If humanity hopes to realize its dreams of exploring the stars, we’re going to need to find ways to recreate life on Earth aboard a spaceship. Simply stockpiling enough vital supplies isn’t going to cut it, which is what led Julian Melchiorri , a student at the Royal College of Art, to create an artificial biological leaf that produces oxygen just like the ones on our home planet do. Read more…
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The First Man-Made Biological Leaf Turns Light and Water Into Oxygen
A team of security researchers has discovered a security flaw in Google’s mobile OS which affects handsets running versions up to and including 4.4—leaving a potential 82 percent of Android users at risk. Read more…
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A ‘Fake ID’ Flaw in Android Leaves Millions of Phones Vulnerable
A newly discovered virus has been found by a San Diego State University team to live inside more than half of all sampled human gut cells sampled. Exploring genetic material found in intestinal samples, the international team uncovered the CrAssphage virus. They say the virus could influence the behaviour of some of the most common bacteria in our gut. Researchers say the virus has the genetic fingerprint of a bacteriophage – a type of virus known to infect bacteria. Phages may work to control the behaviour of bacteria they infect – some make it easier for bacteria to inhabit in their environments while others allow bacteria to become more potent. [Study lead Dr. Robert] Edwards said: “In some way phages are like wolves in the wild, surrounded by hares and deer. “They are critical components of our gut ecosystems, helping control the growth of bacterial populations and allowing a diversity of species.” According to the team, CrAssphage infects one of the most common types of bacteria in our guts. National Geographic gives some idea why a virus so common in our gut should have evaded discovery for so long, but at least CrAssphage finally has a Wikipedia page of its own. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Newly Discovered Virus Widespread in Human Gut
Early detection is the best tool to fight cancer, but biopsies can be painful and inconclusive. New research shows a simple blood test can detect cancers by blasting white blood cells with UV and seeing how they respond. Painless, universal cancer detection could be a drop of blood away. Read more…
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UV-Powered Blood Test Could Make Universal Cancer Detection Possible
Not everything is bigger in Texas. The gargantuan LED display housed in the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium , and the even the slightly more humongous display in the Houston Texans’ stadium , have just been displaced by the mega-jumbotron debuting today in Jacksonville. Read more…
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The World’s Largest HD LED Display Takes Over Jacksonville
The new American Dream was going so well: drop out, make an app for sending emojis that disappear after 5 seconds, and collect your check. But it turns out the app gold rush is broken for almost everyone. Read more…
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There Are Officially Too Many Apps, And Nobody Is Making Money
Do smartphone-wielding citizens of the world need an excuse to snap more selfies? Absolutely not! And yet, against all odds, there is something undeniably charming about Imoji , an app that allows you to turn your face—or anything you’ve got a photo of—into a little textable you-moji. Read more…
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Turn Your Dumb Selfie Into a Textable Emoji, Annoy and Delight Your Pals
alphadogg (971356) writes with news that the SSA has joined the long list of federal agencies with giant failed IT projects. From the article: “Six years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency. In 2008, Social Security said the project was about two to three years from completion. Five years later, it was still two to three years from being done, according to the report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm. Today, with the project still in the testing phase, the agency can’t say when it will be completed or how much it will cost. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Social Security Administration Joins Other Agencies With $300M "IT Boondoggle"
First time accepted submitter Carly Page writes When asked for its response to Edward Snowden’s claims that “Dropbox is hostile to privacy”, Dropbox told The INQUIRER that users concerned about privacy should add their own encryption. The firm warned however that if users do, not all of the service’s features will work. Head of Product at Dropbox for Business Ilya Fushman says: “We have data encrypted on our servers. We think of encryption beyond that as a users choice. If you look at our third-party developer ecosystem you’ll find many client-side encryption apps….It’s hard to do things like rich document rendering if they’re client-side encrypted. Search is also difficult, we can’t index the content of files. Finally, we need users to understand that if they use client-side encryption and lose the password, we can’t then help them recover those files.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy
MojoKid writes: Intel just launched their new SSD 2500 Pro series solid state drive, the follow-up to last year’s SSD 1500 Pro series, which targets corporate and small-business clients. The drive shares much of its DNA with some of Intel’s consumer-class drives, but the Pro series cranks things up a few notches with support for advanced security and management features, low power states, and an extended management toolset. In terms of performance, the Intel SSD 2500 Pro isn’t class-leading in light of many enthusiast-class drives but it’s no slouch either. Intel differentiates the 2500 Pro series by adding support for vPro remote-management and hardware-based self-encryption. The 2500 Pro series supports TCG (Trusted Computing Group) Opal 2.0 features and is Microsoft eDrive capable as well. Intel also offers an administration tool for easy management of the drive. With the Intel administration tool, users can reset the PSID (physical presence security ID), though the contents of the drive will be wiped. Sequential reads are rated at up to 540MB/s, sequential writes at up to 480MB/s, with 45K – 80K random read / write IOps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD