itwbennett (1594911) writes “Cisco Systems said Monday it plans to invest over $1 billion to expand its cloud business over the next two years, including building a global, OpenStack-based ‘network of clouds’ that it has dubbed the ‘intercloud’. The Intercloud will support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud, both private and public, according to Cisco.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Cisco Plans $1B Investment In Cloud
First time accepted submitter Trep (366) writes “I thought Slashdot readers might be interested in seeing how my friend is slowly building a 3D printed toolbox. He’s created a fully functional tape measure which is 3D printed as a single assembly, to follow up on his 3D printed dial calipers. This is a pretty novel design, with a lot of moving parts that come out of the printer completely assembled!” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Functional 3D-Printed Tape Measure
Remember all that business about the NSA saying it only collects phone metadata ? Yeah, that’s not true. Not only can the NSA listen in on foreigners’ phone calls. It can record “every single” conversation in an entire country and store the recordings for 30 days at a time, according to a new Washington Post report . Read more…
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NSA System Can Record Entire Countries’ Calls for 30 Days at a Time
A very tricky phishing scam that takes advantage of Google Docs is making its way around the web . And since it uses a google.com URL and even makes use of Google’s SSL encryption, it’s almost impossible to tell that it’s a hack. Your best safeguard, as always, is a little bit of common sense. Read more…
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Beware of This Dangerously Convincing Google Docs Phishing Scam
Cryonics enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that scientists have demonstrated the ability to revive frozen life not just after a couple years or even a couple of decades. They can bring something back to life that’s been frozen for fifteen centuries. The previous record was just 20 years. Read more…
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Scientists Revive Moss That Was Encased In Ice For 1,500 Years
EwanPalmer sends a followup to a story from last year about a team of Siberian scientists who recovered an ancient wooly mammoth carcass. It was originally believed to be about 10, 000 years old, but subsequent tests showed the animal died over 43, 000 years ago. The scientists have been surprised by how well preserved the soft tissues were. They say it’s in better shape than a human body buried for six months. “The tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved.” The mammoth’s intestines contain vegetation from its last meal, and they have the liver as well. The scientists are optimistic that they’ll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells. They now say there’s a “high chance” that data would allow them to clone the mammoth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning
sandbagger writes “The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the ‘remarkably dysfunctional’ federal bureaucracy. Officials at the Office of Scientific Integrity spent ‘exorbitant amounts of time’ in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, David Wright writes. He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI ‘the very worst job I have ever had.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits In Frustration With Bureaucracy
cartechboy writes “What’s $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87, 000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don’t have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can’t do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry – To Shut It Down
With about 6.3 million Twitter followers, UberFacts reaches millions of people with little nuggets of trivia every day. Unfortunately, many of those “fun facts” are completely wrong or misleading. Read more…
itwbennett writes “As Slashdot readers will remember, last month the U.S government ‘petitioned the court system’ to let the NSA retain phone call metadata for more than 5 years, ironically ‘because it needs to preserve it as evidence for the various privacy lawsuits filed against the government.’ Well, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ruled against that request. The FISC’s Presiding Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled Friday (PDF) that the proposed amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of U.S. persons whose ‘telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government for five years to aid in national security investigation.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Court Denies NSA Request To Hold Phone Records Beyond 5 Years