humans – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

IEEE Sets New Ethernet Standard That Brings 5X the Speed Without Cable Ripping

Reader coondoggie writes: As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification — IEEE P802.3bz — that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling. The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks. Indeed, the wireless component may be the most significant implication of the standard as 2.5G and 5G Ethernet will allow connectivity to 802.11ac Wave 2 Access Points, considered by many to be the real driving force behind bringing up the speed of traditional NBase-T products. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IEEE Sets New Ethernet Standard That Brings 5X the Speed Without Cable Ripping

Air Force Grounds $400 Billion F-35s Because of ‘Peeling and Crumbling’ Insulation

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the Washington Post: Less than two months after declaring the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ready for combat, the Air Force on Friday announced that it was temporarily grounding 15 of the jets after it discovered that insulation was “peeling and crumbling” inside the fuel tanks. The setback is the latest for the $400 billion system, the most expensive in the history of the Pentagon. The problem comes as the program, which for years faced billions of dollars in cost overruns and significant schedule delays, had begun to make strides. The insulation problem affects a total of 57 aircraft, the Air Force said, 42 of which are still in production… In a statement, Lockheed Martin said that “the issue is confined to one supplier source and one batch of parts.” It emphasized that “this is not a technical or design issue; it is a supply chain manufacturing quality issue…” It is unclear how long the aircraft would be grounded, how long the problem would take to fix or what the larger affect on the program would be. âoeWhile nearing completion, the F-35 is still in development, and challenges are to be expected, ” said an Air Force spokeswoman, adding “The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise, and we’re confident we’ll continue to do so.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Air Force Grounds $400 Billion F-35s Because of ‘Peeling and Crumbling’ Insulation

Archaeologists Discover Perfectly Preserved 168-Year-Old Ship in the Arctic Ocean

An arctic research mission claims that it’s discovered the HMS Terror , one of two Franklin Expedition ships that sunk during a doomed attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage. Incredibly, the 168-year-old wreck would probably not have been found if it weren’t for information provided by an indigenous crew member. Read more…

Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine

A page from the Grolier Codex, now confirmed by an international team of scholars to be the oldest bound book found in the Americas. In a rare reversal, archaeologists have determined that a Maya book written almost 900 years ago is genuine–after decades of believing it was fake. The Grolier Codex was so named because it was first displayed in 1971 at the book lovers’ Grolier Club in New York City. Archaeologist Michael Coe, who arranged the 1971 showing, later described its rather questionable history in a book . It was acquired in a spectacularly scammy way in 1966 by a Mexican collector named Josué Sáenz. Coe says that Sáenz told him that a group of unknown men offered to sell the book to him, along with a few other items found “in a dry cave” near the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas. They would only sell it if Sáenz agreed never to tell anyone or show the book. The collector, intrigued, took a plane to a remote airstrip with two experts, who declared the codex fake. But Sáenz went with his gut and bought the codex. After allowing Coe to display it in New York, he gave it to the Mexican government. There were a number of good reasons to believe the Grolier Codex was fake–beyond the sketchy way Sáenz procured it. Unlike three other Maya Codex finds, it had writing on only one side of each of its 10 pages. Plus, some of the pages appear to have been cut relatively recently. There are odd discrepancies in the book’s calendar system, hinting that a forger might have been trying to imitate a calendar he saw in another Maya artifact. The drawings are also unusual for a Maya document, combining styles of the Mesoamerican Mixtec people with Toltec attire. The Toltec were often hailed by the Aztecs as ancestors, and their art shares many similarities with late Maya art. Though carbon dating placed the Codex’s bark pages during the late Maya period, it was not unknown for looters to find blank pages in ancient Maya caches and cover them in fake hieroglyphs to make them more valuable. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine

Facebook Will Force Advertising On Ad-Blocking Users

Long-time reader geek writes: Facebook is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software (Could be paywalled; alternate source). The social network said on Tuesday that it will change the way advertising is loaded into its desktop website to make its ad units considerably more difficult for ad blockers to detect. “Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they’re not a tack on, ” said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of engineering for advertising and pages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Will Force Advertising On Ad-Blocking Users

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

How to Make Chocolate from the Fruit to the Candy Bar

Do you know where chocolate comes from? Apparently, not from the checkout line at grocery stores! How to Make Everything shows how to make chocolate from scratch, from the fruit of the cacao tree to the fermentation to the sun drying process to making sugar and cocoa butter to the grinding and tempering and molding of the chocolate bar. There are so many steps, it’s a wonder how we ever figured it out. Read more…

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How to Make Chocolate from the Fruit to the Candy Bar

This Technicolor Mutant Zebrafish Is Synthetic Biology’s Craziest Creation Yet

It sounds ripped out of the pages of a science fiction novel—or maybe a Lisa Frank catalog—but the genetically modified, brilliantly colored zebra fish pictured above is no fantasy. It was created by scientists, to explore one of the most elusive processes in biology: tissue regeneration. Read more…

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This Technicolor Mutant Zebrafish Is Synthetic Biology’s Craziest Creation Yet

The Two-Mile-Long Tunnel Beneath Seattle Makes Humans Look So Tiny

One of the major elements of the the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Program will be the gigantic SR 99 tunnel which will host a double-deck roadway under downtown Seattle . In this stunning new photo, you are looking south inside the tunnel dug by Bertha, the SR 99 tunneling machine . It is hard to say less than this tunnel is really enormous. Read more…

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The Two-Mile-Long Tunnel Beneath Seattle Makes Humans Look So Tiny

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