Tag: green

NASA confirms two moons in the Solar System are venting oceans into space

Scientists are increasingly confident that an ocean below the icy surface of Enceladus could support life. (credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA) The prospects for life existing in our Solar System beyond Earth, and finding it within a decade or two, improved with two scientific findings announced Thursday by NASA. The space agency confirmed the presence of hydrogen in plumes emanating from Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, and it also reported that plumes are very likely to exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Both of these findings are significant. It means not only that most of the ingredients required for life must exist in the oceans of Enceladus but also that a pair of probes being planned to explore Europa will have a much better chance of finding any life there. In something of an understatement, NASA’s Jim Green, who oversees the agency’s planetary exploration plans, said, “This is a very exciting time to be exploring the Solar System.” The findings buttress a recent focus by NASA on bulking up a program to explore these ocean worlds in the outer Solar System, including Enceladus, Europa and Saturn’s methane-covered moon Titan. This has been a principal aim, in particular, for Texas Republican John Culberson, who serves as chairman of the House subcommittee over NASA’s budget. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NASA confirms two moons in the Solar System are venting oceans into space

Humanity is on the cusp of de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth

After successfully extracting sequenceable DNA from a pair of Woolly Mammoth carcasses pulled from Siberia’s permafrost in 2014, a team of Harvard researchers announced on Thursday that they are tantalizing close to cloning the (currently) extinct pachyderms. The team made the announcement ahead of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting this week. They estimate that they’re just two years away from creating a viable hybrid embryo. That is, they take a modern day asian elephant embryo and splice in DNA from the Mammoth to get a fuzzy “mammophant, ” as the team calls it. “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo, ” Harvard Professor George Church told the Guardian . “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.” So far, the team hasn’t progressed passed the cellular stage in creating one of these beasts though they have managed to splice in as many as 45 mammoth genes, up from their initial 15. Within a few years, the team expects to ramp their efforts up to the embryonic stage but it’ll likely be quite a while until they can birth a living mammophant. Since the Asian elephant is itself endangered, this hybridizing technique could help preserve the species. At the same time, the Harvard team doesn’t want to put one of these valuable animals at risk carrying a mammophant fetus to term, so they’re looking into gestating it in an artificial womb. That’s where the delay comes in. While Church’s team has managed to grow a mouse in an artificial womb for ten days — half its normal gestation period — the technology for doing that for an elephant-scale animal likely won’t be feasible for at least a decade. And even once that technology has matured, there are still a host of hand-wringing ethical arguments that will have to be sorted before Church’s team gets the green light to proceed further. Source: Guardian

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Humanity is on the cusp of de-extincting the Wooly Mammoth

China Chokes On Smog So Bad That Planes Can’t Land

Major cities across northern China choked Monday under a blanket of smog so thick that industries were ordered shut down and air and ground traffic was disrupted. From a report: At least 23 cities issued red alerts for a swath of pollution that has hovered over much of the nation since Friday, China’s Xinhua news agency reported. Alerts are expected to remain in effect through Wednesday. Hospitals set emergency procedures in motion to deal with an influx of breathing-related illnesses. Large hospitals in the port city of Tianjin, less than 100 miles southeast of Beijing, saw a surge in asthma and other respiratory issues, China’s People’s Daily reported. The pollution forced the city to close the highways and caused delays and cancellations for dozens of flights, Xinhua said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Chokes On Smog So Bad That Planes Can’t Land

The Next iPhone Will Probably Have a Beautiful, Curved OLED Display

The next iPhone will reportedly have a beautiful OLED display. Sharp executive Tai Jeng-wu essentially confirmed the next iPhone’s hardware upgrade in a recent trip to his alma mater, Tatung University in Taiwan, according to Japan’s Nikkei Asian Review . Read more…

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The Next iPhone Will Probably Have a Beautiful, Curved OLED Display

NASA changed all the astrological signs and I’m a crab now

Enlarge / The new sign, “Ophiuchus,” means “Snake Bearer.” And who’s got two thumbs and loves snakes? THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. (credit: Wikimedia Commons ) According to a post on NASASpacePlace , everything we thought we knew about the influence the heavens have over our Earthly lives has been thrown into chaos. NASA has announced that the celestial sphere above us contains not twelve canonical zodiacal constellations, but 13. The heretofore overlooked constellation, Ophiuchus, is purported to guide and command events surrounding humans born between November 29 and December 17—so, if you used to be a Sagittarius, then congratulations: you’ve got a new sign, baby! The addition of Ophiuchus—the snake bearer , in case you were wondering—has obvious and far-reaching implications for the entire western Babylonian-derived zodiac calendar. For one thing, squeezing it in means changing the effective dates of all the other signs. According to Yahoo News , the new 13-sign calendar plays out like this: Capricorn:  January 20-February 16 Aquarius:  February 16-March 11 Pisces:  March 11-April 18 Aries:  April 18-May 13 Taurus:  May 13-June 21 Gemini:  June 21-July 20 Cancer:  July 20-August 10 Leo:  August 10-September 16 Virgo:  September 16-October 30 Libra:  October 30-November 23 Scorpio:  November 23-November 29 Ophiuchus:  November 29-December 17 Sagittarius:  December 17-January 20 The changes are as sweeping as they are staggering. For example, I woke up this morning firmly believing that I was an outgoing, courageous, independent, generous Leo. However, now I have to come to grips with the fact that I am in fact a stupid, sulky, inconsiderate, pessimistic Cancer. I have gone from lion to crab, and it weighs heavily upon me. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NASA changed all the astrological signs and I’m a crab now

YouTube Stars Are Blowing Up Over Not Getting Paid (Update)

For the past year YouTubers have been trying to navigate a deluge of false copyright claims and a changing algorithm that rewards needlessly-long videos. Now, allegedly, the platform is starting to withhold paychecks. Read more…

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YouTube Stars Are Blowing Up Over Not Getting Paid (Update)

20 hotels suffer hack costing tens of thousands their credit card information

(credit: HEI Hotels & Resorts) The chain that owns Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental hotels—HEI Hotels & Resorts— said this weekend that the payment systems for 20 of its locations had been infected with malware that may have been able to steal tens of thousands of credit card numbers and corresponding customer names, expiration dates, and verification codes. HEI claims that it did not lose control of any customer PINs, as they are not collected by the company’s systems. Still, HEI noted on its website that it doesn’t store credit card details either. “We believe that the malware may have accessed payment card information in real-time as it was being inputted into our systems,” the company said. The breach appears to have hit 20 HEI Hotels, and in most cases, the malware appears to have been active from December 2, 2015 to June 21, 2016. In a few cases, hotels may have been affected as early as March 1, 2015. According to a statement on HEI’s website, the malware affected point-of-sale (POS) terminals at the affected properties, but online booking and other online transactions were not affected. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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20 hotels suffer hack costing tens of thousands their credit card information

2,000-year-old toilet paper gives us a whiff of life on the Silk Road in China

Archaeologists scraped fecal bits off these ancient wipe sticks, discovered in a 2,000-year-old latrine at a pit stop along the Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. (credit: Hui-Yuan Yeh) For almost 1,500 years, the many trade routes known today as the Silk Road joined eastern China with western China, India, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa . These trade routes created their own culture, uniting empires and connecting distant civilizations through trade goods like books, textiles, and precious substances. But the most important use for the Silk Road was immigration. Now, a new analysis of 2,000-year-old toilet wipes found near Dunhuang in western China has revealed that these immigrants traveled vast distances on roads maintained by the Han in 100 CE. Unfortunately, these wanderers brought their diseases with them. In a new paper published this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports , a group of archaeologists in China and England describe how they found preserved fecal matter on wipe sticks used in a latrine at the Silk Road’s Xuanquanzhi rest stop. Archaeologists excavated the rest stop roughly 20 years ago and discovered that it was one of many such oases maintained by the Han government during the early centuries of the Silk Road. Weary travelers with the right documents could stop there to refresh themselves and their pack animals. They could also, apparently, use the bathrooms. What made the Xuanquanzhi rest stop special was its location near the deadly hot Taklamakan Desert. The arid region has preserved countless treasures from the heyday of the Silk Road, including a bundle of sticks wrapped in rags near the Xuanquanzhi latrines. While analyzing a collection of excavated goods from Xuanquanzhi, a group of archaeologists realized that these were no ordinary sticks. “These have been described in ancient Chinese texts of the period as a personal hygiene tool for wiping the anus after going to the toilet. Some of the cloth had a dark solid material still adhered to it after all this time,” Cambridge  anthropologist Piers Mitchell wrote . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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2,000-year-old toilet paper gives us a whiff of life on the Silk Road in China

Ben Heck powers on the Nintendo PlayStation’s CD drive

When we got our hands on the legendary ” Nintendo PlayStation ” prototype last November, the device worked fine as a Sony-branded SNES console sans audio, whereas its CD drive — the part that eventually led to the birth of the PlayStation — failed to be recognized by the system. The device has since been handed over to hacking maestro Ben Heck, who has just revealed that he finally got the CD drive to power up. First of all, Ben cleaned the contact pins on the Super Disc driver cartridge to get its 256KB of extension RAM talking to the console, then he removed one of the mod wires on the logic board, which got the CD drive to make a ticking noise and even pulling its tray back in. It was a nice “wow” moment for everyone, but the ticking noise suggested that the CD drive was struggling to move its optical head, plus the screen was flickering. Ben figured this was to do with a power glitch caused by three leaky electrolytic capacitors on the logic board, so he replaced those with modern ones, and boom! The CD drive is alive! The diagnostic software gave all the green ticks, and the CD player’s control panel appears to be working. As a bonus, the audio function has also been restored since that’s part of the CD drive’s decoder, so we can now fully enjoy SNES games on this super rare device as well. What’s left to do now is to find some compatible disc games and see if they’ll run on the Nintendo PlayStation — prototype owner Terry Diebold believes he may have one in the boxes he bought from that fateful auction . We also came across a homebrew game called Super Boss Gaiden based on the Super Disc cartridge’s software dump, so here’s hoping they can get that to work on the device. Source: The Ben Heck Show (YouTube)

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Ben Heck powers on the Nintendo PlayStation’s CD drive