Apple just released OS X 10.9.1 , the first update to Mavericks. Included in the update are some fixes for Gmail support in Mail, smart inbox improvements for Mail, and most importantly, it resolves an issue that prevented VoiceOver from speaking sentences that contained emoji. You can grab the in the Mac App Store now. Read more…
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Apple just released OS X 10.9.1, the first update to Mavericks.
cartechboy writes “It looks like the old-school windshield wiper is about to be replaced by new technology — but not until 2015. British car-maker McLaren is apparently developing a new window cleaning system that is modeled from fighter jet tech. The company isn’t revealing exactly how it will work, but the idea comes from the chief designer simply asking a military source why you don’t see wipers on jets as they land. Experts expect McClaren to use constantly active, high-frequency sound waves outside the range of human hearing that will effectively create a force field across a car’s windshield to repel water, ice insects and other debris. Similar sound waves are used by dentists to remove plaque from teeth.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Next-Gen Windshield Wipers To Be Based On Jet Fighter "Forcefield" Tech
Nerval’s Lobster writes “Commercial package-delivery drones such as those revealed by Amazon and DHL could face danger from more than shotgun-toting, UAV-hunting yahoos following the successful test of a drone-killing laser by the U.S. Army. Though it’s more likely to take aim at enemy observation drones than Amazon’s package-deliver ‘copters, the U.S. Army’s High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL-MD) did prove itself in tests last week by shooting down 90 incoming mortars and a series of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The original goal during the test at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico was to burn out or blow up mortar rounds and blind the cameras or other sensors carried by drones. The laser proved capable enough to damage or slice off the tails of target drones, which brought them down, according to Terry Bauer, HEL MD program manager, as quoted in the Dec. 11 Army announcement of the test. The quarter-sized beam of super-focused light set off the explosives in the 60-millimeter mortars in mid-flight, leaving the rest to fall ‘like a rock, ‘ Bauer said. The laser could target only one mortar at a time, but could switch targets quickly enough to bring down several mortars fired in a single volley. The laser and its power source are contained in a single 500-horsepower, four-axle truck but was directed by a separate Enhanced Multi Mode Radar system. The next step is a move from New Mexico to a testing range in Florida early next year ‘to test it in ran and fog and things like that, ‘ according to Bauer.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Army Laser Passes Drone-Killing Test
itwbennett writes “Two reports out this week, one a new ‘codex’ released by 451 Research and the other an updated survey into cloud IaaS pricing from Redmonk, show just how insane cloud pricing has become. If your job requires you to read these reports, good luck. For the rest of us, Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady distilled the pricing trends down to this: ‘HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar. Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute. AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close. Microsoft is taking the ‘middle of the road, ‘ never offering the best or worst pricing.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd
New submitter ghack writes “NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features: ‘NuScale’s 45-megawatt reactor, which can be grouped with others to form a utility-scale plant, would sit in a 5 million-gallon pool of water underground. That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency – an issue … highlighted by Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant.’ This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NuScale Power Awarded $226 Million To Deploy Small Nuclear Reactor Design
KentuckyFC writes “Optical engineers generally build imaging systems with the best possible resolving power. The basic idea is that an imaging system focuses light into a pattern known as a point spreading function. This consists of a central region of high intensity surrounded by a concentric lobe of lower intensity light. The trick to improving resolution is narrowing and intensifying this central region while suppressing the outer lobe. Now optical engineers have turned this approach on its head by suppressing the central region so that the field intensity here is zero while intensifying the lobe. The result is a three-dimensional beam of darkness that hides any object inside it. The engineers say this region can be huge — up to 8 orders of magnitude bigger than the wavelength of the imaging light. What’s more, the optics required to create it are simple and cheap: a lens consisting of concentric dielectric grooves. The team has even tested a prototype capable of hiding a 40-micrometre object in visible laser light.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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‘Darkness Ray’ Beams Invisibility From a Distance
msm1267 writes “Users of Apple’s Safari browser are at risk for information loss because of a feature common to most browsers that restores previous sessions. The problem with Safari is that it stores session information including authentication credentials used in previous HTTPS sessions in a plaintext XML file called a Property list, or plist, file. The plist files, a researcher with Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team said, are stored in a hidden folder, but hiding them in plain sight isn’t much of a hurdle for a determined attacker. ‘The complete authorized session on the site is saved in the plist file in full view despite the use of https, ‘ said researcher Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky on the Securelist blog. ‘The file itself is located in a hidden folder, but is available for anyone to read.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Safari Stores Previous Browsing Session Data Unencrypted
Even after 40 years of service, X-ray computed tomography (better known as CT scans) can be a challenge to capture. If the patient moves even a nudge, the image will come out blurry. But with GE’s new Revolution CT, doctors will be able to image the entirety of your innards in the span of a single heartbeat. Literally. Read more…
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GE’s New Fast CT Scanner Captures Insane Images in a Heart Beat
theodp writes “Code.org, backed by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, boasts in a blog post that thanks to this week’s Hour of Code, which featured a Blockly tutorial narrated by Gates and Zuckerberg, ‘More students have participated in computer science in U.S. schools in the last three days than in the last 100 years.’ Taking note of the impressive numbers being put up on the Hour of Code Leaderboards (’12, 522, 015 students have done the Hour of Code and written 406, 022, 512 lines of code’), the Seattle Times adds that ‘More African American and Hispanic kids learned about the subject in two days than in the entire history of computer science, ‘ and reports that the cities of Chicago and New York have engaged Code.org to offer CS classes in their schools. So, isn’t it a tad hyperbolic to get so excited over kids programming with blocks? ‘Yes, we can all agree that this week’s big Hour of Code initiative is a publicity stunt, ‘ writes the Mercury News’ Mike Cassidy, ‘but you know what? A publicity stunt is exactly what we need.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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More Students Learn CS In 3 Days Than Past 100 Years
Nerval’s Lobster writes “From the annals of Really Important Science comes word that a research assistant who picked up his B.S. just seven months ago has invented a coffee mug designed to keep java at just the right piping-hot temperature for hours. Logan Maxwell, who got his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from North Carolina State University in May, created the “Temperfect” mug as part of his senior design project for the College of Engineering. Most insulated mugs have two walls separated by a soft vacuum that insulates the temperature of a liquid inside from the temperature of the air outside. Maxwell’s design has a third layer of insulation in a third wall wrapped around the inner basin of the mug. Inside is a chemical insulator that is solid at room temperature but melts into a liquid at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The insulator – which Maxwell won’t identify but swears is non-toxic – turns to liquid as it absorbs the extra heat of coffee poured into the mug at temperatures higher than 140 F, cooling it to a drinkable temperature quickly. As the heat of the coffee escapes, the insulating material releases heat through the inner wall of the mug to keep it hot as long as possible; a graph mapping the performance of a prototype shows it could keep a cup of coffee at between 128 F and 145 F for as long as 90 minutes. “Phase-change” coffee-mug insulation was patented during the 1960s, but has never been marketed because they are difficult and expensive to manufacture compared to simpler forms of insulation. While working on the Temperfect design, Maxwell met Belgian-born industrial designer Dean Verhoeven, president of consulting form Ancona Research, Inc., who had been working on a similar design and had already worked out how to manufacture a three-walled insulated mug cost effectively. The two co-founded a company called Joevo to manufacture the mugs.” According to the Joevo Kickstarter page, you can get one starting at $40. For that much, I’d like a clever lid like this Contigo has. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Engineering the Perfect Coffee Mug