Tag: journal

More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating

An anonymous reader writes: Wendy’s is adding self-service ordering kiosks “to at least 1, 000 restaurants, or about 15% of its stores, ” reports the Los Angeles Times, while McDonald’s and Panera Bread are now planning to add kiosks to every restaurant. “Lots of restaurants, not just fast-food chains, are really trying to mitigate the costs of higher wages, ” says one market research firm, while also citing a survey which found 40% of millennials willing to use kiosks (compared to 30% of restaurant-goers overall). But in some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn’t plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread “has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating

Bill Would Legalize Active Defense Against Hacks

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: A new bill intended to update the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would allow victims of computer attacks to engage in active defense measures to identify the attacker and disrupt the attack. Proposed by Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), the bill would grant victims of computer intrusions unprecedented rights. Known as the Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act, the legislation seeks to amend the CFAA, the much-maligned 1986 law that is used in most computer crime prosecutions. The proposed legislation includes the caveat that victims can’t take any actions that destroy data on another person’s computer, causes physical injury to someone, or creates a threat to public safety. The concept of active defense has been a controversial one in the security community for several years, with many experts saying the potential downside outweighs any upside. Not to mention that it’s generally illegal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bill Would Legalize Active Defense Against Hacks

Scientists Have Found a Way To Rapidly Thaw Cryopreserved Tissue Without Damage

schwit1 quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Researchers have developed a technique that allows them to rapidly thaw cryopreserved human and pig samples without damaging the tissue — a development that could help get rid of organ transplant waiting lists. Cryopreservation is the ability to preserve tissues at liquid nitrogen temperatures for long periods of time and bring them back without damage, and it’s something scientists have been dreaming about achieving with large tissue samples and organs for decades. Instead of using convection, the team used nanoparticles to heat tissues at the same rate all at once, which means ice crystals can’t form, so they don’t get damaged. To do this, the researchers mixed silica-coated iron oxide nanoparticles into a solution and generated uniform heat by applying an external magnetic field. They then warmed up several human and pig tissue samples ranging between 1 and 50 mL, using either their new nanowarming technique and traditional slow warming over ice. Each time, the tissues warmed up with nanoparticles displayed no signs of harm, unlike the control samples. Afterwards, they were able to successfully wash the nanoparticles away from the sample after thawing. The team also tested out the heating in an 80 mL system — without tissue this time — and showed that it achieved the same critical warming rates as in the smaller sample sizes, suggesting that the technique is scalable. You can view a video of tissue being thawed out in less than a minute here. The research has been published in Science Translational Medicine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Have Found a Way To Rapidly Thaw Cryopreserved Tissue Without Damage

Researchers Store Computer OS, Short Movie On DNA

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: In a new study published in the journal Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable. Erlich and his colleague Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at NYGC, chose six files to encode, or write, into DNA: a full computer operating system, an 1895 French film, “Arrival of a train at La Ciotat, ” a $50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon. They compressed the files into a master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code made up of ones and zeros. Using an erasure-correcting algorithm called fountain codes, they randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, and mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C and T. The algorithm deleted letter combinations known to create errors, and added a barcode to each droplet to help reassemble the files later. In all, they generated a digital list of 72, 000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long, and sent it in a text file to a San Francisco DNA-synthesis startup, Twist Bioscience, that specializes in turning digital data into biological data. Two weeks later, they received a vial holding a speck of DNA molecules. To retrieve their files, they used modern sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by software to translate the genetic code back into binary. They recovered their files with zero errors, the study reports. The study also notes that “a virtually unlimited number of copies of the files could be created with their coding technique by multiplying their DNA sample through polymerase chain reaction (PCR).” The researchers also “show that their coding strategy packs 215 petabytes of data on a single gram of DNA.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Store Computer OS, Short Movie On DNA

Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 Computer With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

On the fifth birthday of the original Raspberry Pi, the foundation has announced the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a slightly more capable variant of the miniature computer. From a report on BetaNews: It’s essentially a Pi Zero with the addition of the two features many people have been requesting — wireless LAN and Bluetooth. Priced at $10, the Pi Zero W uses the same Cypress CYW43438 wireless chip as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to deliver 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. The full list of features is as follows: 1GHz, single-core CPU, 512MB RAM, mini-HDMI port, micro-USB On-The-Go port, micro-USB power, HAT-compatible 40-pin header, composite video and reset headers, CSI camera connector, 11n wireless LAN, and Bluetooth 4.0. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 Computer With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors

Less than a week after AMD announced the first line up of Ryzen processors, Intel is apparently fighting back by dropping the price of several of its processors. Rob Williams, writing for HotHardware: So, what we’re seeing now are a bunch of Intel processors dropping in price, perhaps as a bit of a preemptive strike against AMD’s chips shipping later this week — though admittedly it’s still a bit too early to tell. Over at Amazon, the prices have been slower to fall, but we’d highly recommend that you keep an eye on the following pages, if you are looking for a good deal this week. So far, at Micro Center we’ve seen the beefy six-core Intel Core i7-6850K (3.60GHz) drop from $700 to $550, and the i7-6800K (3.40GHz) drop down to $360, from $500. Also, some mid-range chips are receiving price cuts as well. Those include the i7-6700K, a 4.0GHz chip dropping from $400 to $260, and the i7-6600K, a 3.50GHz quad-core part dropping from $270 to $180. Even Intel’s latest and greatest Kaby Lake-based i7-7700K has experienced a drop, from $380 to $299, with places like Amazon and NewEgg retailing for $349. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors

Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film

What if you could cool buildings without using electricity? charlesj68 brings word of “the development of a plastic film by two professors at the University of Colorado in Boulder that provides a passive cooling effect.” The film contains embedded glass beads that absorb and emit infrared in a wavelength that is not blocked by the atmosphere. Combining this with half-silvering to keep the sun from being the source of infrared absorption on the part of the beads, and you have a way of pumping heat at a claimed rate of 93 watts per square meter. The film is cheap to produce — about 50 cents per square meter — and could create indoor temperatures of 68 degrees when it’s 98.6 outside. “All the work is done by the huge temperature difference, about 290C, between the surface of the Earth and that of outer space, ” reports The Economist. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film

Fasting Diet ‘Regenerates Diabetic Pancreas’

According to a new study published in the journal Cell, a certain type of fasting diet can trigger the pancreas to regenerate itself. Of course, the researchers advise people not to try this without medical advice. BBC reports: In the experiments, mice were put on a modified form of the “fasting-mimicking diet.” It is like the human form of the diet when people spend five days on a low calorie, low protein, low carbohydrate but high unsaturated-fat diet. It resembles a vegan diet with nuts and soups, but with around 800 to 1, 100 calories a day. Then they have 25 days eating what they want — so overall it mimics periods of feast and famine. Previous research has suggested it can slow the pace of aging. But animal experiments showed the diet regenerated a special type of cell in the pancreas called a beta cell. These are the cells that detect sugar in the blood and release the hormone insulin if it gets too high. There were benefits in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes in the mouse experiments. Type 1 is caused by the immune system destroying beta cells and type 2 is largely caused by lifestyle and the body no longer responding to insulin. Further tests on tissue samples from people with type 1 diabetes produced similar effects. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fasting Diet ‘Regenerates Diabetic Pancreas’

Treasure Trove of Internal Apple Memos Discovered in Thrift Store

An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report: Peeking inside a book bin at a Seattle Goodwill, Redditor vadermeer caught an interesting, unexpected glimpse into the early days of Apple: a cache of internal memos, progress reports, and legal pad scribbles from 1979 and 1980, just three years into the tech monolith’s company history. The documents at one point belonged to Jack MacDonald — then the manager of systems software for the Apple II and III (in these documents referred to by its code name SARA). The papers pertain to implementation of Software Security from Apple’s Friends and Enemies (SSAFE), an early anti-piracy measure. Not much about MacDonald exists online, and the presence of his files in a thrift store suggests he may have passed away, though many of the people included in these documents have gone on to long and lucrative careers. The project manager on SSAFE for example, Randy Wigginton, was Apple’s sixth employee and has since worked for eBay, Paypal, and (somewhat tumultuously) Google. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak also features heavily in the implementation of these security measures. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Treasure Trove of Internal Apple Memos Discovered in Thrift Store

Cellebrite Can Now Unlock Apple iPhone 6, 6 Plus

Patrick O’Neill writes: A year after the battle between the FBI and Apple over unlocking an iPhone 5s used by a shooter in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, smartphone cracking company Cellebrite announced it can now unlock the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus for customers at rates ranging from $1, 500 to $250, 000. The company’s newest products also extract and analyze data from a wide range of popular apps including all of the most popular secure messengers around. From the Cyberscoop report: “Cellebrite’s ability to break into the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus comes in their latest line of product releases. The newest Cellebrite product, UFED 6.0, boasts dozens of new and improved features including the ability to extract data from 51 Samsung Android devices including the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, the latest flagship models for Android’s most popular brand, as well as the new high-end Google Pixel Android devices.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cellebrite Can Now Unlock Apple iPhone 6, 6 Plus