One of the most unique environments on earth exists in a seldom-visited corner of northern California. Lava Beds National Monument is home to over 700 caves, some of which are full of rare ice formations or play home to solitary biomes like this fern cave. They also allowed a tribe of Indians to make one of the last stands against the American government. Here’s how you can visit. Read more…
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Inside California’s Crystal Ice Cave
iONiUM writes: The Economist has a story about how bad the air quality is in Beijing. Due to public outcry the Chinese government has created almost 1, 000 air quality monitoring stations, and the findings aren’t good. They report: “Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold. That is even worse than the satellite data had suggested. Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total. A previous estimate, based on a study of pollution in the Huai river basin (which lies between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), put the toll at 1.2m deaths a year—still high.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Breathing Beijing’s Air Is the Equivalent of Smoking Almost 40 Cigarettes a Day
Archaeologists working in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily have discovered a submerged 40-foot-long (8-meter) limestone monolith carved by Stone Age humans some 10, 000 years ago. Read more…
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An Ancient Monolith Has Been Discovered in the Mediterranean Sea
When you first get a new Windows computer (or set up an old one), you might be focused on downloading your favorite apps and transferring your files. This is also a good time to configure your machine to protect your privacy. Read more…
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How to Configure Windows 10 to Protect Your Privacy
HughPickens.com writes: BBC reports that Germany has abandoned tuition fees altogether for German and international students alike and more than 4, 600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. “When I found out that just like Germans I’m studying for free, it was sort of mind blowing, ” says Katherine Burlingame who decided to get her Master’s degree at a university in the East German town of Cottbus. “I realized how easy the admission process was and how there was no tuition fee. This was a wow moment for me.” When Katherine came to Germany in 2012 she spoke two words of German: ‘hallo’ and ‘danke’. She arrived in an East German town which had, since the 1950s, taught the majority of its residents Russian rather than English. “At first I was just doing hand gestures and a lot of people had compassion because they saw that I was trying and that I cared.” She did not need German, however, in her Master’s program, which was filled with students from 50 different countries but taught entirely in English. In fact, German universities have drastically increased all-English classes to more than 1, 150 programs across many fields. So how can Germany afford to educate foreign students for free? Think about it this way: it’s a global game of collecting talent. All of these students are the trading cards, and the collectors are countries. If a country collects more talent, they’ll have an influx of new ideas, new businesses and a better economy. For a society with a demographic problem — a growing retired population and fewer young people entering college and the workforce — qualified immigration is seen as a resolution to the problem as research shows that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany. “Keeping international students who have studied in the country is the ideal way of immigration, ” says Sebastian Fohrbeck.”They have the needed certificates, they don’t have a language problem at the end of their stay and they know the culture.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How American Students Can Get a University Degree For Free In Germany
Wikipedia’s parent organization just joined the fight against dragnet government surveillance. Read more…
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Wikipedia Just Joined the List of Pissed-Off Organizations Suing the NSA
An anonymous reader writes “Good news for OpenStreetMap: the main website now has A-to-B routing (directions) built in to the homepage! The OSM website offers directions which are powered by third-parties using OSM data, providing car, bike, and foot routing. OpenStreetMap has a saying: ‘What gets rendered, gets mapped’ – meaning that often you don’t notice a bit of data that needs tweaking unless it actually shows up on the map image. It will make OpenStreetMap’s data better by creating a virtuous feedback loop.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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OpenStreetMap.org Gets Routing
Bulletstorm and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter lead Adrian Chmielarz recently confessed that he liked the idea of survival games more than any survival games he actually played. I feel similarly, but his remark got me thinking about why that might be. Read more…
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Most Survival Games Have Problems That S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Solved Long Ago
In 1890, a group of eight large New York City bakeries combined to form the New York Biscuit Company and built a giant six-story factory in West Chelsea. Eight years later, they merged with their competitor, Chicago’s American Biscuit and Manufacturing to form an even larger conglomerate – the National Biscuit Company, but the factory and headquarters remained in Chelsea. In 1901, the National Biscuit Company put their abbreviated company name on a box of wafers for the first time – Nabisco. Soon, Nabisco became the company’s official name. Read more…
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How the Oreo Was Invented
Deathspawner writes: Samsung’s SM951 is an unassuming gumstick SSD — it has no skulls or other bling — but it’s what’s underneath that counts: PCIe 3.0 x4 support. With that support, Samsung is able to boast speeds of 2, 150MB/s read and 1, 550MB/s write. But with such speeds comes an all-too-common caveat: you’ll probably have to upgrade your computer to take true advantage of it. For comparison, Samsung says a Gen 2 PCIe x4 slot will limit the SM951 to just 1, 600MB/s and 1, 350MB/s (or 130K/100K IOPS), respectively. Perhaps now is a bad time to point out a typical Z97 motherboard only has a PCIe 2nd Gen x2 (yes, x2) connection to its M.2 slot, meaning one would need to halve those figures again. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Samsung Unveils First PCIe 3.0 x4-Based M.2 SSD, Delivering Speeds of Over 2GB/s