Adrian Chmielarz recently confessed that he liked the idea of survival games more than any survival games he actually played. I feel similarly, but his remark got me thinking about why that might be. Read more…

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Most Survival Games Have Problems That S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Solved Long Ago

US Army Releases Code For Internal Forensics Framework

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Maryland has released on GitHub a version of a Python-based internal forensics tool which the army itself has been using for five years. Dshell is a Linux-based framework designed to help investigators identify and examine compromised IT environments. One of the intentions of the open-sourcing of the project is to involve community developers in the creation of new modules for the framework. The official release indicates that the version of Dshell released to Github is not necessarily the same one that the Army uses, or at least that the module package might be pared down from the Army-issued software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Army Releases Code For Internal Forensics Framework

Scientists Discover How To Track Natural Errors In DNA Replication

BarbaraHudson writes Researchers figured out how to label and keep track of new pieces of DNA, and learned to follow the enzyme responsible for copying those pieces. Their research focused on enzymes called polymerases. These enzymes create small regions in DNA that act as scaffolds for the copied DNA. Scientists assumed that the body deletes the scaffolds containing errors, or mutations, and the standard computer models supported this theory. However, the actual research showed that about 1.5 percent of those erroneous scaffolds are left over, trapped within the DNA. After running models, scientists now believe they can track how DNA replicates and find the most likely areas where these scaffolds with errors turn up. The erroneous scaffolds usually appear close to genetic switches, those regions that turn on when genes activate. The mutations damage the switch, which results in genetic disease, as well as increasing the likelihood of cancer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Discover How To Track Natural Errors In DNA Replication