Blizzard Has Canceled Titan, Its Next-gen MMO

Ptolemarch writes: Blizzard never officially announced it, but now it’s gone: Titan, the next-generation MMO that had been in development for seven years, has been canceled. Mike Morhaime said, “[W]e set out to make the most ambitious thing that you could possibly imagine. And it didn’t come together. We didn’t find the fun. We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.” Polygon adds an article detailing everything publicly known about Titan (which wasn’t much). MMO-Champion’s report mentions rumors of a new project at Blizzard called Prometheus. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Blizzard Has Canceled Titan, Its Next-gen MMO

Magnetic Nanobeads Can Snatch Bacteria and Virus Out of Blood

Sepsis is an nasty and surprisingly common way to die. The illness is triggered by blood infections but, ultimately, it’s your own immune reaction—not the bacteria or virus—that poisons you to death. Filtering those pathogens out of blood right away, though, could be a promising treatment. Enter a new device made of m agnetic nanobeads coated in sticky proteins that attract bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Read more…

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Magnetic Nanobeads Can Snatch Bacteria and Virus Out of Blood

How the iPhone 6 Stacks Up Against Its Toughest Competition

The iPhone 6 is here! It’s sleek and rounded, just like the leaked photos we’ve been seeing for months. But now we finally know what’s inside that Jony Ive-designed shell. How’s it measure up to the stiff smartphone competition? Let’s see. Read more…

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How the iPhone 6 Stacks Up Against Its Toughest Competition

CDC Statistics Show What Happens When You Don’t Vaccinate

The latest figures: Between January 1 and August 29 of this year, nearly 600 confirmed measles cases were reported to the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. The resurgence is the greatest the U.S. has seen since the disease was eliminated from the country in 2000. Read more…

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CDC Statistics Show What Happens When You Don’t Vaccinate

Securely Format a Drive in Windows 8 from the Command Line

As you probably know, formatting a hard drive doesn’t completely erase the data on it. You must overwrite the data to securely destroy it, preferably multiple times. Windows 8 let’s you do this with the format command and the /p parameter. Read more…

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Securely Format a Drive in Windows 8 from the Command Line

Space station cosmonauts find life in the vacuum of space

The Russian press agency ITAR-TASS is reporting something so surprising that I’m having a hard time believing it: Cosmonauts have found microorganisms on the exterior of the International Space Station. Russian scientists are shocked by this discovery and can’t really explain how it is possible. Read more…

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Space station cosmonauts find life in the vacuum of space

​How San Francisco’s Clean Drinking Water Destroyed The 2nd Yellowstone

Did you know Yosemite Valley used to have an identical twin? It was dammed in the early 1900s to provide San Francisco with water it relies on to this day, but recently, conservationists have been calling for its restoration. http://gizmodo.com/how-san-franci… Read more…

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​How San Francisco’s Clean Drinking Water Destroyed The 2nd Yellowstone

New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory

ganjadude (952775) writes “I stumbled upon this little scoop and thought the Slashdot crowd would be interested in. The new kid on the block, known as the HummingBoard can handle faster processors, more RAM and will fit the same cases for the Pi. Also, you can expand the memory and the CPU is replaceable! The low end model starts at $45 and the high end costs $100. So tell me guys, what are you going to do with yours?” $45 model is a single core iMX6 (an ARMv7) with 512M of RAM, the $100 model has a dual core i.MX6 with 1G of RAM. Full specs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory

Job Automation and the Minimum Wage Debate

An anonymous reader writes “An article at FiveThirtyEight looks at the likelihood of various occupations being replaced by automation. It mentions President Obama’s proposed increase to the federal minimum wage, saying big leaps in automation could reshape that debate. ‘[The wage increase] from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour could make it worthwhile for employers to adopt emerging technologies to do the work of their low-wage workers. But can a robot really do a janitor’s job? Can software fully replace a fast-food worker? Economists have long considered these low-skilled, non-routine jobs as less vulnerable to technological replacement, but until now, quantitative estimates of a job’s vulnerability have been missing from the debate.’ Many minimum-wage jobs are reportedly at high risk, including restaurant workers, cashiers, and telemarketers. A study rated the probability of computerization within 20 years (PDF): 92% for retail salespeople, 97% for cashiers, and 94% for waitstaff. There are other jobs with a high likelihood, but they employ fewer people and generally have a higher pay rate: tax preparers (99%), freight workers (99%), and legal secretaries (98%).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Job Automation and the Minimum Wage Debate