golf – Page 6 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Texas cops joke on Facebook about Ebola-tainted meth and net one arrest

A Central Texas police department issued a “breaking news alert” on Facebook, cautioning residents that meth and heroin in the Granite Shoals area “could be contaminated with the life-threatening disease Ebola .” Last week’s fake Facebook alert urged the public “NOT” to ingest those illicit drugs “until it has been properly checked for possible Ebola contamination” by the police department. The ploy netted one arrest, the Granite Shoals Police Department (GSPD) reported on Facebook. A woman allegedly brought in her meth so the police department could analyze it for Ebola: This morning, we had our first concerned citizen notify the Granite Shoals Police Department (GSPD) that they believed their methamphetamine may be tainted. Our officers gladly took the item for further testing. Results and booking photos are pending. Please continue to report any possibly tainted methamphetamine or other narcotics to the Granite Shoals Police Department. Public health and safety continue to remain our #1 priority. ‪#‎notkidding‬ For the uninitiated, there are no Ebola-contaminated drugs. The alert was a hoax played on the citizens of Granite Shoals, a town of about 5,000 northwest of Austin. But the arrest of 29-year-old Chastity Eugina Hopson is not a joke. She was accused of possessing under a gram of a controlled substance. The police department described Hopson’s arrest as “the winner of the Facebook post challenge.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas cops joke on Facebook about Ebola-tainted meth and net one arrest

Cops: Lottery terminal hack allowed suspects to print more winning tickets

Six people have been charged in what prosecutors say was a scheme to hack Connecticut state lottery terminals so they produced more winning tickets and fewer losing ones. At least two of the suspects have been charged with felonies, including first-degree larceny, first-degree computer crimes, and rigging a game, according to an article published by The Hartford Courant . The suspects allegedly owned or worked at retail stores that produced winning tickets in numbers that were much higher than the state average. Of tickets generated at one liquor store, for instance, 76 percent were instant winners in one sample and 59 percent in another sample. The state-wide average, meanwhile, was just 24 percent. After manipulating the terminals, the suspects cashed the tickets and took the proceeds, prosecutors alleged. The charges come several months after lottery officials suspended a game called the 5 Card Cash after they noticed it was generating more winning tickets than its parameters should have allowed. The game remains suspended. Investigators say more arrests may be made in the future. Almost a year ago, prosecutors in Iowa presented evidence indicating the former head of computer security for the state’s lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops: Lottery terminal hack allowed suspects to print more winning tickets

Minimalist genome—only 473 genes—synthesized and used to boot up a cell

The bacteria that acted as the raw material for this experiment. Life is a rather difficult thing to define, but there are a few aspects that most biologists would agree on: it has to maintain genetic material and be able to make copies of itself. Both of these require energy, so it also must host some sort of minimal metabolism. In large, complex cells, each of these requirements takes hundreds of genes. Even in the simplified genomes of some bacteria, the numbers are still over a hundred. But does this represent the minimum number of genes that life can get away with? About a decade ago, researchers started to develop the technology to synthesize a genome from scratch and then put it in charge of a living cell. Now, five years after their initial successes, researchers used this model to try to figure out the genetic minimum for life itself. At first, the project seemed to be progressing well. In 2008, the team described the tools it had developed that could build the entire genome of a bacterium. (The team used a parasitic bacteria called Mycoplasma genitalium that started with only 525 genes.) Two years after that, they managed to get a genome synthesized using this method to boot up bacteria , taking the place of the normal genome. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Minimalist genome—only 473 genes—synthesized and used to boot up a cell

Report: “YouTube Connect” will be a livestreaming Periscope competitor

VentureBeat has the scoop on another YouTube service: YouTube Connect. Connect would be a livestreaming service which would take on “spur-of-the-moment” live video services like Facebook Live and Twitter’s Periscope. The report says the service would include apps on Android and iOS with “much of the same functionality” as Periscope and Facebook Live. Streaming would be immediate and paired with chat and “tagging” features. There is supposedly even a “news feed” that would list videos from friends and your YouTube subscriptions. Live broadcasts would be saved for later on-demand viewing and would show up on the content creator’s YouTube channel. The new service would be yet another expansion of the YouTube brand and app lineup. Including Connect, YouTube’s video empire would be spread across a whopping seven apps: the regular YouTube app, YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, YouTube Creator Studio, and YouTube Capture. There is also the umbrella subscription service YouTube Red. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: “YouTube Connect” will be a livestreaming Periscope competitor

London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

An artist’s conception of the Boom aircraft at London’s Heathrow Airport. (credit: Boom) After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems. But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to The Guardian , Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City. The agreement brings Branson’s Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin’s base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

9.7-inch iPad Pro and iPhone SE both have 2GB of RAM

Enlarge / The 9.7-inch iPad Pro isn’t quite the equal of the 12.9-inch version. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple has started distributing both the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro to journalists, and one of the first things to come to light has been the amount of RAM in each device. Memory in iDevices has a big impact on performance and general usability, but Apple almost never actually talks about it so we need to have hardware in hand before we can get the full story. The good news is that the iPhone SE has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus despite its smaller size and lower price. The not as good news is that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPad Air 2, not the 4GB of RAM on offer in the 12.7-inch version. RAM doesn’t have quite the same effect in an iOS device as it does in laptops and desktops—iOS was originally designed for low RAM devices and even though current iPhones and iPads have much more RAM than the 128MB in the first iPhone, the OS is still aggressive about ejecting apps from memory. Giving an iPhone or iPad more RAM doesn’t necessarily speed up general performance, but it does mean that apps and browser tabs need to be ejected from memory less often. Today this is particularly beneficial in Safari, which needs to reload tabs when they’re ejected from RAM—at best this process adds a couple extra seconds to what ought to be a simple tab switch, and at worst you don’t have connectivity and so can’t see the tab you’re trying to open. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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9.7-inch iPad Pro and iPhone SE both have 2GB of RAM

Apple announces new 4-inch “iPhone SE,” starting at $399

Behold, the iPhone SE. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) CUPERTINO, Calif.—It’s a big day for small phones. Today, Apple announced its anticipated “iPhone SE,” Apple’s first new 4-inch phone since the iPhone 5C and 5S were released in the fall of 2013. The phone is a throwback in a lot of ways. It’s got the same 1136×640 resolution screen as the iPhone 5 family, and its general design borrows much more from those older phones than it does from the thinner, more rounded 6 and 6S. It looks like and is probably best described as “an iPhone 5S but faster.” Apple VP Greg Joswiak introduced the device, noting that there was great demand for a smaller iPhone. “We sold 30 million 4-inch iPhones in 2015,” he said. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple announces new 4-inch “iPhone SE,” starting at $399

10 more OEMs pledge to make auto-braking standard in new cars

(credit: Ford) The number of car makers committed to making automatic emergency braking a standard feature on all new cars has doubled this week. On Thursday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced that 20 manufacturers are now onboard with the plan, which will see AEB systems installed throughout their model range by 2022. In September of last year, we reported that 10 OEMs had already made the pledge. In the past, government mandates were needed to spread advanced driver safety aids like airbags or electronic stability control systems beyond the luxury cars in which they first appeared. In this case, the auto industry has gotten ahead of possible NHTSA regulation and looks set to implement AEB itself. Speaking at an event last Fall , NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said that NHTSA wanted to see OEMs implement AEB as quickly as possible. “Safety,” he said, “should not be a luxury item. Its an obligation for all of us.” Whether 2022 qualifies as “quickly” may be a matter of opinion, but may be reasonable given the long product development lifecycles of new vehicles. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

Littermates were injected with either a control virus (right) or a virus that knocked out O-GlcNAcTransferase (OGT) (left) in a subpopulation of cells in the hypothalamus in the brain. OGT knock out made the mouse eat twice as much as its sibling. This photo was taken about five weeks after virus injection. (credit: Olof Lagerlof ) After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it. When researchers knocked down a single enzyme in the brains of mice, the rodents seemed to lose the ability to tell when they were full. They ate more than twice their usual amount of food at meal times and tripled their body fat within three weeks. And—most strikingly—when the researchers reversed the experiment, the mice just quickly stopped eating so much . Data on the enzymatic switch, published Thursday in Science , suggests a possible target for future drugs to treat obesity in humans. The enzyme is O-GlcNAc transferase, or OGT, which is known to work in a chemical pathway controlled by nutrients and metabolic hormones, particularly insulin. That pathway has long been linked with obesity. But researchers knew almost nothing about the how the pathway linked to the metabolic disorder or OGT’s specific role. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

307-million-year-old “monster” fossil identified at last

Sean McMahon Reconstruction of the Tully Monster as it would have looked 300 million years ago, swimming in the Carboniferous seas. Notice the jointed proboscis, the multiple rows of teeth, and the dorsal eye bar. 4 more images in gallery The “Tully monster,” a mysterious animal that swam in the inland oceans of Illinois more than 300 million years ago, left behind a tantalizingly detailed map of its body in a well-preserved package of fossils. Unfortunately, nobody could figure out what the creature was for half a century—until now. Francis Tully found the remains of the tiny beast (it’s only about 10 centimeters long) in Illinois in 1958 and gave it the whimsical scientific name Tullimonstrum (nickname: Tully monster). A long stalk extends from the front of its body, which ends in a toothy orifice called a buccal apparatus. Its body is covered in gills and narrows down into a powerful tail that it probably used for propulsion. Its eyes peer out from either end of a long, rigid bar attached to the animal’s back. The Tully monster lived during the Carboniferous period, when the North American Great Basin was an enormous inland sea. Trees were colonizing the land for the first time, transforming the soil and filling the atmosphere with higher levels of oxygen than Earth had known before or since. Giant arthropods, like the 8-foot-long millipede known as Arthropleura , crawled through the new forests. It was a good time to be a weird animal, and the Tully monster probably fit right in. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments